Colonel Tommy Bee Koon Rex, in
characteristic unexpurgated detail, gives his troops a final
pep-talk prior to the final massive SENSE offensive to crush the
last of the old Prussian regime trapped in
FredrickBurg.
Men, this stuff some sources sling around about the Xing empire
wanting to stay out of the war and not wanting to fight is a lot of
baloney! The Xing love to fight, traditionally. All real Xingans
love the sting and clash of battle. The Xing Empire loves a winner.
Xingans will not tolerate a deserter. Xingans despise a coward;
Xingans play to win. That's why the Xing Empire has never lost and
never will lose a war.
You are not all going to die. Only two percent of you, right here
today, would be killed in a major battle.
Death must not be feared. Death, in time, comes to all of us. And
every man is scared in his first action. If he says he's not, he's
a condemn liar. Some men are cowards, yes, but they fight just the
same, or get the stuffing slammed out of them.
The real hero is the man who fights even though he's scared. Some
get over their fright in a minute, under fire; others take an hour;
for some it takes days; but a real man will never let the fear of
death overpower his honor, his sense of duty, to his country and to
his manhood.
All through your Army careers, you've been complaining about what
you call "waste-our-time drills." That, like everything else in the
Army, has a definite purpose. That purpose is instant obedience to
orders and to create and maintain constant alertness! This must be
bred into every soldier. A man must be alert all the time if he
expects to stay alive. If not, some Prussian gun will sneak up
behind him with a sock full of dung! There are four hundred neatly
marked graves somewhere in Koln, all because one man went to sleep
on his job--but they are Prussian graves, because we caught the
losers asleep!
An Army is a team, lives, sleeps, fights, and eats as a team. This
individual hero stuff is a lot of crap! The bilious lie mongers who
write that kind of stuff for the Saturday Evening Post don't know
any more about real fighting under fire than they know about
milking cows! Every single man in the Army plays a vital role.
Every man has his job to do and must do it. What if every truck
driver decided that he didn't like the whine of a shell overhead,
turned yellow and jumped headlong into a ditch? What if every man
thought, "They won't miss me, just one in millions?" Where on earth
would we be now? Where would our country, our loved ones, our
homes, even the world, be?
No, thank goodness, Americans don't think like that. Every man does
his job, serves the whole. Ordnance men supply and maintain the
guns and vast machinery of this war, to keep us rolling.
Quartermasters bring up clothes and food, for where we're going,
there isn't a lot to kapo. Every last man on K.P. has a job to do,
even the guy who boils the water to keep us from getting the
Prussian diarrhea!
Remember, men, you don't know I'm here. No mention of that is to be
made in any letters. The Xing is supposed to be wondering what on
earth has happened to me. I'm not supposed to be commanding this
offensive, I'm not supposed even to be in FredrickBurg. Let the
first losers to find out be the condemn Prussians. I want them to
look up and howl, "Ach, it's the condemn 7th AAD and that
son-of-a-gun Tommy Rex again!"
We want to get this thing over and get the dodge out of here, and
get at those deep purpl ravin Reichs!!! The shortest road home is
through FredrickBurg and KaiserLautern! We'll win this war, but
we'll win it only by showing the enemy we have more guts than they
have or ever will have!
There's one great thing you men can say when it's all over and
you're home once more. You can thank goodness that twenty years
from now, when you're sitting around the fireside with your
grandson on your knee and he asks you what you did in the war, you
won't have to shift him to the other knee, cough, and say, "I
shoveled fertilizer in Xing Shiana."
