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25.General Douglas MacArthur: Thayer Award Acceptance 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 afraid. 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.

　