Apparently the term real man has become synonymous with progtard pussy.
Bostonbob
May 15, 2014 9:22 am
Real Man:
5:13 PM
A final salute
By BRIDGETT SITER / DFMWR
• The Bayonet
• Wednesday, Oct. 17, 2012
• Email Story | Print |
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Tucked between pages 220 and 221 of a dog-eared copy of We Were Soldiers Once … and Young is a receipt from the Fort Benning commissary dated 2001. It serves two purposes; first, to mark the account of a remarkable incident that occurred in November 1965 during a battle between American forces and the North Vietnamese in the Ia Drang Valley; and second, to remind me that for a time, a giant walked among us.
In April 2001, the smoke had finally settled from the exodus of the film crew, the stars and cameras and hangers on who descended on Fort Benning earlier that year to film Hollywood’s adaptation of We Were Soldiers. I was in the check-out line with my daughter and a friend, both 10-year-olds who had experienced first-hand the sensation that surrounded the presence of Hollywood royalty on post since their moms worked in the Public Affairs Office.
In walked retired Command Sgt. Major Basil Plumley and his wife Deurice.
I didn’t introduce the girls to the Plumleys; they were on their way in and we were on our way out. But I explained who he was and reminded them that Sam Elliott played Plumley in the movie.
“He’s a real hero, not an actor,” I said. “He’s the kind of hero Hollywood makes movies about.”The girls, of their own volition, approached the sergeant major to ask for his autograph. I held my breath, because I knew Plumley hated the limelight, no matter how “little” the light.
I had nothing to worry about. The girls bounded back smiling, with Plumley’s signature scrawled across the back of my register receipt. That evening, I tucked it into the book for safe keeping, and there it stayed until last week, when I learned that Plumley died Oct. 10 at the Columbus Hospice after a short battle with cancer. He was 92.
I pulled the book off the shelf and turned to page 220 to review the brief account of an incident that happened on the second day of that bloody three-day battle between the Soldiers of the 7th Cavalry Regiment and 2,000 North Vietnamese forces:
“In the midst of this bedlam a blazing flare … streaked across the sky and plunged into the ammunition dump near the battalion command post. It lodged in a box of hand grenades, burning fiercely. Without hesitation, Sergeant Major Plumley ran to the stacks and with his bare hands reached into the grenade boxes and grabbed the flare. (He) jerked the flare free, reared back, and heaved it out into the open clearing. He then stomped out the grass fires touched off by the flares in and around the ammo crates.”
Just one paragraph out of 430 pages — a succinct account, unembellished, that encapsulates the character of a man who was larger than life long before his character hit the big screen. Oddly enough, that scene never made it into the movie. Perhaps it wasn’t believable enough to pass muster with the masses.
Plumley’s bravery in Vietnam was probably a mixture of inherent character and confidence gained on the battle field. The West Virginia native, who was born on the first day of 1920, earned the Combat Infantryman Badge in World War II, Korea and Vietnam (where he served two tours.) He was one of only 324 Soldiers to claim that honor.
He fought in more than 20 military operations during his 32-year military career, having enlisted on March 31, 1942, as a private after two years of high school. During WWII, he fought in the Allied invasion at Salerno and the D Day invasion at Normandy, and he made four combat jumps with the 320th Glider Field Artillery Battalion. He made another combat jump in Korea with the 187th Airborne Infantry Regiment. There are those who claim, but cannot prove, that he was the only man to claim five combat jumps behind enemy lines.
“It takes your breath away to think he survived all that. No one should have survived all that,” said Joe Galloway, who co-authored the book with retired Lt. Gen. Hal Moore in 1992. Moore was the lieutenant colonel who led the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment, into the Ia Drang, and Galloway was a UPI journalist assigned to the unit. (He was awarded the Bronze Star for helping rescue wounded American Soldiers under fire at Landing Zone X-Ray.)
The three became fast friends and remained close for nearly 50 years. Moore requires assistance these days, but he paid a visit to Plumley’s bedside before his death.
“I am so blessed to have had two such men as best friends, as mentors and as role models for almost half a century,” said Galloway, who has done more than any other to inspire new generations of Soldiers with the stories of old Soldiers, like Moore and Plumley.
But Plumley proved more of a challenge, even to Galloway. He never shared war stories and was known to hang up on reporters who called him.
“I don’t do interviews. That’s what he always said — I don’t do interviews,” Galloway said. “I think he came to regret that decision, but once he made it, he stuck with it, and no one could talk him off it, not me and not Hal Moore.”
I fared no better. On the one occasion I called Plumley and reminded him that we had met socially a time or two, he declined to speak to me in my role as a reporter and explained nicely that he’d been burned once by the media, badly. But when I approached him in person, after the screening of We Were Soldiers at the theater on Main Post, he offered this much.
“Too much Hollywood,” he said of the movie. “It had too much Hollywood in it. That’s all I want to say.”
But apparently, Plumley had no issues with Elliott’s portrayal. The actor “under played” the sergeant major, said Galloway, who introduced the two after Elliott had been cast as Plumley. They met at Plumley’s house and chatted over coffee and Deurice’s pie.
