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.