Ralph Peters

Ralph Peters (born 19 April 1952) is a retired United States Army officer, novelist, and political commentator.

To those who solemnly swear to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

[Americans] choose not to understand the world on terms other than our own.

Here I must inject a personal note—I never shed blood upon the field of Sidwell Friends, nor did I fight the battles of Yale Law. I am a miner's son, and my father was a self-made man who unmade himself during my youth. Education was not a family legacy, and my kin belonged to the United Mine Workers of America, not to Skull and Bones. My forebears fought this country's wars from the bottom ranks, and I began my own military career as a private.

I have felt the full arrogance of those to whom much was given, and personally, wish that I might come to bury the elite, not to praise them. Yet, those who would rise need examples to emulate. It grates on me to write it, but our military needs a return of the nation's elite to the officer corps, to the extent that a traditional elite, with its spotty but essential ideals of service, still exists.

To the flesh-and-blood men who struggled, before we turned them into bronze and marble.

He could not understand how men could tell a public lie and then stand by it. He was not made for the politics of command, not for politics of any kind. He knew that his notions of honor seemed quaint, even laughable, to the likes of Sickles, Hooker, and Butterfield. But he could not imagine a life lived another way.

The message of Vietnam is not that Americans will not take casualties; it is that the American people do not want the lives of their sons and daughters wasted.

Quotes

1980s

Red Army (1989)

Red Army: A Novel of Tomorrow's War. New York: Pocket Books. All quotes are from the May 1989 hardcover edition.

• "This is Ladoga Five. I have a special artillery vehicle with me. I can use the long-range set, if necessary." "Good. Get your vehicles on the road. And whatever you do, keep moving. We will all be behind you."
  The gravity in his commander's voice, and his simple choice of words, moved Bezarin. He switched over to his battalion radio net, anxious to send out the words that would set them all in motion. He knew that his tanks needed more time to resupply, that the stray vehicles had not been sufficiently integrated into the grouping to do much beyond merely following the vehicle to their immediate front. But he knew that now, with a great hole punched through the last line of the enemy's defense, there time was the dominant factor. He felt simultaneously elated and half-wild with small, cloying frustrations. He worked his radio in a fierce, uncompromising voice that had matured in the space of a morning. Major Bezarin wanted to move.
  • p. 232

1990s

Flames of Heaven (1993)

Flames of Heaven: A Novel of the End of the Soviet Union. New York: Pocket Books. All quotes are from the May 1993 hardcover edition.

• "Just one thing," Sasha said suddenly. Pavel looked inquiringly into his brother's exhausted features. "I won't go without my cat."
  • p. 395

Hucksters in Uniform (1999)

• Here I must inject a personal note—I never shed blood upon the field of Sidwell Friends, nor did I fight the battles of Yale Law. I am a miner's son, and my father was a self-made man who unmade himself during my youth. Education was not a family legacy, and my kin belonged to the United Mine Workers of America, not to Skull and Bones. My forebears fought this country's wars from the bottom ranks, and I began my own military career as a private. I have felt the full arrogance of those to whom much was given, and personally, wish that I might come to bury the elite, not to praise them. Yet, those who would rise need examples to emulate. It grates on me to write it, but our military needs a return of the nation's elite to the officer corps, to the extent that a traditional elite, with its spotty but essential ideals of service, still exists.
  • autobiographical aside from Beyond Terror, p. 319. Originally part of an essay entitled "Hucksters in Uniform" which appeared in the May 1999 edition of The Washington Monthly.

Fighting for the Future: Will America Triumph? (1999)

• If there is a single power the West underestimates, it is the power of collective hatred.
  • p. 13

• We [Americans] choose not to understand the world on terms other than our own.
  • p. 51

2000s

Beyond Terror: Strategy in a Changing World (2002)

• At our worst in the Middle East, we unreservedly supported—or enthroned—medieval despots who suppressed popular liberation efforts, thus driving moderate dissidents into the arms of fanatics. From our diplomatic personnel held hostage in Iran a generation ago, to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on the United States, we have suffered for our support of repressive "stable" regimes that radicalized their own impoverished citizens. In the interests of stability, we looked the other way while secret police tortured and shabby armies massacred their own people, from Iran to Guatemala. But the shah always falls. Would that we could tattoo that on the back of every diplomat's hand: The shah always falls.
  • p. 174: originally published as "Stability, America's Enemy" in Parameters, Winter 2001-02

