Famous Military Quotations "Put your trust in God, but keep your powder dry."      - Oliver Cromwell “Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.”      - General Douglas        MacArthur “It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.”      - General Douglas        MacArthur "A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon"      - Napoleon        Bonaparte In war there is but one favorable moment; the great art is to seize it!"      - Napoleon        Bonaparte Death is nothing, but to live defeated and inglorious is to die daily.”      - Napoleon        Bonaparte "The Nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools."       -Thucydides We must remember that one man is much the same as another, and that he is best who is trained in the severest school."      - Thucydides "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing"      - Edmund Burke "Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum". ("If you want peace, prepare for war")      - Flavius Vegetius        Renatus "I have not yet begun to fight."      - Captain John        Paul Jones "War is the mother of everything."      - Heraclitus Wars may be fought with weapons, but they are won by men.       - General George          Patton Jr. "Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it."      - General Dwight        D. Eisenhower "A leader is a man who had the ability to get other people to do what they don't want to do, and like it."      - Harry Truman “You may not be interested in war.  But, war is interested in you.      - Attributed to Leon        Trotsky “Ultima ratio regum.” (The final argument of kings)

Anton Olmstead Myrer (1922 – 1996)

Editor’s Note:  In researching the life and work of Anton Myrer, I found surprisingly little information available.   I have compiled the following biographical sketch with the hope of expanding it over time.  I ask site visitors for their assistance.  I want to thank my brother-in-law Dr. William A. Strycharz, a Harvard University alumnus, with access to that institution’s Widener Library and other information services; his contributions to my knowledge of Anton Myrer have been invaluable.  Please see the complete list of biographical resources that follows the sketch. 

Anton Myrer, author of Once An Eagle and seven other novels, was born on November 3, 1922, to Raymond Lewis and Angele E. Myrer, in Worcester, Massachusetts.  He spent his youth on Beacon Hill in Boston, in the Berkshires (a low mountain range in Western Massachusetts), and on Cape Cod. 

Mr. Myrer graduated from Boston Latin High School and prepared at Phillips Exeter Academy before enrolling at Harvard College in the fall of 1941.  His intended vocation was teaching and his field of concentration was history and literature.  His extracurricular activities included cross- country track, swimming, and numerals.

Mr. Myrer’s college studies were interrupted, however, following the bombing of Pearl Harbor.  Shortly after the attack, he, like many of his college peers, sought to enroll in the Army Enlisted Reserve Corps.  Rejected by the ERC, he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps.  Private Anton O. Myrer (service number 532715) was a member of Platoon 215, 6^th Recruit Battalion.  Shipped overseas, he served with the First Provisional Brigade and participated in the invasion and occupation of Guam and the Mariannas.  He was wounded at Guam and rose to the rank of corporal before being discharged in 1946.

On his WWII service, Mr. Myrer commented:  “World War II was the one event which had the greatest impact on my life.  I enlisted imbued with a rather flamboyant concept of this country’s destiny as the leader of a free world and the necessity of the use of force.  I emerged a corporal three years later in a state of great turmoil, at the core of which was an angry awareness of war as the most vicious and fraudulent self-deception man had ever devised.”

The war had additional impact for Mr. Myrer.  In 1982, he told The Boston Globe: “I had always wanted to be a historian, but I began to ease into writing at Harvard.  Then after a bad day in the war, I decided I definitely wanted to be a writer.”

At war’s end, Mr. Myrer returned to Harvard and graduated magna cum laude with an A.B. in 1947.  Proud of his service, he often wore his khaki and olive drab trousers, service shirts, and service coat around campus and to class.  Shortly after graduation, in August of 1947, he married artist Judith Rothschild and they moved to California.  They spent the better part of a decade in Carmel Highlands, Big Sur, and Monterey. 

While he was in California, Random House published Mr. Myrer’s first novel Evil Under the Sun in 1951.  The book was met with mixed reviews, and its lack of financial success caused Mr. Myrer to work his way through a number of low-paying, blue-collar jobs in book shops, canneries, ranger stations, and nurseries.  In 1957, however, the war veteran turned to a topic he knew very well – war.  The Big War, published by Appleton-Century-Crofts, brought fame and, it appears, at least some fortune.  Reviews were quite good and led to a motion picture titled In Love and War, starring Robert Wagner and Bradford Dillman.  With his new-found affluence, Mr. Myrer and his wife spent most of 1959 on a working vacation, traveling to Paris, London, Antibes, and Florence.  On their return, they settled in New York City.