“I carried the bucket in that conversation. There I was with the two most monosyllabic men in the world in the same room, and I sat there between them. It was just grunts and growls for the first hour and a half, but then they got to talking,” Galloway said. “When we left there, Sam said ‘Joe, I think I’m going to try to talk like the sergeant major.’ I said ‘Well, Sam, it don’t seem like that great of a reach to me.’”
Elliot and Plumley were “two peas in a pod,” Galloway said, but “the sergeant major, in life, was bigger than Sam Elliott. Sam would tell you the same thing.”
As a Soldier, Plumley defied convention as he defied death. Known as “Old Iron Jaw” to his Soldiers, he set his face like flint and led honestly, fairly and occasionally by intimidation, if need be. Galloway said the best lines in the movie were Plumley’s own words, including his response to a Soldier who greeted the sergeant major with a “good morning.”
“Who made you the (expletive) weatherman?” Plumley growled.
Earnie Savage was a young buck sergeant, an E5, when he met Plumley in 1964. Savage didn’t frighten easily, but he tended to be overly deferential to anyone “above” him. And at 6 feet, 6 inches, Plumley towered over the young Soldier.
“It wasn’t just his reputation, the sergeant major was literally bigger than life. He was huge, and when you saw him, you knew you better get your stuff straight,” said Savage, who spent the better part of Monday standing post at Plumley’s casket at a funeral home in Columbus.
Plumley was witty without effort and never long-winded, Savage said. “He didn’t have to say a lot — he just had to show up, and people paid attention. He was a lot like his reputation; he was gruff and he could be tough, but he wasn’t mean. I never knew him to be mean.”
To say he is a legend is not an exaggeration. The refrain “God may look like Sgt. Maj. Plumley, but he isn’t nearly as tough on sins small or large,” or some version there of, is commonly used in any discussion involving the man, and it was so long before his death and long before the movie.
He was also, in the popular vernacular, a PT beast.
In the months leading up to their deployment to Vietnam, Plumley and Moore worked their men hard. Ten-mile foot marches were the norm, and Plumley regularly ran long distances with his men, leading from the front.
“You’d hear him up front yelling, ‘Awright dammit, pick it up back there,’” Savage said. “He was all about PT and conditioning, but he’d do everything he expected us to do. Without a lot of what we got from him and the colonel, I know some of us wouldn’t be here today.”
Plumley believed training, leading and disciplining Soldiers “was NCO’s job, not an officer’s job,” Savage said. “He always said, ‘If you lose a battle, it’s the NCOs’ fault.’”
His dedication paid off, when Plumley staffed the 7th Cav’s 1st Battalion with Soldiers he knew to be highly skilled, well- trained and disciplined. He knew it because he trained most of them himself.
“He said the (1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment) was the best unit he’d ever been in, the best trained,” Savage said. “And it was, because he brought men he knew, a lot of them he’d trained and served with, and that’s why we had such good leaders.”
Plumley believed in training to standard, then raising the standard, said Steve Hansen, who served with Plumley in the Ia Drang.
“Being second at anything didn’t count. He trained us to be the best,” Hansen said. “We thought he was the dragon, but looking back, I know he was the moderator. He’d step in and speak up and tell the colonel when the men had all they could take. He took care of his Soldiers, trained them hard, but looked out for them.”
Hansen said he was intrigued, some years back, when he came across a mention of “first sergeant” Plumley in a historical book about World War II.
“We all thought he was hatched a sergeant major, and here he was in black and white, a first sergeant. The passage wasn’t very clear, just mentioned (Plumley) and something about a German tank,” Hansen said. “He was a man of few words and a humble man; a lot of people don’t realize that about him. He didn’t brag, he just told you like it was. I asked him, ‘What’s the story about you and a German tank and he just grunted and said, ‘Obviously I won.’ And that was all there was to it.”
Over the past few years, Plumley’s personality changed noticeably, Galloway said. He became “almost loquacious — a chatterbox,” swapping old Army stories (but never war stories!) with old Army buddies. He attended events at the National Infantry Museum and seemed to fairly tolerate the limelight, such as it was. He thoroughly enjoyed hosting reunions that brought together dwindling numbers from that ‘original’ battalion of young studs who fought their way through hell together in the bloody Ia Drang Valley. A couple of years back, as his health declined, he relinquished his “reign” on the reunions. After Deurice died in May, Plumley said his time was short, he’d be joining her soon.
Tuesday, a crowd of more than 400 packed The Infantry Center Chapel to bid farewell to a giant. He was laid to rest with Deurice in the Main Post Cemetery.
Plumley received the Doughboy Award in 1999. His awards and decorations included Silver Star (one Oak Leaf Cluster); Legion of Merit; Bronze Star (one Oak Leaf Cluster and Valor Device); Purple Heart (three Oak Leaf Clusters); Air Medal (one silver and three bronze Oak Leaf Clusters); Army Presidential Unit Citation (two Oak Leaf Clusters); Army Commendation Medal; American Defense Service Medal; American Campaign Medal; Word War II Victory Medal; Korean Service Medal (with Arrowhead device and three campaign stars); Vietnam Service Medal (with one silver and three bronze campaign stars); Armed Forces Expeditionary Medal; Republic of Korea Presidential Unit Citation; Republic of Korea War Service Medal; United Nations Service Medal for Korea; Vietnam Gallantry Cross Unit Citation with Palm; Vietnam Campaign Medal; Combat Infantryman Badge (three awards); Master Combat Parachutist Badge (with gold star, indicating 5 combat jumps); Vietnam Army Basic Parachutist Badge; Order of St. Maurice; and Garry Owen Distinctive Unit Insignia.
