American G.I. Lt. Dick Winters hurled himself into world history in 1944 on D-Day, taking the war to Hitler on Hitler’s home turf. But while Winters was away killing America’s enemies, , Winters was betrayed at home. There were forces at work killing American manhood. By the time Winters returned home, America was a different place. It was less civil. It was less mature because American males were surrendering maturity and responsibility. Grown American businessmen were like children compared to those mature boys who fought with Winters to save civilization. The materialistic fellows on Main Street were sinking into a spineless self-centeredness as though someone was whispering to them that they were completely excused from manly responsibility.

Less than a decade after Winters trained his men to fight Nazis, Major Winters was ordered by the US Army to train other young American officers to fight Communists in Korea. He tried. Then, in frustration, he resigned from the military because the young officer candidates would not be men. They were frivolous and undisciplined. They were not serious about the meaning of conflict or manhood. They were not willing to think like men. And they were not willing to grow up.

“Every few hundred years,” wrote Winters contemporary Peter Drucker, “in Western history there occurs a sharp transformation. Within a few short decades, society rearranges itself -- it's worldview; its basic values: its social and political structures; its arts; its key institutions. Fifty years later, there is a new world. And the people born then cannot even imagine the world in which their grandparents lived.... We are currently living through just such a transformation.”

Winters saw this transformation first-hand. It was more than a shift in fads or cultural preferences. The post-WWII transformation destroyed American manhood in the same way Winters destroyed Nazi gun emplacements. This happened because parents ceased to raise boys into the maturity of real life, and the maturity necessary for manhood. America without manhood can no longer be America. It can only exist as a new-world playground for spoiled, infantile males -- and for the social planners who function as their babysitters.

-- Geoffrey Botkin

Winters was portrayed by Damien Lewis in the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers