Dependability, integrity, the characteristic of never knowingly doing anything wrong, that you would never cheat anyone, that you would give everybod… - Omar Bradley

I have attempted to write of my long association with George Patton as fairly and as honestly as I could. General Patton was one of my staunchest friends and the most unhesitatingly loyal of my commanders. He was a magnificent soldier, one whom the American people can admire not only as a great commander but as a unique and remarkable man. In recollecting our experiences together, I may offend those who prefer to remember Patton not as a human being but as a heroic-size statue in a public park. I prefer to remember Patton as a man, as a man with all the frailties and faults of a human being, as a man whose greatness is therefore all the more of a triumph.

There are those who contend that the best strategist is the commander most distantly removed from his troops. From where units exist merely as symbols on a map the strategist can perform in a vacuum and his judgment cannot be infected by compassion for his troops. If war were fought with push-button devices, one might make a science of command. But because war is as much a conflict of passion as it is of force, no commander can become a strategist until he knows his men. Far from being a handicap to command, compassion is the measure of it. For unless one values the lives of his soldiers and is tormented by their ordeals, he is unfit to command. He is unfit to appraise the cost of an objective in terms of human life. To spend lives, knowingly, deliberately- even cruelly- he has to steel his mind with the knowledge that to do less would only cost more in the end. For if he becomes tormented by the casualties he must endure, he is in danger of losing sight of his strategic objective. Where the objective is lost, he the war is prolonged and the cost becomes infinitely worse.

We are dealing with [veterans], not procedures; with their problems, not ours.