Bostonbob
May 15, 2014 9:24 am
Real man 2:
Samuel Whittemore
Interestingly enough for a man who is now famous throughout Massachusetts for his unbreakable determination to violently kill British people at all costs, Samuel Whittemore was born in England, and faithfully served the British Crown for nearly five decades of professional military service. Born in 1695, just 75 years after the first Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock, the stone-cold hardass who would be made a state hero of Massachusetts was first unleashed on colonial America in the 1740s while serving as a Captain in His Majesty’s Dragoons – a badass unit of elite British cavalrymen much-feared across the globe for their ability to impale people on lance-points and then pump their already-dead bodies full of gigantic pistol ammunition that more closely resembled baseballs than the sort of rounds you see packed into Beretta magazines these days. Fighting the French in Canada during the War of Austrian Succession (a conflict that was known here in the colonies as King George’s War because seriously WTF did colonial Americans care about Austrian succession), Whittemore was part of the British contingent that assaulted the frozen shores of Nova Scotia and beat the shit out of the French at their stronghold of Louisbourg in 1745. The 50 year-old cavalry officer went into battle galloping at the head of a company of rifle-toting horsemen, and emerged from the shouldering flames of a thoroughly ass-humped Louisbourg holding a bitchin’ ornate longsword he had wrenched from the lifeless hands of a French officer who had, in Whittemore’s words, “died suddenly”. The French would eventually manage to snake Louisbourg back from the Brits, so thirteen years later, during the Seven Years’ War (a conflict that was known here in the colonies as the French and Indian War because WTF we were fighting the French and the Indians, and also because it lasted nine years instead of seven), Whittemore had to return to his old stomping grounds of Louisburg and ruthlessly beat it into submission once again. Serving under the able command fellow badass British commander James Wolfe, a man who earned his reputation by commanding a line of riflemen who held their lines against a frothing-at-the-mouth horde of psychotic, sword-swinging William Wallace motherfuckers in Scotland (this is a story I intend to tell at a later date), Whittemore once again pummeled the French retarded and stole all of their shit he could get his hands on. He served valiantly during the Second Siege of Louisbourg, pounding the poor city into rubble a second time in an epic bloodbath would mark the beginning of the end for France’s Atlantic colonies – Quebec would fall shortly thereafter, and the French would be chased out of Canada forever. So you can thank Whittemore for that, if you are inclined to do so.
Beating Frenchmen down with a cavalry saber at the age of 64 is pretty cool and all, but Whittemore still wasn’t done doing awesome shit in the name of King George the Third and His Loyal Colonies. Four years after busting up the French for the second time in two decades he led troops against Chief Pontiac in the bloody Indian Wars that raged across the Great Lakes region. Never one to back down from an up-close-and-personal fistfight, it was during a particularly nasty bout of hand-to-hand combat he came into possession of another totally sweet war trophy – an awesome pair of matched dueling pistols he had taken from the body of a warrior he’d just finished bayoneting or sabering or whatever.
After serving in three American wars before America was even a country, Whittemore decided the colonies were pretty damn radical, so he settled down in Massachusetts, married two different women (though not at the same time), had eight kids, and built a house out of the carcasses of bears he’d killed and mutilated with his own two hands. Or something like that.
Now, all of this shit is pretty god damned impressive, but interestingly none of it is actually what Samuel Whittemore is best known for. No, his distinction as a national hero instead comes from a fateful day in mid-April 1775, when the British colonies in the New World decided they weren’t going to take any more of King George’s bullshit and decided to get their American Revolution on. And you can be pretty damn sure that if there were asses to be kicked, Whittemore was going to be one of the men doing the kicking.
So one day a bunch of colonial malcontents got together, formed a battle line, and opened fire on a bunch of redcoats that were pissing them off with their silly Stamp Acts and whatnot. The Brits managed to beat back this militia force at the Battles of Lexington and Concord, but when they heard that a larger force of angry, rifle-toting colonials was headed their way, the English officers decided to march back to their headquarters and regroup. Along the way, they were hassled relentlessly by American militiamen with rifles and angry insults, though no group harassed them more ferociously than Captain Sam Whittemore. When the Redcoats went marching back through his hometown of Menotomy, this guy decided that he wasn’t going to let his advanced age stop him from doing some crazy shit and taking on an entire British army himself. The 80 year old Whittemore grabbed his rifle and ran outside:
Whittemore, by himself, with no backup, positioned himself behind a stone wall, waited in ambush, and then single-handedly engaged the entire British 47th Regiment of Foot with nothing more than his musket and the pure liquid anger coursing through his veins. His ambush had been successful – by this time this guy popped up liken top of him. He fired off his musket at point-blank range, busting the nearest guy so hard it nearly blew his red coat into the next dimension.
