Toecutter, was it like this one? I don't think its political, merely poignant.
"American Honor
By PETER COLLIER
May 26, 2007
Once we knew who and what to honor on Memorial Day: Those who had given
all their tomorrows, as was said of the men who stormed the beaches of
Normandy, for our todays. But in a world saturated with selfhood, where
every death is by definition a death in vain, the notion of sacrifice
today provokes puzzlement more often than admiration. We support the
troops, of course, but we also believe that war, being hell, can easily
touch them with an evil no cause for engagement can wash away. And in any
case we are more comfortable supporting them as victims than as
warriors.
Former football star Pat Tillman and Marine Cpl. Jason Dunham were
killed on the same day: April 22, 2004. But as details of his death
fitfully
emerged from Afghanistan, Tillman has become a metaphor for the current
conflict -- a victim of fratricide, disillusionment, coverup and
possibly conspiracy. By comparison, Dunham, who saved several of his comrades
in Iraq by falling on an insurgent's grenade, is the unknown soldier.
The New York Times, which featured Abu Ghraib on its front page for 32
consecutive days, put the story of Dunham's Medal of Honor on the third
page of section B.
Not long ago I was asked to write the biographical sketches for a book
featuring formal photographs of all our living Medal of Honor
recipients. As I talked with them, I was, of course, chilled by the primal power
of their stories. But I also felt pathos: They had become strangers --
honored
strangers, but strangers nonetheless -- in our midst.
In my own boyhood, figures such as Jimmy Doolittle, Audie Murphy and
John Basilone were household names. And it was assumed that what they had
done defined us as well as them, telling us what kind of nation we
were. But the 110 Medal recipients alive today are virtually unknown except
for a niche audience of warfare buffs. Their heroism has become the
military equivalent of genre painting. There's something wrong with that.
What they did in battle was extraordinary. Jose Lopez, a diminutive
Mexican American from the barrio of San Antonio, was in the Ardennes
forest when the Germans began the counteroffensive that became the Battle of
the Bulge. As 10 enemy soldiers approached his position, he grabbed a
machine gun and opened fire, killing them all. He killed two dozen more
who rushed him. Knocked down by the concussion of German shells, he
picked himself up, packed his weapon on his back and ran toward a group of
Americans about to be surrounded. He began firing and didn't stop until
all his ammunition and all that he could scrounge from other guns was
gone. By then he had killed over 100 of the enemy and bought his
comrades time to establish a defensive line.
Yet their stories were not only about killing. Several Medal of Honor
recipients told me that the first thing they did after the battle was to
find a church or some other secluded spot where they could pray, not
only for those comrades they'd lost but also the enemy they'd killed.
Desmond Doss, for instance, was a conscientious objector who entered
the army in 1942 and became a medic. Because of his religious convictions
and refusal to carry a weapon, the men in his unit intimidated and
threatened him, trying to get him to transfer out. He refused and they
grudgingly accepted him. Late in 1945 he was with them in Okinawa when they
got cut to pieces assaulting a Japanese stronghold.
Everyone but Mr. Doss retreated from the rocky plateau where dozens of
wounded remained. Under fire, he treated them and then began moving
them one by one to a steep escarpment where he roped them down to safety.
Each time he succeeded, he prayed, "Dear God, please let me get just
one more man." By the end of the day, he had single-handedly saved 75
GIs.
Why did they do it? Some talked of entering a zone of slow motion
invulnerability, where they were spectators at their own heroism. But
for most, the answer was simpler and more straightforward: They
couldn't let their buddies down.
Big for his age at 14, Jack Lucas begged his mother to help him enlist
after Pearl Harbor. She collaborated in lying about his age in return
for his
promise to someday finish school. After training at Parris Island, he
was sent to Honolulu. When his unit boarded a troop ship for Iwo Jima,
Mr.
Lucas was ordered to remain behind for guard duty. He stowed away to be
with his friends and, discovered two days out at sea, convinced his
commanding officer to put him in a combat unit rather than the brig. He
had just turned 17 when he hit the beach and a day later he was fighting
in a Japanese trench when he saw two grenades land near his comrades.
