Thanks To Our Troops Quotes

And that brings me to one last point. I've got a simple message for all the dedicated and patriotic federal workers who have either worked without pay, or who have been forced off the job without pay for these last few weeks. Including most of my own staff. Thank you. Thanks for your service. Welcome back. What you do is important. It matters. You defend our country overseas, you deliver benefits to our troops who earned them when they come home, you guard our borders, you protect our civil rights, you help businesses grow and gain footholds in overseas markets. You protect the air we breathe, and the water our children drink, and you push the boundaries of science and space, and you guide hundreds of thousands of people each day through the glories of this country. Thank you. What you do is important, and don't let anybody else tell you different.

When a man seats before his eyes the bronze face of his helmet and steps off from the line of departure, he divides himself, as he divides his ‘ticket,’ in two parts. One part he leaves behind. That part which takes delight in his children, which lifts his voice in the chorus, which clasps his wife to him in the sweet darkness of their bed. “That half of him, the best part, a man sets aside and leaves behind. He banishes from his heart all feelings of tenderness and mercy, all compassion and kindness, all thought or concept of the enemy as a man, a human being like himself. He marches into battle bearing only the second portion of himself, the baser measure, that half which knows slaughter and butchery and turns the blind eye to quarter. He could not fight at all if he did not do this.” The men listened, silent and solemn. Leonidas at that time was fifty-five years old. He had fought in more than two score battles, since he was twenty; wounds as ancient as thirty years stood forth, lurid upon his shoulders and calves, on his neck and across his steel-colored beard. “Then this man returns, alive, out of the slaughter. He hears his name called and comes forward to take his ticket. He reclaims that part of himself which he had earlier set aside. “This is a holy moment. A sacramental moment. A moment in which a man feels the gods as close as his own breath. “What unknowable mercy has spared us this day? What clemency of the divine has turned the enemy’s spear one handbreadth from our throat and driven it fatally into the breast of the beloved comrade at our side? Why are we still here above the earth, we who are no better, no braver, who reverenced heaven no more than these our brothers whom the gods have dispatched to hell? “When a man joins the two pieces of his ticket and sees them weld in union together, he feels that part of him, the part that knows love and mercy and compassion, come flooding back over him. This is what unstrings his knees. “What else can a man feel at that moment than the most grave and profound thanksgiving to the gods who, for reasons unknowable, have spared his life this day? Tomorrow their whim may alter. Next week, next year. But this day the sun still shines upon him, he feels its warmth upon his shoulders, he beholds about him the faces of his comrades whom he loves and he rejoices in their deliverance and his own.” Leonidas paused now, in the center of the space left open for him by the troops. “I have ordered pursuit of the foe ceased. I have commanded an end to the slaughter of these whom today we called our enemies. Let them return to their homes. Let them embrace their wives and children. Let them, like us, weep tears of salvation and burn thank-offerings to the gods. “Let no one of us forget or misapprehend the reason we fought other Greeks here today. Not to conquer or enslave them, our brothers, but to make them allies against a greater enemy. By persuasion, we hoped. By coercion, in the event. But no matter, they are our allies now and we will treat them as such from this moment. “The Persian!

My thanks for your hospitality, Roran Stronghammer,” he said, raising his voice so that his entire troop could hear. “Mayhap I will soon have the honor of entertaining you within the walls of Aroughs. If so, I promise to serve you the finest wines from my family’s estate, and perhaps with them I will be able to wean you off such barbaric milk as you have there. I think you will find our wine has much to recommend it. We let it age in oaken casks for months or sometimes even years. It would be a pity if all that work were wasted and the casks were knocked open and the wine were allowed to run out into the streets and paint them red with the blood of our grapes.” “That would indeed be a shame,” Roran replied, “but sometimes you cannot avoid spilling a bit of wine when cleaning your table.” Holding the horn out to one side, he tipped it over and poured what little mead remained onto the grass below. Tharos was utterly still for a moment--even the feathers on his helm were motionless--then, with an angry snarl, he yanked his horse around and shouted at his men, “Form up! Form up, I say…Yah!” And with that final yell, he spurred his horse away from Roran, and the rest of the soldiers followed, urging their steeds to a gallop as they retraced their steps to Aroughs. Roran maintained his pretense of arrogance and indifference until the soldiers were well away, then he slowly released his breath and rested his elbows on his knees. His hands were trembling slightly. It worked, he thought, amazed.

