This guy holds a special place in my heart. When I was a kid,growing up in the eighties, I watched the 1941 black-and-white epic, “Sgt. York” with Gary Cooper with my Dad. I always remember the part where York uses a turkey mouth call to get as a group of German soldiers hiding in a fox hole to stick their heads up so he can pick them off. Great trick.-SF
Today marks the anniversary of the extraordinary actions of one of the most storied Medal of Honor recipients in history. Slim wrote up a historical account of those events, but be forewarned — he was most of the way through a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle’s 20 year old Family Reserve and an entire carton of unfiltered Camels before he even started, so it gets a little…rowdy. Make sure you check the notes a the end. Swingin’ Dick Kilgore.
We’d ask you fuckers to guess what today is, but you’d probably just say “Wing night at Nancy’s Squat and Gobble?” Well, yes, but more importantly today is October 8th. On October 8th, 1918, over a million Americans were in the middle of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive — among them was a man named Alvin Cullum York.
Today we’re going to talk about that All American Badass. This guy was an American Jedi before being a Jedi was cool. He was a Godly man of honor, born in a log cabin in the wilds of Pall Mall, Tennessee all the way back in 1887. The men of the York family were tough sons of bitches, relying on their own skill and cunning to survive on a shoestring budget . They harvested their own food, worked the family farm and hunted wild game to feed the family. Alvin was among the best hunters in his area, and often brought the meat home for the cook pot. Later on, as World War 1 loomed in the near future, Alvin did railroad construction and worked as a logger to help his family survive. But he wasn’t all hugs and handshakes. He was also known to like his whiskey, rumored to be a violent alcoholic, quick to fight at the saloon and had been busted by the police a few times.
So, he was pretty much like every other dude from Tennessee.
Despite his rowdy, skull-thumping behavior, Alvin York was a church goer, and devoted to his faith. “I was worried clean through. I didn’t want to go and kill. I believed in my Bible,” he was quoted saying after the war, in reference to his youthful pacifism. With the war in Europe starting, he was required to register for the draft. On the draft form, he answered the question “Do you claim exemption from draft (specify grounds)?” with a short, bullshit response. “Yes. Don’t Want To Fight.”
Seriously, can you believe that bullshit? That fucker almost cheated himself out of killing some Hun bastards, and saving a lot of American lives. But we’ll get to that part in a minute. His hippie-ass, touchy feely bullshit claim for conscientious objector status was obviously denied, probably because he filled it out with pink ink from his hello kitty pen. Surprise asshole, you can’t cheat fate out of its newest legendary warrior about to be formed in the crucible of war!
In all fairness, he flip-flopped on this later on after war, denying he ever claimed to having been a conscientious objector. With few records kept back then, few people knew this then or even today. All that survive are righteous tale of his American badassery.
Read the Remainder at Breach Bang Clear
Reblogged this on Rifleman III Journal.