Tiring of the pace of city life fairly quickly, the Myrers divided their time between a country home in Saugerties, New York, and a Cape Codder on Bound Brook Island, near Wellfleet, Massachusetts.  They also traveled fairly extensively.  It was in 1962 and 1965, respectively, that the author’s third and fourth books, The Violent Shore and The Intruder, were published by Little, Brown.  What is clearly the crown jewel of Myrer’s body of work, Once An Eagle, was published in 1968 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, at the height of the Vietnam War.

In 1969, he left his wife and they divorced in April of 1970.  That same year, he married Patricia Schartle, a New York literary agent.  He authored three more novels: The Tiger Waits in 1973 (Norton); The Last Convertible in 1978 (Putnam); and A Green Desire in 1981 (Putnam).

Mr. Myrer died on January 19, 1996, of leukemia, at the age of 73.  He is survived by his widow Patricia.  Judith Rothschild died in 1993.  In 1997, Mrs. Myrer generously donated $25,000 to The New York Society Library in gratitude for the help it provided her husband in his writing.

Other Notable Quotes from Anton Myrer

On his 1957 novel The Big War (this quote foreshadows the coming of Once An Eagle and Sam Damon):

“… the novel is a portrait of a hero.  I realize this is a dangerous word to use - and in a time like ours such a portrait may seem not only suspect but sentimental.  Nevertheless I think it is heroic to stand for the gentle, compassionate side of man, in a situation fraught with brutality and indifference.  Such men do exist, and they are our hope.”

On his failure to achieve his life-long literary goal:

“I have been banned in Boston, feted in Philadelphia, celebrated in San Francisco and clobbered in Cleveland … and yet in all somber truth it must be confessed I am not a stride nearer that towering goal I set for myself 25 years ago:  to fashion a novel that would excite the conscience of my generation.”

On his early influences and the value of dissent:

“A native of the Berkshires and Cape Cod, I was influenced deeply by the lives and work of Hawthorne, Melville and Thoreau - that tradition of proud dissent in the face of an encroaching institutional power and indifference which has all but engulfed us as Americans; what concerns me most vitally is a stubborn assertion of individual dignity, the small but essential personal victories which can still be salvaged in a world largely dominated by waste, irresponsibility and violence.”

On his sense of waste and its impact on him as a writer:

“… waste of talent, of time, of noble hopes and intensions, of life itself in this most violent and wasteful of societies.  My work, consequently, bears the pressure of this waste - and the salvages that those rare and indomitable spirits among us are able to achieve in the face of it.”

On America before World War II:

“Perhaps nothing reflected our naivete more than our love of the convertible, the ultimate American car - sex symbol, power symbol, status-and-style symbol.  How unprepared we were for the world of the Jeep and the weapons carrier.” 

On America after World War II:

“Obsessed by time lost we rushed home into marriage and careers, still believing in the careless freedom of the open road only to discover that in our haste to belong we had built a superhighway that led nowhere.”

On America’s war-like tendencies:

“Shifting American values and the legacies of power, whether civilian or military, have provided the dominant themes of my fiction for the past several years - and of late a deepening sense of alarm over this military-industrial juggernaut we have spawned which can ignore grinding domestic agonies and blandly drop the explosive equivalent of 420 Hiroshimas on a small Southeast Asian nation.”

Biographical Resources

1944 Red Book, The: A Record of the Freshman Year at Harvard College, p. 129.

Biography: Judith Rothschild (1921 – 1993), www.realart.com. (21 Feb. 1996).

Contemporary Authors, New Revision Series, Vol. 3, pg. 390.

Evil Under the Sun, Anton Myrer, Appleton, 1951, dust jacket.

Harvard College: Class of 1944, Triennial Report, Cambridge, 1947, pps. 270-271.

Harvard College: Class of 1944, 15^th Anniversary Report, Cambridge, 1959, pps. 168-169.

Harvard College: Class of 1944, 20^th Anniversary Report, Cambridge, 1964, pps. 141-142.

Harvard College: Class of 1944, 25^th Anniversary Report, Cambridge, 1969, pps. 947-948.

Harvard University Archives: return envelope, postmarked Beaufort, S.C., May 2, 1943.

Harvard University Archives: Harvard War Records Office registration cards dated July 18, 1944 and March 8, 1945.

Intruder, The, Anton Myrer, Little Brown, 1965, dust jacket.

Nostalgia’s hold on Anton Myrer by Bill Fripp. The Boston Globe, March 24, 1982, p. 65.

Notes:  Vol. 4, No. 3: June 1997. New York Society Library.

 Obituary: Anton Myrer, writer whose novels were adapted for television; at 73 by Tom Long. The Boston Globe, January 23, 1996, p. 13.

