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Welcome back to Keep Buggering On.
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Fair warning: everything you're about to hear is true, and none of it is going to make you feel any better about humanity.
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A French officer hands an American captain a note, a one-liner that read, Retreat?
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The captain reads it once, doesn't blink.
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Retreat?
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Hell, we just got here.
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Nine days later, he's dead.
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The line outlived him by a hundred years plus in counting.
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June 1918, Bellow Wood, just outside of Chateau Thierry France.
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The Germans are 50 miles from Paris and pushing hard.
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This is the last big gamble of their spring offensive.
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And the French army in front of them is buckling.
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Columns are retreating so fast it looks like the whole front is dissolving.
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And right in the middle of that mess, a brigade of American Marines shows up.
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Green, untested, haven't fired a shot in the war yet.
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A French officer sees them, sees these brand new Marines standing there, like they're waiting for a roll call, and does the same thing.
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He tells them, fall back with everyone else.
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Spoken warning, scribbled note, accounts differ, but it lands on Captain Lloyd Williams, commanding the 51st Company, 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines.
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And Williams gives the most famous six words in Marine Corps history.
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Retreat, hell, we just got here.
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Hoorah! That's what I'm talking about.
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Now, full accuracy, because that's the whole deal here.
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This one's genuinely messier than it sounds.
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The Marine Corps's own history division credits the line to several officers that week, not just one man.
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Accounts don't even agree on how the order came in.
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Some say a French officer spoke it on the spot.
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Some say it was scribbled no.
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Some say a formal written command came down the chain.
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And William's own battalion commander, Major Frederick Weiss, later claimed he was the one who actually said it.
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And it wasn't just talk.
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The Marines dug in right there and held.
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They spent the next three weeks clearing that wood yard by yard, tree by tree, and some of the ugliest close fighting of the entire war.
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The battalion that started it became the most decorated in Marine Corps history.
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Williams didn't get to see any of that.
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He was gassed and hit by shrapnel a few days in.
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Reportedly told the medics, Don't bother with me.
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Take care of my good men.
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Died on the way out.
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Which is the part that never makes it onto the coffee mug.
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The line is great.
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The man behind it is why it's still great a hundred plus years later.
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So here's where I tell on myself.
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First ever teaching gig.
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I decided to try substitute teaching.
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There's a site where you log in and claim open ships.
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I click on one, thinking I'm just simply previewing it.
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Thinking before acting has never been your strong suit.
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True.
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This is from the man who shot down every boat idea I've ever had.
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Docking, winterizing, way too much hassle.
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That's called foresight.
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That's called crushing my dreams, but sure, foresight.
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Continue.
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I hit the wrong key, and just like that, I've claimed it.
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Signed, committed, and it's not some quiet elementary classroom.
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It's a high school just outside Boston.
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Three city blocks, two bridges, its own bank, a police officer inside, just for scale.
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I remember looking at you like you're gonna die in there.
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Very supportive, very husband of you.
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And I said it with love and outright fear for your safety.
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And the thing is, we already knew, not in theory, we had our granddaughter, Adriana, living with us.
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Beautiful girl.
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Absolute menace to my nervous system.
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She could have held Bella Wood single-handed.
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One afternoon, she gets off the bus early to stop at an Asian market with friends.
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Maybe for Boba, I don't know.
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And she's not where she's supposed to be.
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I panic.
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I end up with an actual all points bulletin out on this kid.
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And where was she?
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Walking across the green bridge, calm as anything.
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Of course, it's a bridge.
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That town's got some bridges now.
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She had no idea why I was upset.
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She was livid that I had been so unreasonable enough to call the police.
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The nerve worrying about her safety.
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And then, just to give you another example of how difficult a simple middle schooler was, and I was gonna go into high school.
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There was the morning.
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I'm driving her to school on my way to work, and she refuses to get out of the car.
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Oh, yes, the car exorcism.
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Yes, I had to call my boss to tell her I'd be late.
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I told her I was waiting on the principal of the middle school to come out and perform an exorcism on my vehicle.
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And she accepted that?
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Yeah, she was one of the few people who ever fully understood my sense of humor or our situation.
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So it's not like we didn't have the intel.
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We just hadn't applied it to a building with its own bridge.
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But I'd already clicked the button.
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I was on the roster.
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And once you're standing in the doorway of that classroom with your name on the sub sheet, there's no version where you turn around and walk back out.
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You're Captain Williams with a coffee cup instead of a rifle.
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Retreat?
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You just got there.
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And did you survive?
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Oh, barely.
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Two days in.
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There's an active shooter reported in the neighborhood.
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You remember that?
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I do.
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Full lockdown.
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And I didn't even know how to lock the classroom doors yet.
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And you've been an employee for what, 48 hours?
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Yes.
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So I'm standing there in a sweater, a skirt, boots, dressed for a first impression, not a crisis.
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And I end up bracing the door shut with my own body weight.
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And one of the girls looks at me and she asks, dead serious, ma'am, what are you gonna do if someone tries to get in?
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And what did you say?
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Without thinking, and none of this was bravery.
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I look down at my boots and said, These are these are good boots.
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They'll hold.
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Boots?
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Boots.
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And that's the whole gap that this show is built on.
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You picture yourself delivering some steely line under pressure.
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And what actually comes out is a spontaneous opinion on your own footwear.
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And you went back the next day?
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Yeah, I went back.
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For the record, that day was real and it was scary.
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And nobody's laughing at the situation.
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We're laughing at the boots.
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Right?
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The situation was serious.
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My response was just very, very human.
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And that's the bigger pattern.
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We've built a whole culture around your sub sheet moment, minus the stakes, click to accept, swipe to confirm, tap I agree on 40 pages you didn't read.
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Gig apps, terms of service, group chats you get added to at 11 p.m.
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We've professionalized committing to things sight unseen.
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But once you're in, most people don't bail.
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They stand in the room they didn't mean to walk into and they finish the shift.
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And that's not recklessness.
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That's showing up.
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The commitment doesn't care how you got there.
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Only once you do, once you're standing in it.
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That's a lot like golf.
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Oh, here we go.
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I'm serious.
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You shank one into the woods on hole four, and you're fully prepared to walk back to the cart and call it a day.
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Every fiber wants to retreat.
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And yeah?
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And yet, you get back into the fairway, on the green, three-pot, and move on to hole five.
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Because you refuse to be the guy who quits at the turn, and then you spend the whole back nine reminding everyone you didn't quit.
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It's called resilience.
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It's called an 18 handicap acting like Bello Wood.
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Retreat hell.
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We just got here to hole five.
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I keep thinking about the difference between the note that told them to retreat and the ground they were actually standing on.
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The note was somebody else's read on the situation, written from somewhere safer.
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The ground was right there under their boots the whole time.
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You don't have to be at Bella Wood for that to be true.
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Half the time the answer isn't up ahead somewhere.
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It's right in front of you if you're willing to look at it straight.
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And that is why this one urgent its spot in the KBO Standard Supply lineup.
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We're the mindset.
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You know where to find it.
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KBO Standard Supply LLC.com.
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Stores filling in piece by piece as these episodes drop.
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More on the way soon.
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And just a quick note, KBO is not live yet.
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Give it a few weeks.
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We're working on it hard, and it will be open soon.
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We checked.
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It's real.
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Until next time, take care of yourself, my friend.