Introduction
to words of one syllable, or I don’t get it.
It goes against the grain to accept statements that we hate to believe, facts that jostle us out of pet notions which are the pride and heritage of every school boy. Patriotic speakers are constantly declaiming “Paul Revere,” “Ring Out for Liberty,” and “Barbara Frietchie,” but never disturb the fakes and the fabrications.
I was a grown man, thirty years old, struggling to hoe off my beard with a safety razor, before it dawned upon me that the military history of my country had not been one long unbroken series of Star Spangled victories. Like all other school boys I had been fed up on 4th of July orations. I believed in fairies, in Jack the Giant Killer, in the Boys of ’76. I almost believed that a lone and gray-haired farmer with a fife, and a bloody rag around his head, flanked by two small drummer boys, had chased the British army from off our sacred continent. I half-way believed that. Did you?
The truth is that Uncle Sam has abandoned
[xi]