Our Harvard: Reflections on College Life by Twenty-two Distinguished Graduates, edited by Jeffrey L. Lant, Taplinger Publishing Co., Inc. 1982, pps. 157-173.

Who’s who In America. Marquis. 1995. 49^th Edition Volume 2, L – Z, p. 2674.

The Eight Novels of Anton Myrer (book jacket summaries)

A Cape Cod town in the summer of 1947 is crowded with a strange and perilous mixture of personalities - art students, wealthy vacationers, bohemians, intellectuals, poverty-ridden fishermen and embittered “Old Yankee” townspeople.  As the summer progresses, the hostilities among these widely different factions erupt in sudden acts of violence and brutality. 

All of the main characters are somehow involved:  Alan Marsden, the seductive and endlessly malevolent editor of Mephisto; the irrepressible talker and painter Mike Doyle; the Portuguese fisherman, Manuel da Rosa, who is dominated by inner compulsion to violence; the promiscuous Michele Klepic, as beautiful and as hard as a bronze goddess; Barbara Merrill, who is warm, innocent and vulnerable.  Though somewhat apart from all these at first, Paul Kittering is gradually drawn into their struggles; and the main focus of the story is on his efforts (often quixotic) to find some resolution of the conflicting points of view that bring about the summer’s fury.

The Commentary

The richness and complexity of his first book should establish Anton Myrer at once as one of the important literary talents of his generation.  It is a mature treatment of a great theme - man’s timeless and incessant confrontation with evil, and the terrifying repercussions of the decision he must make to accept or reject it.

*****

This is a novel about Marines in the South Pacific.  They are plain, ordinary, and sometimes heroic men - inspiring in action, disgusting in degradation, but always drawn to life.  This is their story, their troubled odyssey - from camp, on furlough at home, to the merciless hell of combat on a faraway Pacific island.

There is Danny - Guadalcanal veteran.  He has known from the beginning what war was about - that the big war is not against the Japanese but against the brutalization of spirit which war engenders.  He was born in a mill town on the Housatonic, but Danny is straight from Olympus.  The men know it.  He is their talisman and they will follow him anywhere … Behind him, back in the States, Danny left Andrea - to keep a promise.

There is Jay - lusty, irrepressible, Irish.  To him every babe is a “knock-out drop,” a warm armful on an empty night.  Yet it is Jay, shaking with dengue fever and critically wounded, who decides to fight the Japs who are raping a native child … Behind him, back in the States, Jay left Lorraine - along with a hundred other broads - to wait for him.

There is Al - the blueblood from Beacon hill who can’t seem to feel things as deeply as other people do - until he climbs the hill to the stockade … Behind him, back in the States, Al left a girl named Helen - the girl who taught him that love was possible. 

The Commentary

In The Big War both the battlefront and the home front come alive.  You share Danny’s idyllic honeymoon with Andrea, and Jay’s deliciously funny search for a girl - any girl.  You hit the beach of the tiny, murderous South Pacific island which will be the grave of some of them.  You feel the fire of the flamethrowers; the weariness; the pain; the comradeship of men at war.  As you turn these pages you live the war.

In this, Anton Myrer’s second published novel, we are given the big war - as we knew it; told without sentimentality and without bitterness - a war novel that is not afraid to deal with the tender side of Marines who have not forgotten they are men.

*****

This is the story of Sally Marcherson – brilliant, mercurial, haunted by an incapacity to feel, whose feverish pursuit of sensation led her to ignore the consequences of her actions – and of the men who were captivated by her vivid beauty.  For Byron Cantwell, a foreign correspondent returned to New York from war-tormented Europe, the problem of loving Sally became more indelible, more tragically his own than a world at war.  What began as an entrancing love affair quickly developed into a violent cycle of desire and tyranny, until the moment which forced Cantwell to battle for his very identity.  The Air Force pilot and ex-All American Pete Herland also found himself charmed by Sally’s heedless extravagance – and as fully enmeshed.  For Herland, too, living with  Sally led to a terrible knowledge of himself – and of a force more destructive than any he had ever encountered.  In their anguished efforts to fathom the conflicts in Sally’s nature both men were forced, at their peril, to see evil – heightened to a new dimension; but it was Cantwell, repelled by the fraudulence of the Italian campaign, who was confronted with the ultimate choice ...