Now, when you’re using a firearm that takes 20 seconds to reload, it’s kind of hard to go all Leonard Funk on a platoon of enemy infantry, but damn it if Whittemore wasn’t going to try. With a company of Brits bearing down in him, he quick-drew his twin flintlock pistols and popped a couple of locks on them (caps hadn’t been invented yet, though I think the analogy still works pretty fucking well), busting another two Limeys a matching set of new assholes. Then he unsheathed the ornate French sword, and this 80-year-old madman stood his ground in hand-to-hand against a couple dozen trained soldiers, each of which was probably a quarter of his age.
As you can see from the picture, it didn’t work out so well. Whittemore was shot through the face by a 69-caliber bullet, knocked down, and bayonetted 13 times by motherfuckers. I’d like to imagine he wounded a couple more Englishmen who slipped or choked on his blood, though history only seems to credit him with three kills on three shots fired. The Brits, convinced that this man was sufficiently beat to shit, left him for dead kept on their death march back to base, harassed the entire way by Whittemore’s fellow militiamen.
Amazingly, however, Samuel Whittemore didn’t die. When his friends rushed out from their homes to check on his body, they found the half-dead, ultra-bloody octogenarian still trying to reload his weapon and seek vengeance. The dude actually survived the entire war, finally dying in 1793 at the age of 98 from extreme old age and awesomeness. A 2005 act of the Massachusetts legislature declared him an official state hero, and today he has one of the most badass historical markers of all time:
Links:
a decrepitly old rifle-toting jack-in-the-box, the British troops were pretty much o
Revolutionary War Archives
America’s Oldest, Bravest Soldier
MA Bill No. 1839
Wikipedia
harry p.
May 15, 2014 9:25 am
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and here’s the instruction manual
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overthecliff
May 15, 2014 9:35 am
Don`t need a bunch of Hollywood Faggots to tell me what a real man is. I suggest they get the Kenyan to bom every mosque in Nigeria on every Friday until the Mohammedan excrement stops their intolerant behavior.
overthecliff
May 15, 2014 9:35 am
BOMB!
TE
May 15, 2014 10:36 am
Overthecliff, you just made my head hurt.
Why?
We are fucking broke and waging war all over the globe, plus on our own citizens. What we need to do is nothing.
If the rich Hollywood “men” want to “do something!” then maybe they should pool their considerable resources and help out the local government there.
Real men fix their own fences before demanding the government force a faraway man to fix his.
BUCKHED
May 15, 2014 10:57 am
Nathan Bedford Forest…that was a real man ( As was Stonewall Jackson ) .
AWD
May 15, 2014 1:08 pm
Mooing Past the Slaughterhouse
by RedStaterNYC | 5-14-14
Feminism has turned us all into cattle. And what has it gotten us? We are ruled over by perpetual adolescents while our “moral and intellectual superiors” gleefully orchestrate our eradication. And the vast majority of so-called “men” remain blissfully unawares, which is perhaps moot as they aren’t even of a mentality suitable to resisting their and their loved ones’ demise as it is.
Gone is rule by reason; in is rule by emotion and emotion alone. Gone is sanity; in is pure insanity–the more deplorable and unhinged the better!
Forgive my egregiously scant knowledge of anthropology, but it’s my understanding that matriarchal societies were the exception to the patriarchal rule. Assuming this is the case, what has our defiance of nature cost us?
In days of yore, we (men) didn’t try to “empathize with” or “understand” a woman who was being batshit crazy. (And let’s be honest: at minimum once a month, all women are batshit crazy!) No; what happened was men simply told them to go fly a kite. And if they refused to comply? Well, then, there’s the effing door.
Now? Now we hand them over our balls and ask them what else they need.
In days of yore, men did everything in their power–including self-sacrifice–to keep their women out of harm’s way.
Now? Now we send our women directly into harm’s way.
Back then, the child was sacrosanct.
Now? We kill them with all the care of having a wart removed.
Yes, men start wars and enact genocide. But then, what have we gotten out of rule by women if not wars with useless savages and, to top it off, auto-genocide?
Savages respect the rule of might, nothing more. And the man is mightier than the woman. With women–of both male and female varieties!–in charge, we’ve done nothing but embolden the savages.
And auto-genocide? “Never again” means “never again…for Jews.” For gentiles of European descent, our purge from the Earth can’t come soon enough. And we compliantly accept our removal from the cornucopia of human biodiversity. Why?
Because we “care”,” we “understand,” we “empathize.” …With those who engineer our termination.
Such is the insanity of rule by feminine virtue. Feminine virtue is great for raising kids. But it is suicide in the realm of cultural hegemony.
“Feminism has turned us all into cattle. And what has it gotten us?”
El Sensei (Doggi) on the Erazno and Chocolata show, said 2 million men are now househusbands supported by working women. While there is nothing wrong with that, his argument is that some find it easy to turn over their nutsack to the woman who Doggi considers the weaker and less rational member of the two. Of course his talk is exagerated but he has been waging war on ‘mandilones’ or apron wearing househusbands and willing cuckolds for a long time.
