RED Friday
“All the wrong people remember Vietnam. I think all the people who remember it should forget it, and all the people who forgot it should remember it.”
Michael Herr, The London Observer, 1989
“Because I am hard, you will not like me. But the more you hate me, the more you will learn. I am hard, but I am fair! There is no racial bigotry here! … Here you are all equally worthless! And my orders are to weed out all non-hackers who do not pack the gear to serve in my beloved Corps! Do you maggots understand that?”
R. Lee Ermey, as Gunnery Sergeant Harman in Full Metal Jacket
“The good company has no place for the officer who would rather be right than be loved, for the time will quickly come when he walks alone, and in battle no man may succeed in solitude.”
Brigadier General S.L.A. Marshall, 1964
“I hear a lot of crap about what a glorious thing it is to die for your country. It isn’t glorious—it’s stupid! You don’t go into battle to die for your country. You go into battle to make the other bastard die for his country.”
General George S. Patton, Jr., speaking to troops in 1941
“Son, if the Marines thought you needed a wife, we would have issued you one.”
General Lewis B. “Chesty” Puller, in reply to a Marine’s formal request for permission to be married.
“Sighted sub, sank same.”
U.S. Navy Pilot Donald F. Mason, 1942, in one of the shortest victory messages of all time
“I gave him the whole nine yards!”
A P-51 Mustang pilot, using a WWII expression referring to the plane’s 27-foot-long ammo belt.
“Uncommon valor was a common virtue.”
Admiral Chester Nimitz, in Iwo Jima, 1945
“There can be no retreat when there’s no rear. You can’t retreat, or even withdraw, when you’re surrounded. The only thing you can do is to break out, and in order to do that you have to attack, and that is what we’re about to do. Heck, all we’re doing is attacking in a different direction.”
Marine Major General Oliver P. Smith, in Korea, 1950
“The only way we got out of Frozen Chosin is because a lot of young guys know how to fight. God bless the Chosin Marines. They are my brothers for life…Every Memorial Day my thoughts go drifting back to those youngsters who never came home. I can still see them as they were then. They’ll never grow old.”
Lieutenant Henry Litvin. A battalion surgeon with the Marines, Litvin was describing fighting out of the Chosin Reservoir in North Korea, 1950
“Fix bayonets! Charge! Everybody goes with me!”
U.S. Army Capt. Lewis Millett, in Korea, 1951
“In the final choice, a soldier’s pack is not so heavy a burden as a prisoner’s chains.”
President Dwight D. Eisenhower, First Inaugural Address, 1953
“There is always inequity in life. Some men are killed in a war, and some men are wounded, and some men are stationed in the Antarctic and some are stationed in San Francisco. It’s very hard in military or personal life to assure complete equality. Life is unfair.”
President John F. Kennedy, 1962
“I am the Infantry—Queen of Battle! For two centuries I have kept our Nation safe, purchasing freedom with my blood. To tyrants, I am the day of reckoning, to the suppressed, the hope for the future. Where the fighting is thick, there am I. I am the Infantry! Follow me!
Creed of the U.S. Army Infantry Center, Fort Benning, Georgia
“It doesn’t take a hero to order men into battle. It takes a hero to be one of those men who goes into battle.”
General H. Norman Schwarzkopf
