The most important 6 inches on the battlefield is between your ears.
There are hunters, and there are victims. By your discipline, cunning, obedience, and alertness, you will decide if you are a hunter or a victim.
Engage your brain before you engage your weapon.
Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet.
To Marines, love of liberty is not an empty phrase... Rather, it's displayed by blood, sweat, and tears for the fallen.
In this age, I don't care how tactically or operationally brilliant you are: if you cannot create harmony - even vicious harmony - on the battlefield based on trust across service lines, across coalition and national lines, and across civilian/military lines, you need to go home, because your leadership is obsolete.
Be the hunter, not the hunted.
There is no God-given right to victory on the battlefield. You win that through the skill and the devotion, the valor and the ferocity of your troops.
No war is over until the enemy says it's over.
There is nothing better than getting shot at and missed. It's really great.
We know that in tough times, cynicism is just another way to give up, and in the military, we consider cynicism or giving up simply as forms of cowardice.
I believe that many of my young guys lived because I didn't waste their lives because I didn't have the vision in my mind of how to destroy the enemy at least cost to our guys and to the innocents on the battlefields.
Marines don't know how to spell the word 'defeat'.
I don't worry about stress. I create it.
Demonstrate to the world, there is 'No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy' than a U.S. Marine.
There are going to be good days and bad days. Bottom line.
I don't lose any sleep at night over the potential for failure. I cannot even spell the word.
No matter how bad any situation, cynicism has no positive impact. Watching the news, you might notice that cynicism and victimhood often seem to go hand-in-hand, but not for veterans.
Some people feel affronted when something they thought to be true doesn't happen. If that's the case, then your sense of risk is much higher, and that leads to risk aversion. You need to be able to be comfortable in uncertainty.
So long as our Corps fields such Marines, America has nothing to fear from tyrants, be they Fascists, Communists or Tyrants with Medieval Ideology. For we serve in a Corps with no institutional confusion about our purpose: To fight! To fight well!
