MJ Hegar Quotes
Most combat is not a hand-to-hand knife battle that the person who can do the most push-ups is going to end up winning.
Hegar, Mary Jennings. Shoot Like a Girl: One Woman's Dramatic Fight in Afghanistan and on the Home Front. Berkley, 2017.
Referring to Lincoln's Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton, who was a forceful administrator constantly telling all others what to do:
Referring to the Joint Committee for the Conduct of the War—the unit of Congress that scrutinized and often tried to micro-mange Abraham Lincoln's efforts:
Clark had commanded the American and NATO forces in the Serbian War where all the military and political objectives were accomplished with heavy losses to the Serbian’s and none to the allied side—what many think was the most successful war in American History. Like Eisenhower in WWII one great challenge was the political and strategic one of keeping the coalition of all the allied governments working together. His perspective had been like Eisenhower and other officers in history was much wider and geopolitical than most military officers.
The great singer became embroiled in political controversy when the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to let her, a Black, sing in Constitution Hall in 1939. As a result First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the DAR, and Secretary of Interior Harold L. Ickes offered her the Lincoln Memorial for her 1939 Easter Sunday concert. Four years later she was finally allowed to sing in Constitution Hall. Throughout the controversy Ms. Anderson never attacked those who refused her.
This quotation is historically very interesting. Southern educational materials were extremely scarce with paper one of the commodities most in short supply as the only book paper in the South came from England and had to be smuggled through the Union blockade. Yet the priority was so high that paper was made available in the midst of the Civil War. Confederate civilian morale was a very serious problem while at the same time large numbers of Southern civilians and military were delusional about the Confederate fighting capability. Central to that theme was the myth that the Southern soldier, fighting for such a righteous cause, was several times more effective than his Yankee counterpart. Therefore, the fact that the South was outmanned, out gunned, and out supplied, did not imply a Union victory. So teaching this to the young Southern children who would spread it to the adults on the home front, was a conscious Confederate propaganda effort at this time. Also, the use of these kinds of death and killing arithmetic problems for young children, while considered patriotic in the South was thought to be gross, crude, uncivilized and unchristian by most in the North. The implied 90 to 1 superiority ratio was laughed at in the North, but actually believed by a substantial number of Southerners.
Mary Jennings Hegar is an American United States Air Force veteran and former political candidate. In 2012, she sued the U.S. Air Force to remove the Combat Exclusion Policy. In 2017, she published the memoir Shoot Like a Girl, which describes her service in Afghanistan.
