Major General Smedley D. Butler

Boys with a normal viewpoint were taken from the fields and offices and factories and classrooms and put into the ranks. There they were remolded; they were made over; they were made to 'about face', to regard murder as the order of the day. They were put shoulder to shoulder, and through mass psychology they were entirely changed. We used them for a couple of years and trained them to think nothing at all of killing or of being killed. Then suddenly, we dishcharged them and told them to make another 'about face'. This tiem they had to do their own readjusting without mass psychology, without officers' aid and advice, withou nation-wide propaganda. We didn't need them anymore. So we scattered them about without any speeches or parades. Many, too many, of these find young boys are eventually destroyed mentally, because they could not make that final 'about face' alone."

(written between WWI and WWII...)

Smedley D. Butler,
Major General, USMC
1936
Two-time winner, Congressional Medal of Honor