Op-ed views and opinions expressed are solely those of the author.

“Old soldiers never die, they just fade away.”

Gen. Douglas MacArthur, farewell address to joint session of Congress, April 1951

Reunions take many forms, most meet them with a mixture of dread, hope, and despair. We know we don’t look the same and take grim consolation in knowing that no one else does either. But in that amalgam is a spirit, a spirit of joined adventure, of best forgotten (well almost) memories of escapades best left unsaid and unspoken but there nevertheless. What do we really expect? We don’t know.

That was the atmosphere when the veterans of the 6th Cavalry gathered in that twilight between the August summer and the September autumn. But was not the season of the reunion a metaphor for the soldiers gathered at this point in their lives? Comrades living and dead remembered, old stories and lies swapped and half believed, bad jokes endured and that unspoken bond of soldiers best immortalized by Kipling; of hell survived but only alluded to in ribald tales out of earshot of wives, new and old, and of nubile mistresses leered at by men whose growing girth and receding hair should make them know better. A voice from the back of the hall in reply to the speaker’s comment of graying hair shouts, “What hair?” and the men laugh, knowing full well that their twenty-year-old eyes are in aging bodies.

But these are soldiers, generations apart from the cavalry of the frontier, but still men who would fight each other over honor and stand together against the barbaric foe. They really do deserve better, they are the inheritors of cavalry blue; they deserve their sabres and mounts and the strains of the Gary Owen, and that romantic element of the old army which lends itself to romanticism, and duty, and honor to a terrible and dangerous business. These are men who know what soldiering is about; something the time servers in the Pentagon will never comprehend.

Here they were recounting the old tales and remembering faces transformed by time and most important to them, the colonel commanding the regiment. This was what the Army regimental system should be, not the bastardized version cooked up by a fool’s brew of accountants and functionaries, men who read tables and know nothing of the spirit of war. Even to the outsider, the essence of what these men meant to each other permeated the room. Here too another canard was put to rest: the obscenity that men who served in Viet-Nam were unfit to return to civilian life. One had only to look about the room to know that these were men who surmounted adversity and had gone on to make their lives, not men who capitulated to failure or the Zeitgeist. The media would resent them for it.

So hats off, let us return to the uniforms and symbols of soldiering, to our sabres and blues and gold, and keep in our souls the knowledge that great civilizations and great art have only arisen on nations of great soldiers.

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William Layer

Lt. Colonel Civil Affairs, USAR (ret) served twenty-six years in the regular and reserve components of the US Army. He was civil military liaison for the 260th Military Police, DC National Guard, State Public Affairs Officer, Commander of the Public Affairs unit and a counter-drug intelligence analyst. Transferring to the 352 Civil Affairs Command as monuments and archives officer, he became the Command Public Affairs Officer in Iraq as well as liaison to local Iraqi leaders and acting Secretary to the General Staff. He was instrumental in recovering photographic artifacts of the Iraqi Royal family while in Baghdad. He was wounded in action in an ambush in Feb. 2004 for which he was awarded the Purple Heart.
In his civilian career he worked primarily in Army Public Affairs and for the Air Force as historian to the presidential wing in the early Reagan administration and later for Air Force Legislative Liaison covering congressional hearings and assisting in preparing testimony for senior leaders.
His essays and reviews have appeared in the scholarly and popular press including Asian Affairs and the Washington Times. He is co-author, with Ali Wahab, of The Iraqi Royal Family, a Collection of Photographs Recovered from The Ruins of the Zuhur Palace, 2004.
A native New Yorker, he holds a BA with honors in history from Findlay College (Ohio) and an MA in history from The Ohio State University. He is a graduate of the US Army Command & General Staff College and was graduated with distinction US Naval War College with a MA in National Security and Strategic Studies.

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