Just a Man

"Just a Man."

This weekend made me remember something, and reflect on it. It is in the desert around Las Vegas, lingering beyond the last of the lights. It was in the call for armed revolution from fools who never could manage their claim. It is in what we spoke of below, where the Milbloggers alone play taps among a conference filled with businessmen.

"It was an age akin to the Homeric or the Elizabethan, and a man bred to either age would have been at home in the West, and would have talked the language of the men about him.

"Achilles and Jim Bowie had much in common; Sir Francis Drake and John Coulter or Kit Carson would have understood the other.

"They were men of violence all, strong men of strong emotions, men who lived with strength and skill. Ulysses could have marched beside Jedediah Smith, Crockett could have stormed the walls of Troy."

-Louis L'Amour, How the West Was Won, 1962.

Sometimes it seems like there are not a lot of us left. A statistic often repeated at the conference: fewer than one percent of Americans choose to serve in uniform. It's not the only way, of course, but among the rest, how many? And how many just like what White People like, forgetting to be men?