Big Red Car here. Well yesterday was the Inauguration of President Obama for his second term as President.
One of the traditions of Inauguration Day is the parade down Pennsylvania Avenue.
The Boss is a graduate of Virginia Military Institute, the Nation’s oldest state military college often called the West Point of the South. [VMI grads think of West Point as the VMI of the North.]
When he was there, the cadets marched in the Inaugural Parades of Richard Nixon.
Here is a video of the VMI cadets marching past the reviewing stand in front of the White House.
These are the young men and women who fight America’s wars and whose graduates have fought our wars since the Civil War. It is their blood amongst many others which waters the tree of liberty.
During the Civil War, the VMI Corps of Cadets fought as a unit at the Battle of New Market at which they executed a bayonet charge and swept a hill from the Union forces capturing Union artillery batteries at the point of a bayonet. This is the time in history that a military academy has fought as a single unit and emerged victorious.
It was a VMI graduate, General of the Army George Catlett Marshall, who commanded all American forces in World War II. Winston Churchill described Marshall as the principal Architect of Victory.
Ronald Reagan starred in a movie about VMI called Brother Rat. It is a good story. When you attend VMI your first year is Hell. You are called “Rats” by the upperclassmen and you call your classmates “Brother Rat”. It is a strict and forbidding tradition of breaking down and rebuilding young men. It has worked the same since 1839 almost unchanged. If you can survive VMI, you can survive anything.
If you look carefully, you can see the VMI cadets in the video are shouldering M-14 rifles with fixed bayonets. Bayonets and bayonet drill are still important to instill fighting spirit in soldiers and cadets.
The Boss is very proud of having graduated from VMI and rightfully so. It is a tough place to be but a great place to be from.