Quotes from Robert Coram

Here Boyd says that to shape the environment, one must manifest four qualities: variety, rapidity, harmony, and initiative. A commander must have a series of responses that can be applied rapidly; he must harmonize his efforts and never be passive. To understand the briefing, one must keep these four qualities in mind.

Generating a rapidly changing environment--that is, engaging in actively that is so quick it is disorienting and appears uncertain or ambiguous to the enemy--inhibits the adversary's ability to adapt and causes confusion and disorder that, in turn, causes an adversary to overreact or underreact. Boyd closed the briefing by saying the message is that whoever can handle the quickest rate of change is the one who survives.

Barely six months after Ribbon Creek, Krulak had lost eleven Marines in another training accident. How he handled the incident is an example of the public relations axiom, "Tell the truth. Tell it all. And tell it quickly.

Krulak knew he would pay a price, and he still did the right thing. At a time when he had everything to lose, he was the only general in the American military whose sense of duty and love of country were greater than his careerism.

If you knew your job and you did your job, you could not have a better friend in the Corps than General Krulak.

Tigers breed tigers. A candy-assed commander will have few tigers working for him. Each makes the other uncomfortable.

Misty 2" was Bill Douglass, the operations officer and a laconic fellow who became famous for consistently neglecting marking rockets in favor of pointing the snout of his F-100 at a AAA battery and boring in with guns chattering.

Plus, he was a plainspoken man. Four decades later, when former Mistys were interviewed, they to a man spoke of Day's bluntness. "He called a spade a fucking spade," one said.

They wanted to know about Commando Sabre.

President Calvin Coolidge: "Doubters do not achieve; skeptics do not contribute; cynics do not create.

Vic remembers well the admonitions he received as a boy. Any gift or favor to him quickly resulted in a thank-you note, always on off-white paper and always written in black ink.