Quitters Never Win and Winners Never Quit

“Courage isn’t having the strength to go on – it is going on when you don’t have strength.” ~ Napoleon Bonaparte

1^st an admin note. I contracted with Amazon books to make it easier for people to buy the books I reference in my blog. It makes it easier for SabersEdge Troopers and readers since it’s just right there on the page. However, no one has used it. I have been notified by Amazon that if they don’t get three purchases through my site in the next ninety days they will remove SabersEdge from their affiliate program. If no one buys books fine. But if you do you would help me and my family if you use our link. We get a SMALL percentage from the sale but, honestly, it’s for your convenience. If it’s not helpful we can let it go. I was thinking of getting thrift books affiliate status because I like them better than Amazon in many ways but there is no point if no one is going to use the service. However, at present SabersEdge is hemorrhaging money from our bank account just to maintain things as they are. My desire to expand the site is stymied because we don’t have the money so we are limited with our current format – which means it is getting harder and harder to find previously referenced material. I know from talking to many of you that my family is not the only one living well below the poverty level. My family gives up extras so I can maintain this site and cover the expenses for SabersEdge. I have always believed that the workman is worthy of his hire and that if I provide a service the money to support that service will come. But I also know that most businesses fail because they are not ready to operate at a loss for three years before making a profit. (I know because this is not my first business – and I registered SabersEdge as a business so you could have confidence in our brand.) We have only been active for a few months and I am amazed at our growth. Looking at the stats we are blowing the averages out of the water and that is all because of YOU. Thank you, It is an encouragement to keep going! I would like to see more comments. Currently, I require you to log on with your email to comment to reduce spam and trolls. But you also need to know that SabersEdge will NEVER sell or give your information to anyone. And if it ever comes that government demands our membership records, I will do everything I legally can to protect you, including destroying all troopers’ records. I don’t want to change this because I think we need to network and support each other and I want to start a newsletter for Freedom Troopers of the SabersEdge Association and any other readers that want to be in the know. This is not complaining, it is keeping you informed as we are in this partnership together. My webmaster (who I met in 3/8 Cav – he was one of the handfuls of gamers in my unit so we naturally found each other,) said, have you told people the situation? And I thought, no I haven’t. Whole wars have been lost due to lack of communication so my housekeeping notes should be taken in that vein. I want our troopers to be in the know.

Well, lets get on with what I have for you today. I will end with the standard housekeeping notes.

“I base my calculation on the expectation that luck will be against me.” ~ Napoleon Bonaparte

Dad was born in 1919. His dad died when he was little and his mother, unable to feed all of her kids farmed out the younger kids (my dad included,) to other farms for room and board (room and board means your pay for work is food and a place to stay. If you have ever heard someone say “we farmed out the work” now you know what that saying means.) As a child, my Dad lived in the barn and slept in a pile of straw (“warmest most comfortable way to sleep ever,” he would tell me,) and his constant companions were his dog and his horse. His horse was named Saber but that was also my Dad’s nickname. I didn’t know that until his funeral. I knew when he was young (into his 40s) he wore riding boots and jodhpurs and smoked a pipe, I was little and don’t actively remember that but when I grew up, joined the Cav, wore riding boots, and started smoking a pipe my mom mentioned it (I wonder if that was imprinted into my earliest memories and reinforced by all the Westerns my Dad and I watched where the cavalry rode to the rescue with sabers flashing, pistols blasting, bugles calling, and banners waving. My Dad loved horses and dogs, well pretty much all animals. He used to say animals are more honest than people. They let you know if they don’t like you instead of talking behind your back. Oh, and his mother became so ill my Dad had to carry her into the bathroom so she could do what was necessary.

Dad knew adversity but he never once complained. I learned most of this from others but he never mentioned it.

At his funeral, his brother told the story, “Everyone called Ray Saber. It fit his love of horses and the cavalry but it was the horses’ name. Ray became Saber because they were always together. Someone saw Ray riding into town on Saber and said, “Hey look! There’s Saber!” And people must have thought they were talking about my brother. After that Ray was called Saber too. But he named the horse Saber.” That made me think of Indiana Jones, “We named the dog Indiana.” I use that name here in honor of my father. He went through more adversity before he became an adult than most people ever will.

My Dad always told me I owe it to myself to do my best. If I start cutting corners then the only person it will hurt in the long run is me. “You never know who is watching you do your job or what opportunities may come from always doing your best.” He would say, “When I started at this company I was digging ditches for 10 cents an hour.” (When he said this he had been with the same company my whole life. He managed the company’s railroad – The Omaha, Lincoln, and Beatrice – managed all of the company’s buildings and real estate, supervised the fleet of trucks and other vehicles, and supervised the farms and animals owned by the owner. He would also check the owner’s property whenever he was gone. “I never would have gotten to this point if I had said to myself: ‘I’m only getting 10 cents an hour so I’m only doing 10 cents worth of work.’ ”

I’ve said it before but it bears repeating. My Dad was a man of few words. He didn’t make speeches. The quotes I have are often different quotes from different times about the same subject strung together because it fits this format. My Dad usually said one thing and let that sink in. If I didn’t get it he would repeat it at another time until I did.

