It is human nature to ascribe godlike powers to the heroes of yore. Without exception these man-gods are said to possess traits that even the most rational cannot so quickly dismiss, lest they be deemed a heretic. Tales of steel-driving men and dragon slayers radiate throughout each successive generation teaching us that we too can reach such daunting heights.
It is a cruel deceit - the rarified notion that we can all attain godhood. Nonetheless, it is a treachery we are all too willing to believe. We need to believe that greatness is forged through hard work, sacrifice, and missionary style coitus. We need to believe that there is more to life than working in accounts receivable.
The harrowing truth is that some men are cut from divine cloth; the rest of us are a hodge-podge of undesirable fabric, the kind of tatter that ends up as a patch on an AIDS quilt.
Because of this canard, our lives become the ultimate exercise in futility. Men everywhere fritter away their years trying to approximate the pantheon, but joining the Army does not make you Audie Murphy any more than growing a mustache makes you Charles Bronson.
No, some men are just greater than others. Colonel William F. Guile is one such man.
The Hero, The Beyonder
His gait is both cavalier and purposeful. It is urgency tempered with experience, He knows where he is going and the challenges he will face when he gets there but haste implies the possibility of failure. Guile only has tertiary experience with failure. His associates, friends, and loved ones transcended defeat the moment they first gazed upon his visage; their tales recounting a time before basking in his magnificence are the only evidence Guile has that failure actually exists.
The Colonel’s sense of style, like his walk, sends a similarly mixed-yet-cohesive message. Sure, he’s a military man and he dresses the part. Yet he wears his beret at a rakish angle, the way Thomas Jefferson would have if only he was comfortable enough with his sexuality to wear a beret. On the contrary, Guile’s degree of masculinity requires something as effeminate as a beret. It is a governor for his machismo, the only thing protecting the general populace from his perfectly coifed flat-top. Likewise, the only thing that stands between mankind and The Colonel’s immaculate anatomy is the military garb that adorns his Adonis-like physique. Almost certainly a uniform of his own design, it is camo patterned with a flirty blue-on-light-blue color scheme - the kind of regalia a man wears when he wants you to know that after he beats you mercilessly, he’s taking you cunt hunting and the drinks are on him.
It is Guile’s voice however that eliminates any doubt one might have as to whether or not he is a demi-god. There are many that say the voice of God is too awesome for mere mortals to comprehend or withstand. In a similar way Guile’s accent is so purely American that our ears, perversed by decades of exposure to Ebonics and New Jerseyans, distort it into something else. Although the accent we hear can best be described as “vaguely Belgian”, the dialect is in fact the President’s English in its purest form. It is the manner of speech devised by George Washington himself, an almost Enochian tongue created for the express purpose of mocking the British and bedding virgins. Many say that actions speak louder than words but Colonel William F. Guile makes no such distinction between actions and words. He only talks about things he has done, is doing or will do and he only does things he has talked about, is talking about or will talk about; it is this lack of dichotomy between actions and words that defines Guile’s life and thus defines his legacy. Therefore to relate Guile’s greatness, it is compulsory to recount the words he has spoken - the words to which his actions are so intrinsically bound.
”Troopers, I just received new orders. Our superiors say the war is cancelled. We can all go home. Bison is getting paid off for his crimes, and our friends who have died here will have died for nothing. But, we can all go home. Meanwhile, ideals like peace, freedom, and justice, they get packed up. But, we can all go home. Well, I'm not going home. I'm gonna get on my boat, and I'm going up river, and I'm going to kick that son of a bitch Bison's ass so hard that the next Bison wannabe is gonna feel it. Now, who wants to go home... and who wants to go with me?” - Colonel William F. Guile
So shall it be spoken, so shall it be done. As is perpetually the case with Guile, those words prophesized his immediate course of action and set into motion a chain of wordactions that would culminate in his most celebrated victory.
Clarity Without Specificity
To venture into the any further particulars would be redundant. Surely any red-blooded American knows Guile’s story well. There are an infinite number of anecdotes that could be told but one still would not truly understand his gallantry until they have experienced it firsthand. What exactly makes Guile so great? The answer, like The Colonel himself, is ungraspable. Intangible. Nevertheless it is the inevitable conclusion one draws when it becomes apparent that any other verdict would be empirically false. The conclusion that is drawn when one has witnessed the divine spectacle that is Guile. To see The Colonel is to know The Colonel. Beholding his magnificence solidifies the incontrovertible fact that some men are just greater than others.