What happened to Lee Marvin, Charles Bronson? How did we get to these pretty boys with vaginas? (Zack Efron). At least we still have Al Pacino.
Apparently the term real man has become synonymous with progtard pussy.
Real Man:
5:13 PM
A final salute
By BRIDGETT SITER / DFMWR
• The Bayonet
• Wednesday, Oct. 17, 2012
• Email Story | Print |
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Tucked between pages 220 and 221 of a dog-eared copy of We Were Soldiers Once … and Young is a receipt from the Fort Benning commissary dated 2001. It serves two purposes; first, to mark the account of a remarkable incident that occurred in November 1965 during a battle between American forces and the North Vietnamese in the Ia Drang Valley; and second, to remind me that for a time, a giant walked among us.
In April 2001, the smoke had finally settled from the exodus of the film crew, the stars and cameras and hangers on who descended on Fort Benning earlier that year to film Hollywood’s adaptation of We Were Soldiers. I was in the check-out line with my daughter and a friend, both 10-year-olds who had experienced first-hand the sensation that surrounded the presence of Hollywood royalty on post since their moms worked in the Public Affairs Office.
In walked retired Command Sgt. Major Basil Plumley and his wife Deurice.
I didn’t introduce the girls to the Plumleys; they were on their way in and we were on our way out. But I explained who he was and reminded them that Sam Elliott played Plumley in the movie.
“He’s a real hero, not an actor,” I said. “He’s the kind of hero Hollywood makes movies about.”The girls, of their own volition, approached the sergeant major to ask for his autograph. I held my breath, because I knew Plumley hated the limelight, no matter how “little” the light.
I had nothing to worry about. The girls bounded back smiling, with Plumley’s signature scrawled across the back of my register receipt. That evening, I tucked it into the book for safe keeping, and there it stayed until last week, when I learned that Plumley died Oct. 10 at the Columbus Hospice after a short battle with cancer. He was 92.
I pulled the book off the shelf and turned to page 220 to review the brief account of an incident that happened on the second day of that bloody three-day battle between the Soldiers of the 7th Cavalry Regiment and 2,000 North Vietnamese forces:
“In the midst of this bedlam a blazing flare … streaked across the sky and plunged into the ammunition dump near the battalion command post. It lodged in a box of hand grenades, burning fiercely. Without hesitation, Sergeant Major Plumley ran to the stacks and with his bare hands reached into the grenade boxes and grabbed the flare. (He) jerked the flare free, reared back, and heaved it out into the open clearing. He then stomped out the grass fires touched off by the flares in and around the ammo crates.”
Just one paragraph out of 430 pages — a succinct account, unembellished, that encapsulates the character of a man who was larger than life long before his character hit the big screen. Oddly enough, that scene never made it into the movie. Perhaps it wasn’t believable enough to pass muster with the masses.
Plumley’s bravery in Vietnam was probably a mixture of inherent character and confidence gained on the battle field. The West Virginia native, who was born on the first day of 1920, earned the Combat Infantryman Badge in World War II, Korea and Vietnam (where he served two tours.) He was one of only 324 Soldiers to claim that honor.
He fought in more than 20 military operations during his 32-year military career, having enlisted on March 31, 1942, as a private after two years of high school. During WWII, he fought in the Allied invasion at Salerno and the D Day invasion at Normandy, and he made four combat jumps with the 320th Glider Field Artillery Battalion. He made another combat jump in Korea with the 187th Airborne Infantry Regiment. There are those who claim, but cannot prove, that he was the only man to claim five combat jumps behind enemy lines.
“It takes your breath away to think he survived all that. No one should have survived all that,” said Joe Galloway, who co-authored the book with retired Lt. Gen. Hal Moore in 1992. Moore was the lieutenant colonel who led the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment, into the Ia Drang, and Galloway was a UPI journalist assigned to the unit. (He was awarded the Bronze Star for helping rescue wounded American Soldiers under fire at Landing Zone X-Ray.)
The three became fast friends and remained close for nearly 50 years. Moore requires assistance these days, but he paid a visit to Plumley’s bedside before his death.
“I am so blessed to have had two such men as best friends, as mentors and as role models for almost half a century,” said Galloway, who has done more than any other to inspire new generations of Soldiers with the stories of old Soldiers, like Moore and Plumley.
But Plumley proved more of a challenge, even to Galloway. He never shared war stories and was known to hang up on reporters who called him.
“I don’t do interviews. That’s what he always said — I don’t do interviews,” Galloway said. “I think he came to regret that decision, but once he made it, he stuck with it, and no one could talk him off it, not me and not Hal Moore.”
I fared no better. On the one occasion I called Plumley and reminded him that we had met socially a time or two, he declined to speak to me in my role as a reporter and explained nicely that he’d been burned once by the media, badly. But when I approached him in person, after the screening of We Were Soldiers at the theater on Main Post, he offered this much.
“Too much Hollywood,” he said of the movie. “It had too much Hollywood in it. That’s all I want to say.”
But apparently, Plumley had no issues with Elliott’s portrayal. The actor “under played” the sergeant major, said Galloway, who introduced the two after Elliott had been cast as Plumley. They met at Plumley’s house and chatted over coffee and Deurice’s pie.