The Commentary

The Violent Shore is more than an absorbing tale of one woman and her struggle to break out of the circle of her self;  it is a work of profound insight and its drama, whether tragic or wryly comic, is informed with compassion and the desperate importance of individual dignity.  Anton Myrer has given us a searching appraisal of our values at midcentury:  a portrait of Americans, the reflective and the irresponsible alike, forced to come to grips with the rest of the world.  The Violent Shore is a novel of highest order on a major theme – one which lays bare, with an incisive eloquence, the divided heart of contemporary America.

*****

The Intruder (1965)

The Story and the Characters

For Gardner Lawring, prominent architect and head of one of Boston’s most venerable families, life was a well-charted avenue toward power and distinction; for his impulsive wife Janet, daughter of a French-Irish plasterer, it was a series of adventures imbued with generosity and affection.  And then one sultry June evening Janet Lawring, alone in the suburban home her husband had designed, was assaulted by an unknown intruder; and the warm, certain fabric of their lives was rudely stripped away.  The succeeding weeks, with their atmosphere of increasing fear, build to a swift, violent resolution when Gardner Lawring, believing he has discovered the identity of his wife’s assailant, is impelled by his passion for justice toward a personal confrontation for which nothing in his Brahmin background has prepared him, and which threatens to destroy his marriage and his life.

The Commentary

The Intruder is a novel whose every sinew seems natural and inevitable; whose spare lines reveal the urgent conflicts of our time.  In this story of Bostonians caught in a tragic clash between their romantic concepts of the world and its harsh actualities, Anton Myrer has defined the atmosphere of violence that surrounds our lives in America today – and the emergence of a new, desperate code which defiantly refuses to recognize the older, established values of our society.  A novel of dramatic action infused with sharp moral significance, The Intruder lays bare, with arresting clarity and compassion, today’s shifting pattern of social consciousness.

*****

Once an Eagle (1968)

Once an Eagle compellingly recounts the making of one special soldier, Sam Damon, and his adversary over a lifetime, fellow officer Courtney Massengale.  Damon is a soldier’s soldier, the consummate professional, decorated in both World Wars for bravery under fire, who puts duty, honor, and the men he commands above self-interest.  Massengale, the consummate political animal who disdains the average grunt, brilliantly advances by making the right connections behind the lines and in Washington’s corridors of power.

Begun amid the carnage of Argonne, the conflict between Damon and Massengale solidifies in the isolated garrison life between the wars, intensifies in the verdant and deadly Pacific jungles of World War II, and reaches its treacherous conclusion in the last major battleground of the Cold War – Vietnam.

The Commentary

A sweeping chronicle of American warfare in the twentieth century, this gripping story portrays as well the often overlooked and cruel difficulties of life in peacetime.  Once An Eagle is more than a novel of battle; it is a study in character and the values we continue to cherish:  courage, nobility, honesty, and selflessness.  Powerful and unforgettable, it is ultimately the epic story of a man who serves as an inspiration not just for soldiers, but for us all.

First published in 1968 at the height of the conflict in Vietnam, Once An Eagle captured the imagination and heart of a war-torn nation, reaching number one on the New York Times bestseller list twice and selling more than three million copies.  Published in nineteen languages, Anton Myrer’s novel was made into an acclaimed television miniseries.

Thirty years (now thirty-eight years) after its initial publication, Once An Eagle has become a touchstone for the military professionals who devise and carry out our nation’s defense.  According to the New York Times, “Once An Eagle has worked its way over a generation into the mindset and lexicon of the American military.”  Named to the Marine Commandant’s Reading List, it is required reading for all Marines, is assigned to West Point cadets, and is featured in the United States Army War College’s annual leadership seminar.  Soldiers emblazon the protagonist’s name – Sam Damon – across their tanks, and military officers at every level make decisions by asking themselves, “What would Sam do?” 

*****

The Tiger Waits (1973)

Paul Blackburn had sought the Brahmin world of privilege and wealth.  He had married into that proud East Coast tradition of elegant Cambridge mansions, of sailing regattas and family compounds on Martha’s Vineyard.  In the new Washington of the late ‘70s, liberated Watergate hostesses welcomed this exciting Secretary of State who had brought dash and honor back to the Department.  But Secretary Blackburn (to the consternation of the CIA) had fallen desperately in love, for the first time in his life.  Her name is Jillian Hoyt.  She is nearly half his age, a leader of the militant protest group Sirius - and the lover of his own son, Land.  Rare as a summer idyl, Jillie hangs like a pendant between their alien generations.

It is unthinkable for Blackburn, at the pinnacle of his career, to risk everything - the trust of the President, the fragile peace he has forged with the new China, his responsibility to a defiant son and wife.  But Jillie has restored something he has lost in the arid, hard-driving years:  the green rush of life, the heart’s eye.

