Navy Day
1962
General Douglas MacArthur’s
DUTY, HONOR AND COUNTRY
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 pro
fession 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.
Duty, honor, country: Those three hallowed words
reverently dictate what you will be. They are your rally
ing 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 becoms forlorn.
Unhappily, I possess neither that eloquence of diction,
that poetry of imagination, nor that brilliance of meta
phor 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 trouble*
maker 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 build. 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 sub
stitute words for actions, nor 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 fail; 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 imagina
tion, a vigor of the emotions, a freshness of the deep
springs of life, a tempermental 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 battlefiled 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 Amer
ican citizen. la 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. . . .
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 invin
cible determination which have carved his stature 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 stag
gering 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 we sought the way and the
light. 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 the relentless heat, those torrential rains of deva
stating 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 victory, always through the
bloody haze of their last reverberating shot, the vision
of gaunt, ghastly men, reverently following your pass
word of duty, honor, country. . . .
You now face a new world, a world of change. The
thrust into outer space of the satellite, spheres and mis
siles marks a beginning of another epoch in the long
stpry 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 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 the primary target in war, no
longer limited to the armed forces of an enemy, but
instead to include his civil populations; of ultimate con
flict between a united human race and the sinister forces
of some other planetary galaxy; of such dreams and fan
tasies as to make life the most exciting of all times.
And though 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 pub
lic needs, great or small, will find others for their ac
complishment; 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 guardians, as
its lifeguards from the raging tides of international con
flict 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
rroups 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 com
plete as they should be.
inese great national problems are not for your pro
fessional participation or military solution. Your guide
post 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, thun
dering 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 wonderous beauty watered
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terday. I listen vainly, but with thirsty ear, for the witch
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