Duty Honor Country
General Westmoreland, General Groves, distinguished guests, and gentlemen of the Corps. As I was leaving the hotel this morning, a doorman asked me, "Where are you bound for, General?" and when I replied, "West Point," he remarked, "Beautiful place, have you ever been there before?"
No human being could fail
to be deeply moved by such a tribute as this, coming from a profession I have
served so long and a people I have loved so well. It fills me with an emotion I
cannot express. But this award is not intended primarily for a personality, but
to symbolize a great moral code - the code of conduct and chivalry of those who
guard this beloved land of culture and ancient descent. That is the meaning of
this medallion. For all eyes and for all time, it is an expression of the
ethics of the American soldier. That I should be integrated in this way with so
noble an ideal arouses a sense of pride and yet of humility which will be with
me always.
Duty, Honor, Country: Those three hallowed words reverently dictate
what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be. They are your rallying
points: to build courage when courage seems to fail; to regain faith when there
seems to be little cause for faith; to create hope when hope becomes forlorn.
Unhappily, I possess neither that eloquence of diction, that poetry of
imagination, nor that brilliance of metaphor to tell you all that they mean.
The unbelievers will say
they are but words, but a slogan, but a flamboyant phrase. Every pedant, every
demagogue, every cynic, every hypocrite, every troublemaker, and, I am sorry to
say, some others of an entirely different character, will try to downgrade them
even to the extent of mockery and ridicule.
But these are some of the
things they do. They build your basic character. They mold you for your future
roles as the custodians of the nation's defense. They make you strong enough to
know when you are weak, and brave enough to face yourself when you are afraid.
They teach you to be proud
and unbending in honest failure, but humble and gentle in success; not to
substitute words for action; not to seek the path of comfort, but to face the
stress and spur of difficulty and challenge; to learn to stand up in the storm,
but to have compassion on those who fall; to master yourself before you seek to
master others; to have a heart that is clean, a goal that is high; to learn to
laugh, yet never forget how to weep; to reach into the future, yet never
neglect the past; to be serious, yet never take yourself too seriously; to be
modest so that you will remember the simplicity of true greatness; the open
mind of true wisdom, the meekness of true strength.
They give you a temperate
will, a quality of imagination, a vigor of the emotions, a freshness of the
deep springs of life, a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity, an
appetite for adventure over love of ease. They create in your heart the sense
of wonder, the unfailing hope of what next, and the joy and inspiration of
life. They teach you in this way to be an officer and a gentleman.
And what sort of soldiers
are those you are to lead? Are they reliable? Are they brave? Are they capable
of victory? Their story is known to
all of you. It is the story of the American man at arms. My estimate of him was
formed on the battlefields many, many years ago, and has never changed. I
regarded him then, as I regard him now, as one of the world's noblest figures;
not only as one of the finest military characters, but also as one of the most
stainless.
His name and fame are the
birthright of every American citizen. In his youth and strength, his love and
loyalty, he gave all that mortality can give. He needs no eulogy from me, or
from any other man. He has written his own history and written it in red on his
enemy's breast.
But when I think of his
patience under adversity, of his courage under fire, and of his modesty in victory,
I am filled with an emotion of admiration I cannot put into words. He belongs
to history as furnishing one of the greatest examples of successful patriotism.
He belongs to posterity as the instructor of future generations in the
principles of liberty and freedom. He belongs to the present, to us, by his
virtues and by his achievements.
In twenty campaigns, on a
hundred battlefields, around a thousand campfires, I have witnessed that
enduring fortitude, that patriotic self-abnegation, and that invincible
determination which have carved his statue in the hearts of his people.
From one end of the world
to the other, he has drained deep the chalice of courage. As I listened to
those songs of the glee club, in memory's eye I could see those staggering columns
of the First World War, bending under soggy packs on many a weary march, from
dripping dusk to drizzling dawn, slogging ankle deep through mire of
shell-pocked roads; to form grimly for the attack, blue-lipped, covered with
sludge and mud, chilled by the wind and rain, driving home to their objective,
and for many, to the judgment seat of God.
I do not know the dignity
of their birth, but I do know the glory of their death. They died
unquestioning, uncomplaining, with faith in their hearts, and on their lips the
hope that we would go on to victory. Always for them: Duty, Honor, Country. Always their blood, and sweat, and tears, as
they saw the way and the light.
And twenty years after, on
the other side of the globe, against the filth of dirty foxholes, the stench of
ghostly trenches, the slime of dripping dugouts, those boiling suns of the
relentless heat, those torrential rains of devastating storms, the loneliness
and utter desolation of jungle trails, the bitterness of long separation of
those they loved and cherished, the deadly pestilence of tropic disease, the
horror of stricken areas of war.
