MacArthur:Duty, Honor, Country

[Nimitz]

General Douglas MacArthur -- Thayer Award Address

General Westmoreland, General Grove, 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
[Thayer Award]. 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 to honor 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 animation 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 . They teach you
to be proud and unbending in honest failure, but humble and gentle in
success; not to substitute words for actions, 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 to 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 temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the
emotions, a freshness of the deep springs of life, a temperamental
predominance of courage over timidity, of 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 battlefield 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 20 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 the mire of shell-shocked
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 we sought the way and the light and the truth.

And 20 years after, on the other side of the globe, again the filth of
murky foxholes, the stench of ghostly trenches, the slime of dripping
dugouts; those boiling suns of relentless heat, those torrential rains
of devastating storms; the loneliness and utter desolation of jungle
trails; the bitterness of long separation from those they loved and
cherished; the deadly pestilence of tropical 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 mark the beginning of
another epoch in the long story of mankind. 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 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; to purify sea water
for our drink; of mining ocean floors for new fields of wealth and
food; of disease preventatives to expand life into the hundreds 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 purposes, all other public projects,
all other public needs, great or small, will find others for their
accomplishment. 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-guardian, as its lifeguard from the raging
tides of international conflict, as its gladiator 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
thorough 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 ten-fold 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 war mongers.

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 tint. 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 vainly, but with thirsty ears, 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, always 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.