Captain Willard Quotes

[Wilford] Woodruff met with three members of the Young family: Elder [Brigham] Young [Jr.]; his brother, Major Willard Young; and their nephew, Captain Richard W. Young. . . . 'The apostle was chastised for speaking without authorization and was told not to oppose the enlistment of Mormon volunteers.' . . . That same day, the First Presidency sent out several other letters that explained the Church's stance on members enlisting in the armed services. First, a letter was sent to Governor Heber M. Wells. In that letter, the presidency explained that the Church was against war and that its responsibility was to proclaim peace. Yet in the current circumstances they also felt it their duty to support the war effort. Next, President George Q. Cannon wrote a letter to all of the stake presidents of the Church. President Cannon instructed these leaders not to impede the work of recruitment among their members. Conversely, they were to encourage the enlistment of Latter-day Saint soldiers for the conflict. By sending their message out on several fronts, Church members no longer had to guess at the Church's position on the war. . . . Once the Church had put forward its stance on the war, members of the Church joined the army in great numbers. . . . The Church demonstrated in a remarkable way that service in the military during wartime was in the veins of its people. To all fair observers, it was clear that Latter-day Saints could be counted on to stand by their nation. Since then, the Church has never looked back.

That meant that fully half of the guests at the El Dorado weren't who they were supposed to be. As a fillip to all this big-brained deceiving going on, Mary Hepburn's war-surplus combat fatigues still bore the embroidered last name of their previous owner over the left breast pocket, which was Kaplan. And when she and James Wait finally met in the cocktail lounge, he would tell her his false name and she would tell him her true name, but he would keep calling her "Mrs. Kaplan" anyway, and extol the Jewish people and so on. And they would later be married by the Captain on the sundeck of the Bahia de Darwin, and as far as she knew, she had become the wife of Willard Flemming, and as far as he knew, he had become the husband of Mary Kaplan. This sort of confusion would be impossible in the present day, since nobody has a name anymore - or a profession, or a life story to tell. All anybody has in the way of a reputation anymore is an odor which, from birth to death, cannot be modified. People are who they are, and that is that. The Law of Natural Selection has made human beings absolutely honest in that regard. Everybody is exactly what he or she seems to be.