Their resolute and
determined defense, their swift and sure attack, their indomitable purpose,
their complete and decisive victory - always victory, always through the bloody
haze of their last reverberating shot, the vision of gaunt, ghastly men,
reverently following your password of Duty,
Honor, Country.
The code which those words
perpetuate embraces the highest moral laws and will stand the test of any ethics
or philosophies ever promulgated for the uplift of mankind. Its requirements
are for the things that are right, and its restraints are from the things that
are wrong. The soldier, above all other men, is required to practice the
greatest act of religious training - sacrifice. In battle and in the face of
danger and death, he discloses those divine attributes which his Maker gave
when he created man in his own image. No physical courage and no brute instinct
can take the place of the Divine help which alone can sustain him. However
horrible the incidents of war may be, the soldier who is called upon to offer
and to give his life for his country, is the noblest development of mankind.
You now face a new world,
a world of change. The thrust into outer space of the satellite, spheres and
missiles marked the beginning of another epoch in the long story of mankind -
the chapter of the space age. In the five or more billions of years the
scientists tell us it has taken to form the earth, in the three or more billion
years of development of the human race, there has never been a greater, a more
abrupt or staggering evolution. We deal now not with things of this world
alone, but with the illimitable distances and as yet unfathomed mysteries of
the universe. We are reaching out for a new and boundless frontier. We speak in
strange terms: of harnessing the cosmic energy; of making winds and tides work
for us; of creating unheard synthetic materials to supplement or even replace
our old standard basics; of purifying sea water for our drink; of mining ocean
floors for new fields of wealth and food; of disease preventatives to expand
life into the hundred of years; of controlling the weather for a more equitable
distribution of heat and cold, of rain and shine; of space ships to the moon;
of the primary target in war, no longer limited to the armed forces of an
enemy, but instead to include his civil populations; of ultimate conflict
between a united human race and the sinister forces of some other planetary
galaxy; of such dreams and fantasies as to make life the most exciting of all
time.
And through all this
welter of change and development your mission remains fixed, determined,
inviolable. It is to win our wars. Everything else in your professional career
is but corollary to this vital dedication. All other public purpose, all other
public projects, all other public needs, great or small, will find others for
their accomplishments; but you are the ones who are trained to fight.
Yours is the profession of
arms, the will to win, the sure knowledge that in war there is no substitute
for victory, that if you lose, the Nation will be destroyed, that the very
obsession of your public service must be Duty,
Honor, Country.
Others will debate the
controversial issues, national and international, which divide men's minds. But
serene, calm, aloof, you stand as the Nation's war guardians, as its lifeguards
from the raging tides of international conflict, as its gladiators in the arena
of battle. For a century and a half you have defended, guarded and protected
its hallowed traditions of liberty and freedom, of right and justice.
Let civilian voices argue
the merits or demerits of our processes of government. Whether our strength is
being sapped by deficit financing indulged in too long, by federal paternalism
grown too mighty, by power groups grown too arrogant, by politics grown too
corrupt, by crime grown too rampant, by morals grown too low, by taxes grown
too high, by extremists grown too violent; whether our personal liberties are
as firm and complete as they should be.
These great national
problems are not for your professional participation or military solution. Your
guidepost stands out like a tenfold beacon in the night: Duty, Honor, Country.
You are the leaven which
binds together the entire fabric of our national system of defense. From your
ranks come the great captains who hold the Nation's destiny in their hands the
moment the war tocsin sounds. The long gray line has
never failed us. Were you to do so, a million ghosts in olive drab, in brown
khaki, in blue and gray, would rise from their white crosses, thundering those
magic words: Duty, Honor, Country.
This does not mean that
you are warmongers. On the contrary, the soldier above all other people prays
for peace, for he must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war. But
always in our ears ring the ominous words of Plato, that wisest of all
philosophers: "Only the dead have seen the end of war."
The shadows are
lengthening for me. The twilight is here. My days of old have vanished - tone
and tints. They have gone glimmering through the dreams of things that were.
Their memory is one of wondrous beauty, watered by tears and coaxed and
caressed by the smiles of yesterday. I listen then, but with thirsty ear, for the
witching melody of faint bugles blowing reveille, of far drums beating the long
roll.
In my dreams I hear again
the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, the strange, mournful mutter of the
battlefield. But in the evening of my memory I come back to West Point. Always
there echoes and re-echoes: Duty, Honor,
Country.
Today marks my final roll
call with you. But I want you to know that when I cross the river, my last
conscious thoughts will be of the Corps, and the Corps, and the Corps.
I bid you farewell.
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