“I carried the bucket in that conversation. There I was with the two most monosyllabic men in the world in the same room, and I sat there between them. It was just grunts and growls for the first hour and a half, but then they got to talking,” Galloway said. “When we left there, Sam said ‘Joe, I think I’m going to try to talk like the sergeant major.’ I said ‘Well, Sam, it don’t seem like that great of a reach to me.’”
Elliot and Plumley were “two peas in a pod,” Galloway said, but “the sergeant major, in life, was bigger than Sam Elliott. Sam would tell you the same thing.”
As a Soldier, Plumley defied convention as he defied death. Known as “Old Iron Jaw” to his Soldiers, he set his face like flint and led honestly, fairly and occasionally by intimidation, if need be. Galloway said the best lines in the movie were Plumley’s own words, including his response to a Soldier who greeted the sergeant major with a “good morning.”
“Who made you the (expletive) weatherman?” Plumley growled.
Earnie Savage was a young buck sergeant, an E5, when he met Plumley in 1964. Savage didn’t frighten easily, but he tended to be overly deferential to anyone “above” him. And at 6 feet, 6 inches, Plumley towered over the young Soldier.
“It wasn’t just his reputation, the sergeant major was literally bigger than life. He was huge, and when you saw him, you knew you better get your stuff straight,” said Savage, who spent the better part of Monday standing post at Plumley’s casket at a funeral home in Columbus.
Plumley was witty without effort and never long-winded, Savage said. “He didn’t have to say a lot — he just had to show up, and people paid attention. He was a lot like his reputation; he was gruff and he could be tough, but he wasn’t mean. I never knew him to be mean.”
To say he is a legend is not an exaggeration. The refrain “God may look like Sgt. Maj. Plumley, but he isn’t nearly as tough on sins small or large,” or some version there of, is commonly used in any discussion involving the man, and it was so long before his death and long before the movie.
He was also, in the popular vernacular, a PT beast.
In the months leading up to their deployment to Vietnam, Plumley and Moore worked their men hard. Ten-mile foot marches were the norm, and Plumley regularly ran long distances with his men, leading from the front.
“You’d hear him up front yelling, ‘Awright dammit, pick it up back there,’” Savage said. “He was all about PT and conditioning, but he’d do everything he expected us to do. Without a lot of what we got from him and the colonel, I know some of us wouldn’t be here today.”
Plumley believed training, leading and disciplining Soldiers “was NCO’s job, not an officer’s job,” Savage said. “He always said, ‘If you lose a battle, it’s the NCOs’ fault.’”
His dedication paid off, when Plumley staffed the 7th Cav’s 1st Battalion with Soldiers he knew to be highly skilled, well- trained and disciplined. He knew it because he trained most of them himself.
“He said the (1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment) was the best unit he’d ever been in, the best trained,” Savage said. “And it was, because he brought men he knew, a lot of them he’d trained and served with, and that’s why we had such good leaders.”
Plumley believed in training to standard, then raising the standard, said Steve Hansen, who served with Plumley in the Ia Drang.
“Being second at anything didn’t count. He trained us to be the best,” Hansen said. “We thought he was the dragon, but looking back, I know he was the moderator. He’d step in and speak up and tell the colonel when the men had all they could take. He took care of his Soldiers, trained them hard, but looked out for them.”
Hansen said he was intrigued, some years back, when he came across a mention of “first sergeant” Plumley in a historical book about World War II.
“We all thought he was hatched a sergeant major, and here he was in black and white, a first sergeant. The passage wasn’t very clear, just mentioned (Plumley) and something about a German tank,” Hansen said. “He was a man of few words and a humble man; a lot of people don’t realize that about him. He didn’t brag, he just told you like it was. I asked him, ‘What’s the story about you and a German tank and he just grunted and said, ‘Obviously I won.’ And that was all there was to it.”
Over the past few years, Plumley’s personality changed noticeably, Galloway said. He became “almost loquacious — a chatterbox,” swapping old Army stories (but never war stories!) with old Army buddies. He attended events at the National Infantry Museum and seemed to fairly tolerate the limelight, such as it was. He thoroughly enjoyed hosting reunions that brought together dwindling numbers from that ‘original’ battalion of young studs who fought their way through hell together in the bloody Ia Drang Valley. A couple of years back, as his health declined, he relinquished his “reign” on the reunions. After Deurice died in May, Plumley said his time was short, he’d be joining her soon.
Tuesday, a crowd of more than 400 packed The Infantry Center Chapel to bid farewell to a giant. He was laid to rest with Deurice in the Main Post Cemetery.
Plumley received the Doughboy Award in 1999. His awards and decorations included Silver Star (one Oak Leaf Cluster); Legion of Merit; Bronze Star (one Oak Leaf Cluster and Valor Device); Purple Heart (three Oak Leaf Clusters); Air Medal (one silver and three bronze Oak Leaf Clusters); Army Presidential Unit Citation (two Oak Leaf Clusters); Army Commendation Medal; American Defense Service Medal; American Campaign Medal; Word War II Victory Medal; Korean Service Medal (with Arrowhead device and three campaign stars); Vietnam Service Medal (with one silver and three bronze campaign stars); Armed Forces Expeditionary Medal; Republic of Korea Presidential Unit Citation; Republic of Korea War Service Medal; United Nations Service Medal for Korea; Vietnam Gallantry Cross Unit Citation with Palm; Vietnam Campaign Medal; Combat Infantryman Badge (three awards); Master Combat Parachutist Badge (with gold star, indicating 5 combat jumps); Vietnam Army Basic Parachutist Badge; Order of St. Maurice; and Garry Owen Distinctive Unit Insignia.