• We [the U.S.] think nothing…of attempting to inflict upon other peoples forms of government ill-tailored to their needs.
  • p. 218

• The message of Vietnam is not that Americans will not take casualties; it is that the American people do not want the lives of their sons and daughters wasted.
  • p. 287

• We have moved from an age in which government leaders sought to do what was best for the people to one in which the political leadership is convinced it knows what is best for the people, whether they like it or not.
  • p. 133

• There is no lack of bravery in the ranks of our armed forces, but bureaucratic cowardice rules in our intelligence establishment (as well as at the higher levels of military command).
  • p. 196

Wars of Blood and Faith: The Conflicts That Will Shape the Twenty-First Century (2007)

Wars of Blood and Faith: The Conflicts That Will Shape the Twenty-First Century (2007), Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania: Stackpole Books

When Europeans feel sufficiently threatened–even when the threat's concocted nonsense–they don't just react, they overreact with stunning ferocity.

[T]he American dream is still alive and well, thanks: Even the newest taxi driver stumbling over his English grammar knows he can truly become an American.

European Muslims can't become French or Dutch or Italian or German. Even if they qualify for a passport, they remain second-class citizens. On a good day.

• [P]op prophets tell us that Muslims in Europe are reproducing so fast and European societies are so weak and listless that, before you know it, the continent will become "Eurabia," with all the topless gals on the Rivera wearing veils. Well, maybe not. The notion that continental Europeans, who are world-champion haters, will let the impoverished Muslim immigrants they confine to ghettos take over their societies and extent the caliphate from the Amalfi Coast to Amsterdam has it exactly wrong.
  • p. 332

• Muslims are hardly welcome to pick up the trash on Europe's playgrounds. Don't let Europe's current round of playing pacifist dress up fool you: This is the continent that perfected genocide and ethnic cleansing, the happy-go-lucky slice of humanity that brought us such recent hits as the Holocaust and Srebenica.
  • p. 332

• [H]istorical patterns are clear: When Europeans feel sufficiently threatened–even when the threat's concocted nonsense–they don't just react, they overreact with stunning ferocity. One of their more humane (and frequently employed) techniques has been ethnic cleansing.
  • p. 332

• Europeans have enjoyed a comfy ride for the last sixty years–but the very fact that they don't want it to stop increases their rage and sense of being besieged by Muslim minorities they've long refused to assimilate (and which no longer want to assimilate).
  • p. 333

• When Europeans feel sufficiently provoked and threatened–a few serious terrorist attacks could do it–Europe's Muslims will be lucky just to be deported...
  • p. 333

• Europeans have just been better organized for genocide... Far from enjoying the prospect of taking over Europe by having babies, Europe’s Muslims are living on borrowed time...
  • p. 334

• [T]he American dream is still alive and well, thanks: Even the newest taxi driver stumbling over his English grammar knows he can truly become an American. But European Muslims can't become French or Dutch or Italian or German. Even if they qualify for a passport, they remain second-class citizens. On a good day. And they're supposed to take over the continent that's exported more death than any other?
  • p. 334

• All the copy-cat predictions of a Muslim takeover of Europe not only ignore history and Europe’s ineradicable viciousness and Europe's ineradicable piousness, but do a serious disservice by exacerbating fear and hatred. And when it comes to hatred, trust me: The Europeans don't need our help.
  • p. 334

Looking for Trouble (2008)

Looking for Trouble: Adventures in a Broken World. Mechanicsburg: Stackpole Books. All quotes are from the 2008 hardcover edition.

