That was just the first example I ran across that seemed to fit (and I just picked Korea as a place to start looking more or less at random, then did a search on the page for the word “exhausted”). I’m sure you could find plenty of others at that website.
Well, you could look at Khe Sanh, where between twenty and forty thousand NVA surrounded five thousand Marines. There was a vicious assault on the position in 1968, but the NVA couldn’t pull off another Dien Bien Phu. The Marnies held long enough to be reinforced by regular Army, even though some of the Marines wore beards, all needed haircuts, and all were exhausted. So I guess exhaustion didn’t make cowards of them.
On a rather more down note, the author of the book “Prisoner of the Japanese,” a very good documentary about the Japanese POW camps during WWII, makes the argument that humanity, morality, all of the ‘basically human’ traits, all come down to calories. If you don’t get enough of them, you denegrate from human to animal. He supports that claim with copious evidence, none of it light reading.
so, quod erat demonstrandum. it is just an irritating quote by some fool who believes that fitness is a good thing. how awful. probably a californian. urrrrggghhhh
I don’t know about cowardly, but fatigue sure as hell makes me grumpy!
From practical experience, other factors sap the brain and the will far more.
Heat exhaustion causes a remarkable snap in the will. One minute you have a motivated individual, struggling but still trying. The next you have a walking basket case. No will, no sense of self, just another CAS you have to get off the battlefield. Rehydration and a short break and they are back to normal.
I’ve had to deal with many people who went through this. It is a clearly physiological thing, probably a defensive reaction to prevent progression from heat exhaustion to heat-stroke and death.
Hmmm. Shakespeare coined “Conscience doth make cowards of us all.”
I see any number of instances of the “fatigue” quote attributed to Vince Lombardi, but none of the ones that I have seen actully note the place or occasion where he said it. Is it, perhaps, one of those free-floating, ersatz quotations that has simply been pinned to Lombardi’s tail without there having ben an actual statement by him?
Listen, you guys are looking for the wrong kinds of examples. Vince Lombardi was a football coach, so whether or not he actually said the thing, presumably it’s in a “football context”, so instead of looking for examples of Marines charging up San Juan Hill (or whatever it was), you should be looking for examples of football teams who got tired, and lost their nerve, and quit trying, and lost.