Real man 2:
Samuel Whittemore
Interestingly enough for a man who is now famous throughout Massachusetts for his unbreakable determination to violently kill British people at all costs, Samuel Whittemore was born in England, and faithfully served the British Crown for nearly five decades of professional military service. Born in 1695, just 75 years after the first Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock, the stone-cold hardass who would be made a state hero of Massachusetts was first unleashed on colonial America in the 1740s while serving as a Captain in His Majesty’s Dragoons – a badass unit of elite British cavalrymen much-feared across the globe for their ability to impale people on lance-points and then pump their already-dead bodies full of gigantic pistol ammunition that more closely resembled baseballs than the sort of rounds you see packed into Beretta magazines these days. Fighting the French in Canada during the War of Austrian Succession (a conflict that was known here in the colonies as King George’s War because seriously WTF did colonial Americans care about Austrian succession), Whittemore was part of the British contingent that assaulted the frozen shores of Nova Scotia and beat the shit out of the French at their stronghold of Louisbourg in 1745. The 50 year-old cavalry officer went into battle galloping at the head of a company of rifle-toting horsemen, and emerged from the shouldering flames of a thoroughly ass-humped Louisbourg holding a bitchin’ ornate longsword he had wrenched from the lifeless hands of a French officer who had, in Whittemore’s words, “died suddenly”. The French would eventually manage to snake Louisbourg back from the Brits, so thirteen years later, during the Seven Years’ War (a conflict that was known here in the colonies as the French and Indian War because WTF we were fighting the French and the Indians, and also because it lasted nine years instead of seven), Whittemore had to return to his old stomping grounds of Louisburg and ruthlessly beat it into submission once again. Serving under the able command fellow badass British commander James Wolfe, a man who earned his reputation by commanding a line of riflemen who held their lines against a frothing-at-the-mouth horde of psychotic, sword-swinging William Wallace motherfuckers in Scotland (this is a story I intend to tell at a later date), Whittemore once again pummeled the French retarded and stole all of their shit he could get his hands on. He served valiantly during the Second Siege of Louisbourg, pounding the poor city into rubble a second time in an epic bloodbath would mark the beginning of the end for France’s Atlantic colonies – Quebec would fall shortly thereafter, and the French would be chased out of Canada forever. So you can thank Whittemore for that, if you are inclined to do so.
Beating Frenchmen down with a cavalry saber at the age of 64 is pretty cool and all, but Whittemore still wasn’t done doing awesome shit in the name of King George the Third and His Loyal Colonies. Four years after busting up the French for the second time in two decades he led troops against Chief Pontiac in the bloody Indian Wars that raged across the Great Lakes region. Never one to back down from an up-close-and-personal fistfight, it was during a particularly nasty bout of hand-to-hand combat he came into possession of another totally sweet war trophy – an awesome pair of matched dueling pistols he had taken from the body of a warrior he’d just finished bayoneting or sabering or whatever.
After serving in three American wars before America was even a country, Whittemore decided the colonies were pretty damn radical, so he settled down in Massachusetts, married two different women (though not at the same time), had eight kids, and built a house out of the carcasses of bears he’d killed and mutilated with his own two hands. Or something like that.
Now, all of this shit is pretty god damned impressive, but interestingly none of it is actually what Samuel Whittemore is best known for. No, his distinction as a national hero instead comes from a fateful day in mid-April 1775, when the British colonies in the New World decided they weren’t going to take any more of King George’s bullshit and decided to get their American Revolution on. And you can be pretty damn sure that if there were asses to be kicked, Whittemore was going to be one of the men doing the kicking.
So one day a bunch of colonial malcontents got together, formed a battle line, and opened fire on a bunch of redcoats that were pissing them off with their silly Stamp Acts and whatnot. The Brits managed to beat back this militia force at the Battles of Lexington and Concord, but when they heard that a larger force of angry, rifle-toting colonials was headed their way, the English officers decided to march back to their headquarters and regroup. Along the way, they were hassled relentlessly by American militiamen with rifles and angry insults, though no group harassed them more ferociously than Captain Sam Whittemore. When the Redcoats went marching back through his hometown of Menotomy, this guy decided that he wasn’t going to let his advanced age stop him from doing some crazy shit and taking on an entire British army himself. The 80 year old Whittemore grabbed his rifle and ran outside:
Whittemore, by himself, with no backup, positioned himself behind a stone wall, waited in ambush, and then single-handedly engaged the entire British 47th Regiment of Foot with nothing more than his musket and the pure liquid anger coursing through his veins. His ambush had been successful – by this time this guy popped up liken top of him. He fired off his musket at point-blank range, busting the nearest guy so hard it nearly blew his red coat into the next dimension.