Yeah, that kick hurts, man.” “Your face does look a bit puffy. Anyway, if it makes you feel better, I’ll check our troops for any injuries.” “Yes, please do.” “Alright, give me a second.” Then Devlin announced, “Gather up, everyone, and get into formation!” “The line formation?” asked Arthur. “No, the first formation. Thank you, Arthur.” The guards, knights and paladins formed the first section of the formation. Then the snipers, rangers and archers quickly made their way back to us and got into the rear section. Once our noncombatants and necromancers filled in the middle, the formation was complete. At that point, Devlin asked if anyone got hurt. No one said anything. “Great. We’re good to go, then,” Devlin said to me. “And I got everyone into formation.” “Alright, Paladin-Captain, lead us to the stronghold,” I said.

My family is a classic American-dream story. My great-grandparents fled Russia to avoid being murdered for their religion. Just two generations later, my parents fled New York City weekends for their country house. I never felt guilty about this. I was raised to believe America rewards hard work. But I was also raised to understand that luck plays a role in even the bootstrappiest success story. The cost of living the dream, I was taught, is the responsibility to expand it for others. It’s a more than fair price. Yet the people running the country didn’t see it that way. With George W. Bush in the White House, millionaires and billionaires were showered with tax cuts. Meanwhile, schools went underfunded. Roads and bridges deteriorated. Household incomes languished. Deficits ballooned. And America went to war. President Bush invaded Iraq to destroy weapons of mass destruction, a campaign which hit a snag when it turned out those weapons didn’t exist. But by then it was too late. We had broken a country and owned the resulting mess. Colin Powell called this “the Pottery Barn rule,” which, admittedly, was cute. Still, it’s hard to imagine a visit to Pottery Barn that costs trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives. Our leaders, in other words, had made bad choices. They would therefore be replaced with better ones. That’s how AP Government told me the system worked. In the real world, however, the invasion of Iraq became an excuse for a dark and antidemocratic turn. Those who questioned the war, the torture of prisoners—or even just the tax cuts—found themselves accused of something barely short of treason. No longer was a distinction made between supporting the president’s policies and America’s troops. As an electoral strategy, this was dangerous and cynical. Also, it worked. So no, I didn’t grow up with a high opinion of politicians. But I did grow up in the kind of environment where people constantly told me I could change the world. In 2004, eager to prove them right, I volunteered for John Kerry’s presidential campaign.

Legacy items. That’s the term we used to describe these golden moments. Sometimes we even knew what it meant. Taking out bin Laden was a legacy item. So was rescuing the auto industry, bringing troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan, or repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” But just as often, we imagined our legacy with the starry eyes of a hobo describing the Big Rock Candy Mountain. We dreamed of a distant utopia, a sunny political paradise, where the credit flows like a waterfall and approvals stay sky-high. We weren’t there yet. With twenty months to go until POTUS left office, our place in history was far from certain. But inside the building, something had undoubtedly changed. President Obama’s jaunty, let’s-go-for-it attitude was infectious. We no longer felt like turtles in our shells. Our growing confidence was matched by growing competence as well. That’s not to disparage the early days: as White Houses go, Obama’s functioned fairly smoothly from the start. Still, the longer POTUS ran the institution, the more we learned from our mistakes. After the Healthcare.gov disaster, we began “red-teaming” a growing number of big decisions, assigning designated cynics to guard against undiluted hope. Confronted with its lack of diversity, Obamaworld gradually became a place where rooms full of white guys were the exception and not the rule. Baby steps, I know. But these baby steps made us a unicorn among bureaucracies—we improved over time. Somewhat to my astonishment, so did I. At the risk of sounding boastful, I had now gone two full years without angering a sovereign nation. Even better, the White House finally felt like home. There was no one moment when the transformation happened. I didn’t burst forth from a cocoon. It was more like learning a language. You study, you practice, you embarrass yourself. And then one day someone cuts you off in traffic and you call them a motherfucker in perfect Portuguese. Whoa, you think. I guess I’m learning.

