Ralph Peters Quotes

In the sour air of his tent, Meade viewed himself with an engineer's cold eye: too dark of thought, too dour, a man alert to the smell of sulfur, but not to Heaven's scent. His wife was a proud, loyal woman, of good family. He could hear Margaret teasing. "George, I know you can smile!" She had got him a brigadier's rank at the start of the war, when his merits had not sufficed. He would have to do his best for her. And for the Union, of course. Major General George Gordon Meade had been happiest building lighthouses.

To study what men have done is to see ourselves as we are: History's mirror disintegrates our makeup. With its casualty lists, litany of atrocities, and suggestions that heroism, too, may require violence, history shows us "the skull beneath the skin." And no matter how firmly we shut our eyes, the skull will still be there.

We have moved from an age in which government leaders sought to do what was best for the people to one in which the political leadership is convinced it knows what is best for the people, whether they like it or not.

If there is a single power the West underestimates, it is the power of collective hatred.

When I mentioned my decision to retire, it surprised everyone. The immediate advice from peers was that I should stay on for at least two years from the date of my promotion, since that was the minimum period of service-in-grade required, with a waiver, to qualify for a lieutenant-colonel's retirement pay. It showed how little they knew me: the notion that I would hang on for an additional year, counting down the days, just to collect a few hundred dollars more each month offended me. For the rest of my life, I'll be paid as a retired major, and I have never wished it otherwise.
The Army was good to me even then, and the chain of command asked what it would take to make me change my mind and stay in uniform. I didn't even consider the offer. Once you make up your mind on so weighty an issue, you stick by your decision. And had I said, "Oh, assign me to X and I'll hang around," it would have seemed as if the whole fuss had been a bit of theater to get whatever I wanted. I had always served with dignity, if sometimes obstreperously, and I intended to leave on my own terms.
Three and a half years later, on the morning of September 11, 2001, I did regret retiring from the Army. But my fate lay elsewhere.

Muslims are hardly welcome to pick up the trash on Europe's playgrounds. Don't let Europe's current round of playing pacifist dress up fool you: This is the continent that perfected genocide and ethnic cleansing, the happy-go-lucky slice of humanity that brought us such recent hits as the Holocaust and Srebenica.

We [Americans] choose not to understand the world on terms other than our own.

The message of Vietnam is not that Americans will not take casualties; it is that the American people do not want the lives of their sons and daughters wasted.

"Just one thing," Sasha said suddenly. Pavel looked inquiringly into his brother's exhausted features. "I won't go without my cat."

On February 1, 1998, I woke up as a civilian. And life got interesting.

To those who solemnly swear to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

To the flesh-and-blood men who struggled, before we turned them into bronze and marble.

[P]op prophets tell us that Muslims in Europe are reproducing so fast and European societies are so weak and listless that, before you know it, the continent will become "Eurabia," with all the topless gals on the Rivera wearing veils. Well, maybe not. The notion that continental Europeans, who are world-champion haters, will let the impoverished Muslim immigrants they confine to ghettos take over their societies and extent the caliphate from the Amalfi Coast to Amsterdam has it exactly wrong.

Here I must inject a personal note—I never shed blood upon the field of Sidwell Friends, nor did I fight the battles of Yale Law. I am a miner's son, and my father was a self-made man who unmade himself during my youth. Education was not a family legacy, and my kin belonged to the United Mine Workers of America, not to Skull and Bones. My forebears fought this country's wars from the bottom ranks, and I began my own military career as a private. I have felt the full arrogance of those to whom much was given, and personally, wish that I might come to bury the elite, not to praise them. Yet, those who would rise need examples to emulate. It grates on me to write it, but our military needs a return of the nation's elite to the officer corps, to the extent that a traditional elite, with its spotty but essential ideals of service, still exists.

A mighty burst of rain assaulted the canvas, conjuring Gettysburg: his hour of glory, of triumph. The smoke, confusion, and carnage had calmed to reveal his army victorious. Lee had been defeated. Lee! His elation on that July afternoon had soared beyond all words, beyond his deathly exhaustion, and he had thought, mistakenly, that all might be well thereafter. Only to spend the night wrapped in an oilcloth, sitting on a rock amid the mud, under a tree that channeled the rain into torrents. Every roof had been required for the wounded his victory cost. The wounded, in their legions.
Damn Washington, and damn the New York papers. None of the men in frock coats and cravats understood the human side of an army. How they had howled- and were howling still- because he had not chased Lee like an ill-trained dog. They refused to hear that three hard days of battle had left tens of thousands of wounded men in his care and thousands more as prisoners in his hands. They did not want to hear that his army, too, had been mauled and thrown into confusion, that officers had been slaughtered by the hundredfold, that ammunition pouches and caissons had been emptied, that entire divisions had nothing to eat and no water untainted by blood, that the corpses of the brave baked in the sun, or simply that he had done the best he could. The Army of the Potomac had worked a miracle, sending Lee home in shame, but it had not been wonder enough for the stay-at-homes.