• When I mentioned my decision to retire, it surprised everyone. The immediate advice from peers was that I should stay on for at least two years from the date of my promotion, since that was the minimum period of service-in-grade required, with a waiver, to qualify for a lieutenant-colonel's retirement pay. It showed how little they knew me: the notion that I would hang on for an additional year, counting down the days, just to collect a few hundred dollars more each month offended me. For the rest of my life, I'll be paid as a retired major, and I have never wished it otherwise.
  The Army was good to me even then, and the chain of command asked what it would take to make me change my mind and stay in uniform. I didn't even consider the offer. Once you make up your mind on so weighty an issue, you stick by your decision. And had I said, "Oh, assign me to X and I'll hang around," it would have seemed as if the whole fuss had been a bit of theater to get whatever I wanted. I had always served with dignity, if sometimes obstreperously, and I intended to leave on my own terms.
  Three and a half years later, on the morning of September 11, 2001, I did regret retiring from the Army. But my fate lay elsewhere.
  • p. 338

• On February 1, 1998, I woke up as a civilian. And life got interesting.
  • p. 339

The War after Armageddon (2009)

The War After Armageddon: A Novel. Published as a Forge Book by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC, New York, New York. All quotes are from the September 2009 hardcover first edition.

• To those who solemnly swear to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
  • Dedication

• They moved up between black trees, trip-me stumps, and small boulders. Everything in this world seemed disordered, messed up. Crazy people. Who started all this. For what? The nuclear blast hadn't reached his hood in East L.A. But the radiation did. He'd been on Okinawa. His family had been home. Now the Jihadis were going to get their shit handed to them.
  • p. 46-47

2010s

Endless War (2010)

Endless War: Middle-Eastern Islam vs. Western Civilization. Mechanicsburg: Stackpole Books. All quotes are from the 2010 hardcover first edition.

• To study what men have done is to see ourselves as we are: History's mirror disintegrates our makeup. With its casualty lists, litany of atrocities, and suggestions that heroism, too, may require violence, history shows us "the skull beneath the skin." And no matter how firmly we shut our eyes, the skull will still be there.
  • p. xi

Lines of Fire (2011)

Lines of Fire: A Renegade Writes on Strategy, Intelligence and Security. Mechanicsburg: Stackpole Books. All quotes are from the 2011 hardcover edition.

• Faced with opponents who sacrifice the innocent to their god, our generals study atheist guerrillas. To cope with fanatical killers with global ambitions, we turn to courts of law intended for common criminals. Pirates terrorize shipping lanes, while we wring our hands over their legal status. And all parties on the Potomac still insist that stability can be assured by supporting tyrants and that infernally corrupt governments are bound to reform if only we treat them respectfully. We mouth admirable principles for which we won't lift a finger. If we must be hypocrites, we should at least apply some intelligence to the task.
  • p. x

Cain at Gettysburg (2012)

Cain at Gettysburg: A Novel. Published as a Forge Book by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC, New York, New York. All quotes are from the February 2012 hardcover first edition. The book alternates between different points-of-view from various historical characters.

• In the sour air of his tent, Meade viewed himself with an engineer's cold eye: too dark of thought, too dour, a man alert to the smell of sulfur, but not to Heaven's scent. His wife was a proud, loyal woman, of good family. He could hear Margaret teasing. "George, I know you can smile!" She had got him a brigadier's rank at the start of the war, when his merits had not sufficed. He would have to do his best for her. And for the Union, of course. Major General George Gordon Meade had been happiest building lighthouses.
  • George G. Meade, p. 15

Hell or Richmond (2013)

Hell or Richmond: A Novel. New York: Tom Doherty Associates, LLC. Published as a Forge Book by Tom Doherty Associates. All quotes are from the 2013 hardcover edition. The book alternates between different points-of-view from various historical characters.

• To the flesh-and-blood men who struggled, before we turned them into bronze and marble.
  • Dedication

• He had to do the honorable thing, he understood that. Today of all days, it was vital to remain a gentleman, to speak faithfully and betray no emotions to his career's executioner. His family seemed ever destined for disappointment: his father, now him. Yet, he had done much, giving them all the victory they needed, that victory and more...
  Only to have a low cabal poison Lincoln against him. Liars. Devils. Whoremongers. Intimating, in the wake of Mine Run, that he sympathized with the Confederacy, that he was unfit to command, even that he was cowardly. All because he would not squander thousands of men to no purpose. Oh, yes. Had he overruled all military judgment, common sense, and decency and ordered Warren to attack, had he sacrificed five thousand soldiers in an act of folly, he might have been forgiven. But powerful men never spotted near a battlefield had seized upon his refusal to charge Lee's entrenchments, coiling like snakes to strike his reputation. Their ardor for slaughter repelled him.
  Perhaps he was better off being relieved. He could put this filth behind him, this infinite human vice of cold ambition. He could not understand how men could tell a public lie and then stand by it. He was not made for the politics of command, not for politics of any kind. He knew that his notions of honor seemed quaint, even laughable, to the likes of Sickles, Hooker, and Butterfield. But he could not imagine a life lived another way.
  • George G. Meade, p. 18-19

