George S. Patton Quotes
Never draw a gun on a man unless you intend to kill him. And believe me, if you do intend to kill him he will already know it. Then he will feel the cold breath of the tomb.
Blumenson, Martin. The Patton Papers, 1940-1945. Houghton Mifflin, 1974, p. 464.
He was threatening to shoot another Texas State Legislator, Ramon Romero, with whom he had been brawling on the floor of the Texas House of Represenatives. Rinaldi had claimed that all the Hispanics who were protesting the bill he was supporting were Illegals and called ICE. Romero objected to the Racial Profiling and generalization of many Hispanic Citizens whose ancestors were Texas Citizens when Texas became a Republic.
A number of the American soldiers refused to obey Calley's illegal order. Some helped some villagers to escape, and a helicopter pilot landed betreen Callery's men and the villagers they were shooting at, and ordered his helicopter machine gun crew to fire on the soldiers if they did back off. The soldiers stopped firing at the civillians. However, his and other reports of the massacre were covered up by the military for a few years. Mai Lai was not the only major war crime perpetrated by Americans in the Vietnam War; there had been a few others. But given the years of fighting and the many opportunities war crimes violations under orders were quite rare. The Viet Cong had many more war crimes that they perpetrated, and our South Vietnamese allies repeatedly committed war crimes against their own people.
George Smith Patton Jr. was a general in the United States Army who commanded the Seventh United States Army in the Mediterranean theater of World War II, and the Third United States Army in France and Germany after the Allied invasion of Normandy in June 1944.