Now, when you’re using a firearm that takes 20 seconds to reload, it’s kind of hard to go all Leonard Funk on a platoon of enemy infantry, but damn it if Whittemore wasn’t going to try. With a company of Brits bearing down in him, he quick-drew his twin flintlock pistols and popped a couple of locks on them (caps hadn’t been invented yet, though I think the analogy still works pretty fucking well), busting another two Limeys a matching set of new assholes. Then he unsheathed the ornate French sword, and this 80-year-old madman stood his ground in hand-to-hand against a couple dozen trained soldiers, each of which was probably a quarter of his age.
As you can see from the picture, it didn’t work out so well. Whittemore was shot through the face by a 69-caliber bullet, knocked down, and bayonetted 13 times by motherfuckers. I’d like to imagine he wounded a couple more Englishmen who slipped or choked on his blood, though history only seems to credit him with three kills on three shots fired. The Brits, convinced that this man was sufficiently beat to shit, left him for dead kept on their death march back to base, harassed the entire way by Whittemore’s fellow militiamen.
Amazingly, however, Samuel Whittemore didn’t die. When his friends rushed out from their homes to check on his body, they found the half-dead, ultra-bloody octogenarian still trying to reload his weapon and seek vengeance. The dude actually survived the entire war, finally dying in 1793 at the age of 98 from extreme old age and awesomeness. A 2005 act of the Massachusetts legislature declared him an official state hero, and today he has one of the most badass historical markers of all time:
Links:
a decrepitly old rifle-toting jack-in-the-box, the British troops were pretty much o
Revolutionary War Archives
America’s Oldest, Bravest Soldier
MA Bill No. 1839
Wikipedia
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and here’s the instruction manual
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Don`t need a bunch of Hollywood Faggots to tell me what a real man is. I suggest they get the Kenyan to bom every mosque in Nigeria on every Friday until the Mohammedan excrement stops their intolerant behavior.
BOMB!
Overthecliff, you just made my head hurt.
Why?
We are fucking broke and waging war all over the globe, plus on our own citizens. What we need to do is nothing.
If the rich Hollywood “men” want to “do something!” then maybe they should pool their considerable resources and help out the local government there.
Real men fix their own fences before demanding the government force a faraway man to fix his.
Nathan Bedford Forest…that was a real man ( As was Stonewall Jackson ) .
Mooing Past the Slaughterhouse
by RedStaterNYC | 5-14-14
Feminism has turned us all into cattle. And what has it gotten us? We are ruled over by perpetual adolescents while our “moral and intellectual superiors” gleefully orchestrate our eradication. And the vast majority of so-called “men” remain blissfully unawares, which is perhaps moot as they aren’t even of a mentality suitable to resisting their and their loved ones’ demise as it is.
Gone is rule by reason; in is rule by emotion and emotion alone. Gone is sanity; in is pure insanity–the more deplorable and unhinged the better!
Forgive my egregiously scant knowledge of anthropology, but it’s my understanding that matriarchal societies were the exception to the patriarchal rule. Assuming this is the case, what has our defiance of nature cost us?
In days of yore, we (men) didn’t try to “empathize with” or “understand” a woman who was being batshit crazy. (And let’s be honest: at minimum once a month, all women are batshit crazy!) No; what happened was men simply told them to go fly a kite. And if they refused to comply? Well, then, there’s the effing door.
Now? Now we hand them over our balls and ask them what else they need.
In days of yore, men did everything in their power–including self-sacrifice–to keep their women out of harm’s way.
Now? Now we send our women directly into harm’s way.
Back then, the child was sacrosanct.
Now? We kill them with all the care of having a wart removed.
Yes, men start wars and enact genocide. But then, what have we gotten out of rule by women if not wars with useless savages and, to top it off, auto-genocide?
Savages respect the rule of might, nothing more. And the man is mightier than the woman. With women–of both male and female varieties!–in charge, we’ve done nothing but embolden the savages.
And auto-genocide? “Never again” means “never again…for Jews.” For gentiles of European descent, our purge from the Earth can’t come soon enough. And we compliantly accept our removal from the cornucopia of human biodiversity. Why?
Because we “care”,” we “understand,” we “empathize.” …With those who engineer our termination.
Such is the insanity of rule by feminine virtue. Feminine virtue is great for raising kids. But it is suicide in the realm of cultural hegemony.
Read more at http://angrywhitedude.com/2014/05/mooing-past-slaughterhouse/#rPZVwRJ3jicZPyJ5.99
AWD says:
“Feminism has turned us all into cattle. And what has it gotten us?”
El Sensei (Doggi) on the Erazno and Chocolata show, said 2 million men are now househusbands supported by working women. While there is nothing wrong with that, his argument is that some find it easy to turn over their nutsack to the woman who Doggi considers the weaker and less rational member of the two. Of course his talk is exagerated but he has been waging war on ‘mandilones’ or apron wearing househusbands and willing cuckolds for a long time.
What happened to Lee Marvin, Charles Bronson? How did we get to these pretty boys with vaginas? (Zack Efron). At least we still have Al Pacino.