“Anything you do can get you killed, including nothing.”
Murphy’s Laws of Combat
Men:
The MFA battlefield came alive last Saturday with the sound of chain saws and an amazing tree grinder, courtesy of Gerald Phillips and Team 22. (I don’t think I will be able to bag leaves again for the rest of my life.) Before you die, you absolutely must see a machine chew up a 12” tree that is over 30 feet long. We all applauded as the raging force of hardened steel and a 250 hp, John Deere turbo diesel engine obliterated the sweet gum tree. The Sierra Club has not yet sought an emergency injunction against our activities so for those of you who were otherwise occupied, don’t despair, many trees remain to be killed.
These days, with all the bad news about the economy and the confused state of the culture we live in, you may feel more like the tree than part of the workforce feeding the shredder. “Don’t take counsel of your fears” is an adage we should consider at times like this. For those of you who have read this far and have time to read on, let me take you back in history to a leader who decided to “take counsel of his fears.”
Lieutenant General Arthur Ernest Percival (1887 –1966) was a British Army officer and World War I combat veteran who commanded the forces of the British Commonwealth during the Battle of Malaya and the subsequent Battle of Singapore in 1942. Singapore is an island at the tip of the Malay Peninsula. Singapore lies along the narrow entry to the Straits of Malacca, which is the main shipping channel between the Indian and Pacific oceans. It is one of the most strategic shipping lanes in the world.
During the 1930’s, the British spent enormous sums to build port facilities and establish coastal guns on the island of Singapore. Winston Churchill called Singapore “the Gibraltar of the east.”
On 10 December 1941, the Far Eastern Fleet of the British Empire was virtually destroyed in a two-hour engagement east of the Malay Peninsula in which the battleship HMS Prince of Wales and the cruiser HMS Repulse were sunk in a two-hour battle with the Japanese air force operating out of Saigon. This left the Japanese free to move rapidly down the peninsula forcing the British forces under Gen. Percival to retreat to Singapore Island.
On February 8th, 1942, the Japanese, under the command of Gen. Yamashita, the “the tiger of Malaya,” attacked Singapore with just 23,000 troops. Just a week later, on February 15th, Gen. Percival surrendered unconditionally to Gen. Yamashita. The Japanese force of 23,000 took over 100,000 British, Australian and other Commonwealth soldiers prisoner. It was the largest surrender of British-led forces in history. Over 9,000 of these men would later die building the Burma-Thailand railway. The people of Singapore fared worse. The exact death toll is unknown but at least 50,000 Singaporean Chinese alone were slaughtered.
Now we will never know all that might have happened if Percival had stuck to his guns and continued to fight. Much is made of the problems he faced, lack of airpower, tanks, and water, but here is a man that clearly took counsel of his fears and was defeated by them. We do know that had he fought longer and harder there would have been a lot fewer Japanese soldiers to live to fight again and British soldiers to build railways for the Japanese Empire.
I have the opportunity to speak with many of the men at the Fraternity over the past few weeks and I am aware of the significant problems many of you are facing. The life we have and the future we face, as Robert discussed so clearly last week, do not ebb and flow on the tides of change. In fact, adversity will very often created the opportunities we could never have envisioned. Fear can defeat you even when an enemy cannot. Further, in the end, you may discover you had them outnumbered all along.
Never surrender, never quit,
Harper
For we walk by faith, not by sight.
Paul the Apostle
(2 Corinthians 5:7)




