Duty – Honor – Country

April 5, 2011

Profession of Arms:

Many contributors to VT may not have an understanding of members of the Armed Forces – particularly career Soldiers, Sailors, Marines, Airmen and CoastGuardsmen. (Also derisively referred to as Lifers!) I have a blue retiree I.D. card. Guess I qualify as a Lifer. I like coffee too (inside joke, coffee is also called “Lifer Juice!) I know many Veterans and current-serving members of the Armed Forces. The ones that I associate with like the military. They are proud of America and proud of their service. Few people outside of our ranks understand us. I have read many articles and comments from people that despise the military. Many of these comments are easily found on sites like VT. O.K. you left leaning types – ever taken the time to read General MacArthur’s speech to the Corp of Cadets at West Point as he was leaving military life? If not read it now. Note how General MacArthur describes Infantry and how he explains to future military leaders how vital it is for them to care for their troops.

General MacArthur’s Thayer Award Speech — Duty, Honor, Country (1962)

The address by General of the Army Douglas MacArthur to the cadets of the U.S. Military Academy in accepting the Sylvanus Thayer Award on 12 May 1962 is a memorable tribute to the ideals that inspired that great American soldier. For as long as other Americans serve their country as courageously and honorably as he did, General MacArthur’s words will live on.

General MacArthur’s service to his country spanned the years from 1903, when he was graduated from the Military Academy, to 5 April 1964 , when he died in Washington, D.C., at the age of 84. He was recognized early in his career as a brilliant officer and was advanced to brigadier general in 1918. Twelve years later he was named Chief of Staff of the Army, and in 1937 he retired. Recalled to active duty during World War II, he was commander of the Southwest Pacific Area during the greater part of the war. His wartime triumphs were followed by service as supreme commander of the Allied occupation forces in Japan. When the Korean conflict erupted, he also commanded the United Nations forces in Korea. He completed his active military service in 1951.

Before being laid to rest in Norfolk, Va., General MacArthur’s body lay in state in New York City and in the Capitol rotunda in Washington, while a grateful Nation paid its tribute in sorrow.

Duty, Honor, Country

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-a code of conduct and chivalry of those who guard this beloved land of culture and ancient descent. For all hours 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 point 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.
What the Words Teach

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 temperate 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 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 in 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.

Witness to the Fortitude

In 20 campaigns, on a hundred battlefields, around a thousand camp fires, 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-pocked roads to form grimly for the attack, bule-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.

Swift and Sure Attack

Their resolute and determined defense, their swift and sure attack, their indomitable purpose, their complete and decisive 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 law and will stand the test of any ethics or philosophies ever promulgated 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 greater strength can take the place of the divine help which alone can sustain him. However hard 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 marks a 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 of 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 hundred of years; of controlling the weather for a more equitable distribution of heat and cold, of rain and shine; of spaceships 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 times.

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.

The Profession of Arms

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.

Prays for Peace

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 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 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 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.

The text of this speech is reproduced from Department of Defense Pamphlet GEN-1A, US Government Printing Office, 1964. *

General MacArthur spoke to the Corp of Cadets at West Point. He emphasized the Soldierly value of duty to country in an honorable manner. There are many examples of honor among Soldiers.

I attended the retirement of an Army Officer a few decades ago. The Officer had a long and honorable career in combat arms. ** He did not reach filed grade rank having risen through ranks from private and retirement as a Captain of Field Artillery. The only honor the decorated officer permitted to be spoken of at this retirement dinner was that he never once hesitated or refused an order to advance against the enemy while under fire. General MacArthur and the Captain had much in common. Both served their country with honor and neither ever failed to do their duty.

Recently two Sergeants (E-5) were retired from The United States Army. Both men are in their 20’s. Both were so severely wounded they were medically retired from the Army. They too did their duty in an honorable manner to The United States of America. These young men need life long care. Both remain loyal to their country and proud of their service. Although retired, they remain at heart, Sergeants of Infantry. Both served their country with honor and neither ever failed to do their duty.

General Joshua Chamberlain repulsed attack after attack on a critical position during the Battle of Gettysburg during America’s Civil War. Very low on ammunition and unable to defeat another Confederate attack, [then] Colonel Chamberlain ordered a bayonet attack. He led it personally and drove the enemy preserving the Union line. He earned the Medal of Honor for his conduct. At the end of the war, General Chamberlain’s conduct towards the enemy is legend among professional soldiers. Consider:

Returning to duty in November 1864, Chamberlain served for the remainder of the war. On March 29, 1865, his brigade led the Union attack at the Battle of Lewis’ Farm outside Petersburg. Wounded again, Chamberlain was brevetted to major general for his gallantry. On April 9, Chamberlain was alerted to the Confederate’s desire to surrender. The next day he was told that of all the officers in the Union army, he had been selected to receive the Confederate surrender. On April 12, Chamberlain presided over the ceremony and ordered his men to attention and carry arms as a sign of respect for their vanquished foe. (American Civil War Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and the 20th maine)

At the end of the conflict, General Chamberlain honored his enemy. I doubt few people except for those in the military understand this honorable behavior. General Chamberlain provided those that came after him the example of duty – honor – country.

Armed Forces preserve our freedom. Without it – nobody would have access to expressing their views – or choosing their matter of living. Leftist – no matter how derogatory they are to the military or The United States of America must have liberty to express their negative points of view. The military preserves Americans first amendment freedoms.

Beginning with the events that occurred on America’s political scene in the 1960’s leftist have “fashionably” taken delight in demeaning, insulting and deriding those who serve in our nation’s Armed Forces. Some leftists are Veterans choosing to literally turn their coats against those they served with becoming members of so called anti-war groups. Well known Veteran leftists include Daniel Ellsberg and [senator] John Kerry. IVAW (Iraq Veterans Against the War) website contains an article announcing guilt of Soldiers in Afghanistan [accused?] of crimes – without benefit of trials. IVAW is an example of so called veterans turning on the military. Veterans from the War on Terror tell me they do not have a good opinion of the IVAW. I understand the viewpoint of new Vets. I have an extremely negative view of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Both groups are – in my view – anti-military and anti-American. VVAW through their activities in the 1960’s and early 1970’s provided direct support to the enemy strategy and propaganda efforts American Armed Forces were facing in Vietnam. ***

Readers and contributors at VT – understand that professional members of our Nation’s Armed Forces serve with honor in their duty in support of our country. Please feel free to engage in your continued insults and denigration of us. Five hundred thousand (plus) of us have died to preserve your first amendment right to do so!

Dale R. Suiter
Atlanta Michigan

* General MacArthur’s Thayer Award Speech — Duty, Honor, Country (1962)

** Combat Arms – historically Infantry, Armor, Artillery
Note: Any person experiences ups and downs in a career. The military is no better or worse with this issue.
*** See: http: “Two Sides to Every Story: Perspectives on the Vietnam War and Iraq War”

Dale R. Suiter

Dale R. Suiter served in the United States Marine Corps June 1966 – February – 1970. He served with Ammo Company First FSR, 2nd CAG Q-6 and Q-3, H&S 81’s 3/9 and 1/3. His service “On the Rock” was with Ordanance Schools, Camp Hansen. Following the Marine Corp, he completed a career in public service – prison and jail operations. In addition, he completed a career as a reserve officer with the Michigan Army National Guard. His two sons and two sons-in-law are veterans of the war on terror. The family continues in service to the United States of America.