First let me thank all of you for your honesty,” Chang Weisi said, and then turned to Zhang Beihai. “Excellent, Comrade Zhang. Tell us, on what do you base your confidence?” Zhang Beihai stood up, but Chang Weisi motioned for him to sit down. “This is not a formal meeting,” he said. “It’s just a heart-to-heart chat.” Still standing at attention, Zhang Beihai said, “Commander, I can’t answer your question sufficiently in just a few words, because building faith is a long and complicated process. First of all, I’d like to make note of the mistaken thinking among the troops at the present time. We all know that prior to the Trisolar Crisis, we had been advocating for the examination of the future of war from scientific and rational perspectives, and a powerful inertia has sustained this mentality to the present day. This is particularly the case in the present space force, where it has been exacerbated by the influx of a large number of academics and scientists. If we use this mentality to contemplate an interstellar war four centuries in the future, we’ll never be able to establish faith in a victory.” “What Comrade Zhang Beihai says is peculiar,” a colonel said. “Is steadfast faith not built upon science and reason? No faith is solid that is not founded on objective fact.” “Then let’s take another look at science and reason. Our own science and reason, remember. The Trisolarans’ advanced development tells us that our science is no more than a child collecting shells on the beach who hasn’t even seen the ocean of truth. The facts we see under the guidance of our science and reason may not be the true, objective facts. And since that’s the case, we need to learn how to selectively ignore them. We should see how things change as they develop, and we shouldn’t write off the future through technological determinism and mechanical materialism.” “Excellent,” Chang Weisi said, and nodded at him to continue. “We must establish faith in victory, a faith that is the foundation of military duty and dignity! When the Chinese military once faced a powerful enemy under extremely poor conditions, it established a firm faith in victory through a sense of responsibility to the people and the motherland. I believe that today, a sense of responsibility to the human race and to Earth civilization can encourage the same faith.

There were over a half million troops in Italy at the beginning of June 1944. Driving out the Germans would eventually cost 40,455 lives, including those killed on Sicily. Those men weren’t a sideshow, and they certainly deserve our respect and thanks today.

Vanessa had no trouble imagining how the general could look scary as hell to his troops. But this morning, at the kitchen table with just his daughter and grandson, he was soft as a puppy. She reached across the table and patted his hand. He played with the baby’s foot with his other. “You’re not losing me, Daddy. Not ever.” “It’s okay, Vanni. You’re a young woman in your prime. Paul’s a fine young man, despite the fact that he’s fathering the nation…” “Daddy…” “Nah, he’s a good man. His incident aside.” She leaned toward him. “You’re not losing me,” she said again. “But I packed a bag this morning. I’m going home with him, Dad. Just for a few days. We’ll be back before the weekend.” “That doesn’t surprise me a bit. I’m surprised you didn’t take off in the dark of night.” Then she asked softly, “Did I disturb your sleep last night?” He shook his head. “I suppose we’re an odd family,” he said. “Not quite the stiff and upright family I had always thought we were, but the facts of our lives have changed all that. Relaxed our expectations… At least mine.” He looked down. “I heard you, yes. It wasn’t too disturbing. In fact, those are happy sounds.” He lifted his eyes. “There were other nights I heard you—and your brother. Nights of crying over loved ones lost. Your mother. Your husband. And I don’t doubt there were nights young Tom, at only fourteen, wondered what to do about a tough old three-star crying in his bed over his wife’s death.” “Oh, Daddy…” “Vanni—life is rough. It can’t help but be, especially for military families like ours. But we have to soldier on, be strong, do the best we can. If you tell me you’re happy with Paul…” “Oh, Dad, I love him so much. I loved him before I fell in love with him, if that makes sense. He loves me. And—he loves you.” “Any man who would do all he did after his best friend’s death—this is a man who deserves my respect.” “Thank

The draft was created in the Civil War. Young men were conscripted again in World War I, World War II, Korea and Vietnam. Today, America does not need a draft to fill the ranks of the armed forces. But without one, there remains a civic obligation for the 99.5 percent to commit to much more than “Thank you for your service.” In my view, there is an obligation to understand the volunteer military class and understand what it is asked to do. We can repay their valor in battle with valor on the home front. This requires real effort to give our professional troops the same attention, care and scrutiny of policy as if they had left our own kitchen to go to war. It is noble to donate to wounded warrior charities, but it is patriotic to analyze and question the plans for war before our sons and daughters are sent to fight in the first place.

If you count our nearby wandering golems.” “Oh, that’s right. Okay, two layers, it is. That’s even better.” “Yeah, that should be plenty.” “Alright, that’s it. I’m done with my errands.” “Time to head to the southern wall and wait for our enemy?” asked Bob. I nodded. As we walked to the southern part of the city, Bob said to me, “By the way, I thought that was a great speech.” “Thanks, man. I just spoke from the heart.” “You really boosted everyone’s morale. They didn’t look too scared anymore.” “Good. That’s what I meant to do. Because we don’t need fear right now. We need hope.” We walked past the TNT cannons as a handful of guards were loading TNT blocks into them. “Looks like the troops know what they’re doing,” I said. “Come on, let’s get up on the wall.” When we got up on the wall, I saw all the captains standing there, looking off into the southern horizon. Behind and