Threatened by scandal, haunted by intimations of betrayal within the Administration, Blackburn fears that the Drachenfels Flood Mission on the China border will erupt into the ultimate international incident.  He alone stands in the way of men like Presidential Adviser Vosz, whose reckless scenarios of power would provoke deadly consequences.  At last only he can refute the terrible charges of Peking before the great powers collide…

The Commentary

Now, in an unforgettable love story set against the shifting tides of power, Anton Myrer has written his finest novel.

The Tiger Waits is a novel in the grand manner that explodes the very essence of trust and betrayal in our time.  Anton Myrer has created an eloquent portrait of the man of sensibility wrestling with the arrogance of power and the humility of love.

*****

The Last Convertible (1978)

The “last convertible” is a magnificent Packard Super 8, owned successively by five Harvard classmates of divergent backgrounds.  This unlikely fraternity of five calls itself the Fusiliers - as wild, as carefree a bunch as ever danced the Lindy or shag.  They name the convertible the Empress, and the great car will become their standard - the setting for their love affairs, rivalries, disasters; shared by the women they win and lose, the rebellious children they bring up; their quarrels and reconciliations, loyalties and betrayals.  The Empress is all convertibles ever raced by young men in pursuit of their dreams - into a seemingly boundless future ...

This is the story of Jean des Barres, first of the Fusiliers, aristocratic, worldly, escaped from France one step ahead of the Germans; of Russ Currier, blue-blooded Brahmin, romantic, mercurial, irresistible to women; of beautiful Chris Farris, the girl who is loved by two Fusiliers and is herself in love with a third; of Terry Gilligan, the sardonic lace-curtain Irishman who will drive the Empress to a new destiny with JFK; of Ron Dalrymple, ambitious and practical, utterly American; of Nancy Van Breymer, who can never face the truth about herself; and Lix Payne, who can.

Above all, this is the story of George Virdon, conscience to the group, whose destiny it is to hold them all together - who is first to see that Kay Madden, the enameled Hollywood enchantress, can wantonly destroy the solidarity of the Fusiliers forever.  It is George who finds himself charged, by the son of the woman he has loved all his life, with revealing the truth about their past.

In this remarkable novel spanning three decades, Anton Myrer has given us a searching, compassionate portrait of the way we really were -- the portrait of a generation’s struggle, in war and peace, to come to terms with itself.

Sometimes there is a golden novel that recaptures a golden time, never to be again:  the lost promise of an entire generation.  For Americans who came of age in the ‘40s - and for millions more who would like to have been there - that novel will be The Last Convertible.  It celebrates the high pride of those innocent years when, top down, racing under the stars or dancing to the big bands of Goodman or Dorsey, that most romantic and exuberant generation faced the dark days of war.

*****

A Green Desire (1981)

The fierce rivalry between two brothers, Tip and Chapin Ames, impelled them to make very different choices in their climb to the heights of financial power.  But their fatal competition is over Josefina Gaspa, the elusive woman both brothers want.  Jophy will take any dare, run any risk; she will never yield her own wild sense of freedom to either of them.

Tip, exuberant and resourceful, with the magic gift of the born salesman, reflects the unbounded confidence of The American Century - from the extravagant Bull Market of the Roaring ‘20s, through those desperate days of the Great Crash, to the mutual fund empires of the ‘50s.  The sky is his limit, all things are possible.  He believes in the product - and in people.  His brother Chapin, bred to their Aunt Serena’s world of Boston wealth and privilege, is the arch manipulator: a collector of beautiful objects, and even more beautiful people.

Jophy has come into their lives like the south wind - and changed them irrevocably.  Romantic, a woman of great passion, she scorns convention with the high courage of her grandmother Annabella.  She seeks the far horizons and forbidden shores that once lured her Portuguese forebears - a desire that leads to betrayal, and a terrible vengeance.

There is a time in every person, in every country, when hope is green, when the sap rises, when we believe we can be anything, do anything.  This is a novel about that time in America.  It is an age of innocence, but it is an age of temptation and corruption as well. This is a novel about the dreams we sought then, and the sins we committed in their pursuit.  It is a novel about money - and desire. 

Here is a novel in the grand tradition - as rich, as various, as urgent in its themes as America itself.  Bold in scope and characters, it moves from Cape Cod waters and Boston mansions to the penthouses of those Wall Street speculators who brought the nation once to ruin.  In its evocation of our recent past, A Green Desire speaks eloquently of today. 

*****

Once An Eagle Available in three editions!

The Last Convertible

A Green Desire

The Big War