If you start skimping on your work it will become a habit and, in the end, it is you who will be cheated because you will never reach the positions you would have had you done your best. From a religious standpoint he told me the Bible says to do every task as if you were doing it directly for Jesus because, indeed, he is watching. The way you do your work, the effort you put in and whether you give your best is not so much a matter of importance to your boss (he can just fire you and get someone else,) but it is important to you and it is important to God that you reach and fulfill the potential that he placed within you. To strive to “Be All That You Can Be” is our duty to our ancestors and ourselves. To cut corners is an affront to your creator and everyone who sacrificed to get you to where you are today. My Dad started at ten cents an hour and worked hard all his life so I would have the opportunities I have today. To do less than my best would be an insult to his efforts and my creator. It’s like saying, yeah, you gave me all this potential but I didn’t need it so I’m not using it. I prefer to be a useless lump.

Now, I need to address something about our toxic society.

It is producing youth who are demoralized and cannot do their best because no one ever demanded that they do their best. They never learned to push through because they were coddled. The same kids you saw screaming in the store 20 years ago are older now (I won’t say they are grown up because they are not,) but they are older. Helicopter parents protected them from adversity and so they never learned how to push through adversity and go “above and beyond.” This is the greatest dis-service we older generations, our educational system, child “protective” services, and parents have done to our kids. Now, we need to stop child abuse. But like nearly everything else in this society the government now interferes in so much that we can no longer live. This is not freedom but like the frog in a pot who will sit and let himself be boiled to death (as long as the heat is raised slowly,) our freedoms have been lost one degree at a time.

As a Drill Sergeant part of my job was to get people to realize they could do more than they ever dreamed of. That’s why they changed “obstacle course” to “confidence course.” Its for pushing people farther than they thought they could go. As a DI I know that everyone I had in my platoons needed to be pushed to exceed what they thought they could do. My Drill Sergeant pushed me way beyond what I thought were my limits and once I realized how psychological our limits are – we literally cheat ourselves out of our best by not pushing through things. Naturally, this is not easy on kids but life is not easy and they need to be prepared for it because, someday, they will have to stand alone. I remember my two older son’s watching me shave and brush my teeth when they were little and Nicholas looked up and said, “Dad, sometimes we wish you had never been a Drill Sergeant.” No doubt. But I could stand on my front porch and call for my son and he could hear me over a block away.

Drill Sergeant school itself pushed us beyond what we thought we could do. When my friend and I went to Drill Sergeant School at Ft. Leonard Wood Missouri they were proud of their 50% drop out rate. They viewed that as ensuring that only the best became drill sergeants and they believed that their washout rate ensured their DI’s were among the best in the army. Other schools had a 10%, 15%, and 25% drop out rate but I got to go to the one that washed out half of its class each cycle…joy…on the other hand I learned a lot. On our first run we had two platoons (one platoon by graduation was all that was left,) we ran 5 miles on our first run. The other sergeants were whining all over the place. The army standard is 2 miles why do we have to run 5? Answer: you need to be twice as good as you expect your trainees to be. We were expected to be twice as good as the kids we trained so when we demanded the best we ourselves could give our best.

So they ran us into the ground. The cavalry also wanted to ensure they had the best. 3/8 Cav in Europe ran 5 km to the Rhine River and back every morning to maintain combat readiness. But a lot of these sergeants had been in training brigades. So, we ran over twice what most of the sergeants were used to running and we were dragging as we came around the corner in sight of the Drill Sergeant Academy after running just over 5 miles. We ran up to the driveway where we fell into formation and ran right by the assembly area and started running a second round. Almost half the company fell out ten feet past the driveway where they thought we were going to end. Mark and I didn’t fall out. Being Cav it had been drilled into us you never fall out of formation so we ran on. We looked at each other like “Oh shit not again.” But we kept running. We ran to the main parking lot, made a huge loop and ran right back to the academy. Literally, we just ran 50 yards past what people had expected. Everyone who fell out got 25 demerits. 25 demerits on the first day! And if you accumulated 75 demerits over the six week course of training you were expelled. This drilled into me visually everything my father had tried to say about pushing through and going above and beyond. Our worst enemy, too often, is our own lack of determination. As Napoleon said, “The reason most people fail instead of succeed is they trade what they want most for what they want at the moment.”

You can do more than you think you can and too often we give up, not because we have reached our true limit but because we underestimate ourselves and are not prepared to face the unexpected. Then when our goal turns out to be 50 yards farther than we thought, too many people give up. We cheat ourselves by our own low expectations when we are the children of the living God and we can do so much more than we think we can. It was Napoleon who said, “…the morale is to the physical as ten to one.” But in our materialistic society today we act as if numbers are everything and only the material matters. We have been sold lie after lie and our youth have internalized these lies.

Will is everything.

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“Once you have made up your mind, stick to it; there is no longer any ‘if’ or ‘but’.” ~ Napoleon Bonaparte