A WARRIOR'S TALE
This story may be apochryphal; I've gotten it third hand after several decades during which distortion is likely. But if you know anything about Douglas MacArthur it's believable, and illustrates the difference between our old military versus our current one, so I thought I'd pass it along.
It's around 1916, and Douglas MacArthur, a young Army lieuteant, is stationed in San Antonio, TX. Legendary Mexican revolutionary and bandit Pancho Villa starts up his cross-border antics, and America gets ready to send "Black Jack" Pershing to take care of him.
Young MacArthur is much like the older MacArthur we came to know in World War II and Korea--brilliant, charismatic, and possessing a monumental ego. Arrogant beyond belief. While marching up the beach to retake the Philippines several decades later, one of his aides suggested that the General should perhaps wait a while, at least until the beach was more secure, before coming ashore. MacArthur dismissed the suggestion out of hand, replying that since it wasn't his time yet (to die), he had nothing to fear.
Apparently aware that he was even further from his time to die in 1916, Lt. MacArthur decides to do a little free-lance recon work. He heads across the border, not a short trip from San Antonio in those days, alone and armed only with his pistols. He enters a cantina on the Mexican side, as it turned out a cantina full of banditos, and starts asking questions about Pancho Villa.
The inquisitive gringo with the crew cut wasn't well received; MacArthur had to fight and then shoot his way out of the cantina. He didn't learn much on the trip, but didn't lose anything either. And he proved, at least to himself, that he could take on about 20 banditos at once and live to tell the tale.
If we had any MacArthurs in our military today, how long do you think they would last? Gen. Patton famously believed that he was a reincarnated Roman general, and was open about that belief during the war. Did he find himself the subject of a scathing LA Times article? No, America was more serious then, and quicker to forgive eccentricities. You could be rough around the edges and still make it to the top of the Army.
Now, such personal quirks are career limiting. Just ask General William Boykin. Or Lt. Col Allen West, who is fighting court martial for saving American troops from a terrorist attack.
Today's Army would have drummed out MacArthur for that Mexican incident, thus robbing itself of one of its most instrumental strategists during World War II. We would have lost the man who, more than any other single individual, cemented the US-Japanese friendship that exists and grows stonger today.
Today, we're not serious about anything, except attacking people for being people, for doing their jobs, for having opinions and for protecting us from terrorists. Everything is politicized, to the detriment of our ability to live like we want and defend our common rights. If we continue like this, it's going to cost us eventually. Risk takers will not make it to the top; pencil-pushers and lawyers will push them out to make way for muddlers and hacks. Today it's just a general or a colonel, tomorrow it could be a whole war or worse.
MORE: Frankly, I'm surprised no one's yelling at me for this post yet. Maybe no one's interested, I don't know. As I got to thinking about it while watching The Hulk, a movie that offers lots of time to think about other things, it occurred to me that MacArthur's rank in 1916 was probably higher than Lieutenant. Three years later he would become Commandant of West Point, and you don't generally go from Lt. to whatever rank you need to run West Point in three years. From what I can dig up on the web, MacArthur was a Brigadier (one-star) General when he became Commandant in 1919. He was the youngest Commandant in West Point's history at the time, at age 39. As far as I know he still holds that record (Webster, still true?). From 1917 to 1918 he served in World War I. Battlefield promotions are common during wartime, but it's unlikely he went from being a 36-year-old Lt to a BG that fast. So if the cantina story is real, he must have held a rank higher than Lt when it happened. Or it happened prior to 1916.
According to this web biography, MacArthur did take part in the Mexican campaign of 1914, and was a Major by the time the US entered World War I in 1917. So the cantina story is possible as long as you move it up two years. He would probably have been a Captain at the time, low enough to be able to pull off a stunt like that without attracting too much attention. In those days, the Army probably thought his antics showed initiative and spunk, traits it valued at the time.
As to the story's provenance, I learned it from a friend who served in the Army in San Antonio in the 60s. His landlady at the time had a picture on her wall depicting her Army officer husband along with Patton, MacArthur and another officer (Patton also served in the Mexican campaign, and was posted at Fort Bliss, TX). It was taken at a time when they all were young officers. MacArthur graduated from West Point in 1903; Patton, in 1909. Her husband was a man of few friends, but one of them was MacArthur, and that's how she knew the story. She knew MacArthur.
I actually started researching all this to knock the story down, but based on purely circumstantial evidence I can't. So what I strongly doubted, but liked, a few hours ago, I doubt a lot less now.