• A mighty burst of rain assaulted the canvas, conjuring Gettysburg: his hour of glory, of triumph. The smoke, confusion, and carnage had calmed to reveal his army victorious. Lee had been defeated. Lee! His elation on that July afternoon had soared beyond all words, beyond his deathly exhaustion, and he had thought, mistakenly, that all might be well thereafter. Only to spend the night wrapped in an oilcloth, sitting on a rock amid the mud, under a tree that channeled the rain into torrents. Every roof had been required for the wounded his victory cost. The wounded, in their legions.
  Damn Washington, and damn the New York papers. None of the men in frock coats and cravats understood the human side of an army. How they had howled- and were howling still- because he had not chased Lee like an ill-trained dog. They refused to hear that three hard days of battle had left tens of thousands of wounded men in his care and thousands more as prisoners in his hands. They did not want to hear that his army, too, had been mauled and thrown into confusion, that officers had been slaughtered by the hundredfold, that ammunition pouches and caissons had been emptied, that entire divisions had nothing to eat and no water untainted by blood, that the corpses of the brave baked in the sun, or simply that he had done the best he could. The Army of the Potomac had worked a miracle, sending Lee home in shame, but it had not been wonder enough for the stay-at-homes.
  • George G. Meade, p. 19-20

2014

• We know how to deal with apocalyptic blood-thirsty fanatics. We have two thousand years of historical examples in various religions of these death cults exploding out of the mainstream religion. And in two thousand years there is not a single example of these wildfire death cults being put down without extreme violence. Not a single example. But the Obama Administration doesn't know history, they don't want to know history, they don't want to deal with reality. And the reality is: That the way you deal with Islamic State - these blood-thirsty, blood-drunken terrorists - is to kill them, keep on killing them until you kill the last one, then you kill his pet goat! That's how you deal with them.
  • Fox News interview (20 August 2014)

Valley of the Shadow (2015)

Valley of the Shadow: A Novel. Published as a Forge Book by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC, New York, New York. All quotes are from the May 2015 hardcover first edition. The book alternates between different points-of-view from various historical characters.

• Rud Hayes watched his division dissolve. What little he could see of it, anyway. He had just assured Kitching, an insolent young colonel newly attached, that his men would hold against any Reb assault, when thousands of screaming Johnnies had burst from the fog behind his left flank. Stunned, the one brigade he had managed to get into line buckled, then broke and disintegrated. Now he rode among swirls of air made visible, alternately ordering and begging his men to rally. Of all the brave soldiers he had led through three years of battles, few heeded him now.
  • p. 430

The Damned of Petersburg (2016)

The Damned of Petersburg: A Novel. Published as a Forge Book by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC, New York, New York. All quotes are from the June 2016 hardcover first edition. The book alternates between different points-of-view from various historical characters.

• As Hancock issued the order to Mott to move his division up onto White Oak Road, a cavalcade appeared behind his trail brigade. "Better hold off," Hancock told the division commander. "See what the hell they want. Just get de Trobriand placed. Then come back." His leg scourged him doubly. He almost felt like pounding his thigh with his fists, to beat out the pus and hammer the pain to death.
  Preceded by outriders, Grant and Meade came cantering side by side, trailed by more flags than a Fourth of July celebration in Philadelphia. Behind the banners, enough well-mounted cavalrymen followed to be put to good use, had they not been retained to serve as palace guards. Their uniforms were mud-clotted now, to the delight of troopers less fortunate.
  • p. 373

Judgement at Appomattox (2017)

Judgement at Appomattox: A Novel. Published as a Forge Book by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC, New York, New York. All quotes are from the August 2017 hardcover first edition. The book alternates between different points-of-view from various historical characters.

• Peering through his field glasses, George Custer saw all that he needed to see. He turned to his brother, the privileged lieutenant, and to his senior staff men. "What do you say? Shall we give those poor devils a good thrashing?"
  • p. 217

External links

• Encyclopedic article on Ralph Peters on Wikipedia