duty honor country speech by douglas macarthur

Lô and Tarawa, in alphabetical order with Doolittle and Pershing as the connecting boulevards.īy the way, I lived on Bastogne, the namesake of the bloody fight in the Battle of the Bulge. The streets in my neighborhood were named Ardennes, Bastogne, Calais, Dunkirk, Eisenhower, Forrestal, Guadal Canal, Hürtgen Forest, Iwo Jima, Jutland, Leyte, Mountbatten, Okinawa, St. In my neighborhood you weren’t asked, “What’s your daddy do?” but instead, “What was your daddy in?” That was only natural because virtually every dad (and we all had dads in the home) had served in either the Army, Navy, Marines, Air Corps, or Coast Guard. The neighborhood in which I grew up was built between 19 and virtually all of the houses were financed on G.I. I am a baby boomer, born in the first year of that massive generation (78 million strong) when the veterans came home from four years of war and their wives started having babies at unprecedented rates. That is why we speak so often of a particular generation and their common experience - 'the baby boomers, (1946-1964),” Generation X, “the baby busters” (1965-1980), and the “millennials” (1981-1996). It has been said, I think quite correctly, that “you never completely escape the zip code into which you are born.” I would add that you never completely forget or jettison the influence of the era into which you are born.

I was too young to hear the General’s “Old Soldiers Never Die” speech before a joint session of Congress in 1951, but I was 15 in May 1962, and I was deeply impacted by the General’s speech, “Duty, Honor, Country!” I was going to serve in America’s army before God called me into His army.

In fact, before God called me into Christian ministry in 1963, my plan was to follow in General MacArthur’s footsteps, attend West Point, and become a career Army officer. Why? I was a great admirer of the general. That picture and that speech hung on the bedroom wall of my boyhood home in Houston from a month or so after it was delivered until I graduated from college and entered seminary in 1969. Over the Memorial Day Weekend, I was going through some boxes of memorabilia from offices past from college and seminary onward, trying to decide which ones to keep, which ones to dispatch to the Richard Land Center for Cultural Engagement at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, which ones my three children might want, and which ones I should jettison to the recycling bin.Īs I was in the midst of this emotionally painful process I was confronted with an icon from my youth and adolescence - a framed picture of General Douglas MacArthur in uniform, along with a copy of the text of his “Duty, Honor, Country” speech delivered 60 years ago at West Point, May 12, 1962. Circa 1943: American general Douglas MacArthur (1880 - 1964), in uniform, holds a pipe while standing on balcony with an American flag in background during World War II.

Duty honor country speech by douglas macarthur