Page 84 - The Voice of Authority

You are not all going to die. Only two percent of you
right here today would die in a major battle. Death
must not be feared. Death, in time, comes to all men.
Yes, every man is scared in his battle. If he says he’s
not, he’s a liar. Some men are cowards but they fight
the same as the brave men, or they get the hell
slammed out of them watching men fight who are just
as scared as they are. The real hero is the man who
fights even though he’s scared. . . .
All through your Army careers, you men have
b—ched about what you call “chicken sh—drilling.”
That, like everything else in this Army, has a definite
purpose. That purpose is alertness. Alertness must be
bred into every soldier. . . . There are four hundred
neatly marked graves somewhere in Sicily all because
one man went to sleep on the job.

In short, he knew his audience. He knew the emotional
strings he had to pull to get them psyched to go into bat-
tle. Although I’m definitely not sanctioning his “eloquent
profanity” as he referred to it, he did understand adapting
his message to the audience and purpose.
Some people primarily take in information visually.
Others pay attention to what they hear and rarely notice
what they see. Still others learn and draw conclusions
kinesthetically—primarily through what they experience
through their own senses.
As individuals, people also vary along the continuum
between the two extremes of directness—either very di-
rect, bordering on blunt, or indirect, expecting others to
read their minds. Their words will fall somewhere between
a hint and a hammer.
In addition to individual styles, consider cultural

72 The Voice of Authority