War Stories Become Prologue
It was 1961 and Dwight Eisenhower was still going back to that game in 1912—West Point v. Carlisle.
West Point and Carlisle were winning teams. One featured two future generals—Eisenhower and Omar Bradley—and the other featured all-around athlete and gold-medal-winning Olympian Jim Thorpe and the now-legendary Coach Pop Warner.
Eisenhower and a team mate strategized and hit Thorpe high and low, doubling up on the already-famous young athlete. The three stopped play, sprawled across the field.
Play resumed.
Thorpe knew what to expect.
Carlisle won the game.
“Here and there, there are some people who are supremely endowed,” said Eisenhower in 1961. “My memory goes back to Jim Thorpe . . . he could do anything better than any other football player I ever saw.”
War stories are about victories and defeat—and then they are followed by remembering, dissecting, learning from, and honoring.
And then—as Shakespeare put it—what is past becomes prologue.
The earlier stories become opening acts for the future.
Eisenhower held onto that 1912 memory, as well as those from years before. Earlier in his 1961 speech:
“In my young years—high school and college—I was a member of some athletic teams, and in all of those years there were coaches who were men of character who were always telling us boys that when you had to take a defeat you had to be a good sport about it. I believed that, and I still believe it. But I never had a coach that told me I had to get used to it. . . .
“I find that every time there was a loss, they just took you out and instead of scrimmaging once a week or twice, you were doing it four times. You practiced not an hour and a half but two hours and a half. Then you got down to the fundamentals, whether it was in football or baseball or any other game you were playing.”
War stories have a way of sticking in your head, the way the coaches and Thorpe stuck in Eisenhower’s.
You remember them. You dissect them. You learn from them. When due, you honor them.
When they become the opening act, you use them to warm up for the headliner.
And when they are forgotten, and the warriors who lived them are long gone, wheels are recreated, and history repeats—without past’s prologue.
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Beautifully said. I feel like there should be some sort of weird steampunk/time travel story embedded in there somewhere. LOL
To paraphrase, say something like “So what you’re saying is that she was acting immature.”
Sometimes people just want someone to talk to and not to receive advice or judgment. Wait for her to ask you for your opinion before trying to help.
A lot of people will tell you that war stories are only for soldiers, but that isn’t true. War stories can be told by anyone who has been in battle, whether they were there or not. They are the stories that we tell about our military experiences, the ones we share with our friends and family members, the ones we write down in journals or on Facebook pages or on any other form of social media. War stories are important because they help us remember what happened during wartime and make sense of it all later on down the road when we need to talk about what happened to us in an effort to explain why we felt the way we did about something at the time. I need read PapersOwl reviews through https://facts.net/best-research-paper-writing-services/ website because it shares real help with research paper writing online to complete it online.
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