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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;ancientnut, post: 2460942, member: 73212&quot;]I just finished a book and thought this quote might be appropriate for today:</p><p><br /></p><p>Douglas MacArthur, at the age of 82, after receiving the highest honor bestowed by the academy, spoke to the 1962 graduating class at West Point:</p><p><br /></p><p>“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…</p><p>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 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…</p><p>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 miles of yesterday. I listen vainly 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.</p><p>But in the evening of my memory, always I come back to West Point. Always there echoes and re-echoes: Duty-Honor-Country.</p><p>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.”</p><p><br /></p><p>Bob Considine, It’s All News To Me: A Reporter’s Deposition, 1967, pp 360-1.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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