Duty,
Honor, Country
General Of The Army, Douglas MacArthur
Speech to
The Corps of Cadets
U. S. Military Academy At West Point
May
12, 1962
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 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
want 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.
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 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, 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, 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; 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
dirty foxholes, the stench of ghostly trenches, the slime of dripping dugouts,
those broiling suns of 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
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 law, and will
stand the test of any ethics or philosophy ever promoted 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 disposes 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 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 synthetic materials to supplement or even replace
our old standard basics; to purify sea water for our drink; of mining the 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 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 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 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, always I come back to West Point. Always there echoes and
reechoes: 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.