Quotes from Burke Davis

Sir, do you know they've cut us off? We're entirely surrounded." "Those poor bastards," Puller said. "They've got us right where we want 'em. We can shoot in every direction now.

We've been looking for the enemy for several days now. We've finally found them. We're surrounded. That simplifies our problem of getting to these people and killing them.

We must not be too proud or too stupid to profit by our mistakes—

The difference between success and failure in this life of ours is mostly hard work, so you must constantly work to try to improve yourself.

When I entered the service, the regulations stated that the object of all military training is "success in battle." This short sentence has been rewritten on three pages and I defy anyone to read it over three or more times and then explain what the object of military training is.

between our enlisted men and young officers and those of the Army. There appears to be no example of leadership in the latter organization. No pride and nothing to look up to. The truth is unknown. …

From the ranks of the Richmond militia across the square, a thin-shouldered infantryman glared at the hooded figure on the scaffold. The militiaman's eyes were dark with excitement, as if he had quite lost himself in the spectacle. He was Private John Wilkes Booth.

Mrs. Puller gave him a last-minute gift, a bathrobe. He thanked her tenderly, but growled to his staff: "I've got the world's greatest wife, but my God, what do you do when she sends you off to war with a new red flannel bathrobe?" He had it secretly stowed away before boarding his transport, the U.S.S. Fuller.

A French count, as a volunteer officer with the Federal regiment, Gardes Lafayette, admired the delicious salad served in the headquarters mess. "What meat is this?" he asked the cook one day. "I must take the recipe to France, It will be a sensation." "Blacksnake," was the reply. The count paled, lost interest, and disappeared from the coterie of salad fanciers.

if he had attended burial services for one of his bitter enemies, said, "No, I didn't patronize the funeral, but I approve of it.

We must not be too proud or too stupid to profit by our mistakes—and God knows we make 'em.

Stonewall Jackson was the symbol of Southern resistance, but his sister Laura, a Union sympathizer, remained unshaken in her devotion to the Old Republic, and was applauded for her stand by Federal soldiers. She sent a message by a Union soldier to the effect that she could "take care of wounded Federals as fast as brother Thomas would wound them.

A Virginia woman assailed me as "non-Southern" because of my account of the burning of Richmond by Confederates in To Appomattox - before reading the book. In her broadside she lumped me with the Soviet Union, the United States Supreme Court and Certain Republican Presidents fore and aft.

The definition of military training is success in battle. In my opinion that is the only objective of military training. It wouldn't make any sense to have a military organization on the backs of the American taxpayers with any other definition. I've believed that ever since I've been a Marine.

I'll quote Napoleon. He stated that the most important thing in military training is discipline. Without discipline an army becomes a mob.

On the other hand, a New Yorker charged me with hero worship of Lee and more: "Over-emphasis upon the Christianity of the butcher in a human slaughter business by one who was a parasitic blueblood all his life." This one is filed under "Views of the War, Marxist.

We'll have to get over the idea that we're the greatest people on earth in every respect, that we're infallible and that no one else has ideas worth considering. One of the reasons we had to fight against odds on Guadalcanal was this insufferable American notion of superiority, and our carelessness in face of danger. It goes back to Pearl Harbor and far beyond.

In August, 1956, a Swedish bank teller cheerfully changed a $500 Confederate banknote for an enterprising customer, at the same favorable rate of exchange commanded by Federal currency in that season. His mistake was discovered only when it was much too late.

Commodore Stephen Decatur. And he said, 'My country, may she always be right—but my country, right or wrong.

Among the eulogies raised to the departed general, the terse words of his friend Whitelaw Reid seemed to summarize most perceptively the mercurial Sherman: "He never acknowledged an error and never repeated it.

Never underestimate the enemy, boys. If you don't figure him to have as much sense as you've got you'll have trouble.