Hal Moore Quotes
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The leader must have trust in the people he leads; trust that they will perform their duties well. The people in the ranks must have trust in their leaders; trust that they will perform their duties completely. The people in the ranks must have trust and confidence in one another; trust that each will perform their duties well as members of the team.
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Even in the midst of defeat, carry yourself professionally and maintain your discipline. That is the quickest way towards recovery.
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Now, this not only means seeing the troops are fed, clothed and housed properly the easy part, but more importantly, training them to perfection, anticipating their problems and needs while actively anticipating and eliminating problems before they occur. Among other attributes...
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There is no glory in war—only good men dying terrible deaths.
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There’s always one more thing you can do to influence any situation in your favor—and after that one more thing, and after that…. The more you do the more opportunities arise.
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A commander in battle has three means of influencing the action: Fire support, now pouring down in torrents; his personal presence on the battlefield; and the use of his reserve.
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There is always one more thing you can do to increase your odds of success.
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Fear comes, and once you recognize it and accept it, it passes just as fast as it comes, and you don’t really think about it anymore. You just do what you have to do, but you learn the real meaning of fear and life and death.
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Ernie Savage rose to fire on three enemy soldiers only a few feet away only to find that his rifle was empty. Savage says: “I didn’t know what to do, so I just said ‘Hi’ and smiled. All three looked at me in confusion, but by then I had slipped in a fresh magazine and sprayed them.
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A leader is paid to do three things: Get the job done and get it done well. Plan ahead—be proactive, not reactive. Exercise good, sound judgment in doing all of the above.
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Fewer things will impact a team’s morale than a leader who does not recognize their accomplishments and hard work.
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Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion had good, solid, professional noncoms, and its troops had served together for a long time. It was a good rifle company and I was happy to get it. Captain Diduryk was twenty-seven years old, a native-born Ukrainian who had come to the United States with his family in 1950. He was an ROTC graduate of St. Peter’s College in Jersey City, New Jersey, and was commissioned in July of 1960. He had completed paratrooper and Ranger training and had served tours in Germany and at Fort Benning. Diduryk was married and the father of two children. He was with his mortar platoon at Plei Me camp when he got the word by radio of his company’s new mission.
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Now, this not only means seeing the troops are fed, clothed and housed properly the easy part, but more importantly, training them to perfection, anticipating their problems and needs while actively anticipating and eliminating problems before they occur.
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Only first-place trophies will be displayed, accepted, or presented in this battalion. Second place in our line of work is defeat of the unit on the battlefield, and death for the individual in combat. No fat troops or officers. Decision-making will be decentralized: Push the power down. It pays off in wartime. Loyalty flows down as well. I check up on everything. I am available day or night to talk with any officer of this battalion. Finally, the sergeant major works only for me and takes orders only from me. He is my right-hand man.
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Then it came across the radio: Bravo Company had found one other survivor from our 2nd Platoon. He had been badly wounded in the legs and had propped himself up against a tree. He had been burned by napalm, waiting in the night, and some North Vietnamese had put a pistol to his eye and pulled the trigger. Shot him in the eye, blinded him, but he was still alive! I saw him being brought in on a stretcher, smoking a cigarette, all fucked up.
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American soldiers in battle don't fight for what some president says on T.V., they don't fight for mom, apple pie, the American flag...they fight for one another.
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James A. Mullartey from our 1st Platoon made it back to our lines. His story: The NVA had been shooting our wounded. One came up to him, stuck a pistol in his mouth, and fired. The bullet exited the back of his throat, knocked him out and they left him for dead. He survived and when he woke up at night he started crawling to us
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Many of our countrymen came to hate the war we fought. Those who hated it the most—the professionally sensitive—were not, in the end, sensitive enough to differentiate between the war and the soldiers who had been ordered to fight it. They hated us as well, and we went to ground in the cross fire, as we had learned in the jungles.
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We were the children of the 1950s and John F. Kennedy’s young stalwarts of the early 1960s. He told the world that Americans would “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship” in the defense of freedom. We were the down payment on that costly contract, but the man who signed it was not there when we fulfilled his promise. John F. Kennedy waited for us on a hill in Arlington National Cemetery, and in time we came by the thousands to fill those slopes with our white marble markers and to ask on the murmur of the wind if that was truly the future he had envisioned for us.
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Smith recalls: “Within a span of perhaps twenty minutes everyone around me was dead or wounded, except me.
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When we step on the battlefield, I will be The First Boots On and the Last Boots Off.
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The first impression a speaker makes on his audience is by his appearance and demeanor. Well-groomed or not? Self-Confident or not? Nervous or not? Paper-shuffler or not? All this and more before he says a word. The next impression is how the speaker talks. Forceful or not? Correct diction or not? Too much use of hands? Walking around? If so, too much? Any distracting mannerisms such as always shoving his spectacles back up his nose? Speaks too loud? Too soft? “Talks down” to the audience?The next impression is about what he says—the content of his talk. Are the thoughts well-organized? Or is he just “winging it?
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This act is engraved in my mind deeper than any other experience in my two tours in Vietnam. A huge black enlisted man, clad only in shorts and boots, hands bigger than dinner plates, reached into my helicopter to pick up one of the dead white soldiers. He had tears streaming down his face and he tenderly cradled that dead soldier to his chest as he walked slowly from the aircraft to the medical station.
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I can't promise you that I will bring you all home alive. But this I swear, before you and before Almighty God, that when we go into battle, I will be the first to set foot on the field, and I will be the last to step off, and I will leave no one behind. Dead or alive, we will all come home together.