Archive for August 24th, 2011
Are We Here to Brag or to Fight?
Posted by Bob in Coaching Session on 08/24/2011
One of our commenters made a valid point we all expect.
But remember that a major theme of BUGS is that we are to take a SECOND LOOK at every basic.
In reply to one of my articles about the Alamo, one commenter pointed out that we have it easy, because we don’t have to be out there in the miseries of the battlefield. That is a good point, but now let’s do a Whitakerism. Let’s take a SECOND LOOK at it.
This point contradicts everything we desperately need to keep in mind.
A war is decided before the first shot is fired. It would be hard to find an instance where the actions of man in uniform, however heroic and brave and suffering, ever made the slightest difference to a war’s outcome.
As CS Lewis pointed out in his introduction to The Screwtape Letters, he thinks of all the Evils of Hell taking place, not in the Pit with the heat and the screaming, but quiet, efficient offices with thick, spotlessly clean rugs.
That, Lewis points out as I am here, is where the real, massive Evil takes place on earth.
He sees Screwtape is in the Executive Suite, not down there where the heat is with a pitchfork.
Screwtape refers to a Demon appearing as an Angel of Light as a standard parade-ground exercise.
Long before the first Medal of Honor Winner sees action, the war has been decided by men in coats and ties.
In fact the Alamo and the three hundred Spartans were necessary precisely because decisions had not been made in the Executive Suites. Texas could have been conquered while the debaters in the capitol were holding up any effective defensive action.
Exactly the same was true in ancient Greece. Athenians had stayed off the battlefield while the Persians invaded because they were celebrating a particularly important religious holiday. The Persian hordes would have conquered all of Greece if the Spartans hadn’t died to give the Executive Suite time to DECIDE.
In fact, both the Spartans and the Alamo’s defenders were perfectly aware that they had to DECIDE to die simply because they had to give the guys in a clean safe place time to make a decision. THEY certainly understood the point I am making here.
If you want to BRAG, you talk about when you had on a uniform and how you were stuck in the mud or the ice. If you want to WIN, the real fight is where it always was, with those who see the issues long before the first shot is fired, those the soldiers, who are merely filling in the diagram already drawn for them, so despise.
If you want to BRAG, slog it out in the field. If you want to get in on the REAL fight, it is right here in the air conditioning.
Get off the “I SERVED” crap of the Weakest Generation. They gave a third of the human race, now down to a fourth, to the Communists.
Their only excuse is that it was hard work.
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