He threw himself onto the grenades and absorbed the explosion. Later a
medic, assuming he was dead, was about to take his dog tag when he saw
Mr. Lucas's finger twitch. After months of treatment and recovery, he
returned to school as he'd promised his mother, a ninth grader wearing a
Medal of Honor around his neck.
The men in World War II always knew, although news coverage was
sometimes scant, that they were in some sense performing for the people at
home. The audience dwindled during Korea. By the Vietnam War, the
journalists were omnipresent, but the men were performing primarily for each
other. One story that expresses this isolation and comradeship involves a
SEAL team ambushed on a beach after an aborted mission near North
Vietnam's Cua Viet river base.
After a five-hour gunfight, Cmdr. Tom Norris, already a legend thanks
to his part in a harrowing rescue mission for a downed pilot (later
dramatized in the film BAT-21), stayed behind to provide covering fire
while the three others headed to rendezvous with the boat sent to extract
them. At the water's edge, one of the men, Mike Thornton, looked back
and saw Tom Norris get hit. As the enemy moved in, he ran back through
heavy fire and killed two North Vietnamese standing over Norris's body.
He lifted the officer, barely alive with a shattered skull, and carried
him to the water and then swam out to sea where they were picked up two
hours later.
The two men have been inseparable in the 30 years since.
The POWs of Vietnam configured a mini-America in prison that upheld the
values beginning to wilt at home as a result of protest and dissension.
John McCain tells of Lance Sijan, an airman who ejected over North
Vietnam and survived for six weeks crawling (because of his wounds) through
the jungle before being captured.
Close to death when he reached Hanoi, Sijan told his captors that he
would give them no information because it was against the code of
conduct. When not delirious, he quizzed his cellmates about camp security and
made plans to escape. The North Vietnamese were obsessed with breaking
him, but never did. When he died after long sessions of torture Sijan
was, in Sen. McCain's words, "a free man from a free country."
Leo Thorsness was also at the Hanoi Hilton. The Air Force pilot had
taken on four MiGs trying to strafe his wingman who had parachuted out of
his damaged aircraft; Mr. Thorsness destroyed two and drove off the
other two. He was shot down himself soon after this engagement and found
out by tap code that his name had been submitted for the Medal.
One of Mr. Thorsness's most vivid memories from seven years of
imprisonment involved a fellow prisoner named Mike Christian, who one day found
a grimy piece of cloth, perhaps a former handkerchief, during a visit
to the nasty concrete tank where the POWs were occasionally allowed a
quick sponge bath. Christian picked up the scrap of fabric and hid it.
Back in his cell he convinced prisoners to give him precious crumbs of
soap so he could clean the cloth. He stole a small piece of roof tile
which
he laboriously ground into a powder, mixed with a bit of water and used
to make horizontal stripes. He used one of the blue pills of unknown
provenance the prisoners were given for all ailments to color a square in
the upper left of the cloth. With a needle made from bamboo wood and
thread unraveled from the cell's one blanket, Christian stitched little
stars on the blue field.
"It took Mike a couple weeks to finish, working at night under his
mosquito net so the guards couldn't see him," Mr. Thorsness told me. "Early
one morning, he got up before the guards were active and held up the
little flag, waving it as if in a breeze. We turned to him and saw it
coming
to attention and automatically saluted, some of us with tears running
down our cheeks. Of course, the Vietnamese found it during a strip
search, took Mike to the torture cell and beat him unmercifully. Sometime
after midnight they pushed him into our cell, so bad off that even his
voice was gone. But when he recovered in a couple weeks he immediately
started looking for another piece of cloth."
We impoverish ourselves by shunting these heroes and their experiences
to the back pages of our national consciousness. Their stories are not
just boys' adventure tales writ large. They are a kind of moral
instruction. They remind of something we've heard many times before but is
worth repeating on a wartime Memorial Day when we're uncertain about what
we celebrate. We're the land of the free for one reason only: We're
also the home of the brave."
Mr. Collier wrote the text for "Medal of Honor: Portraits of Valor
Beyond the Call of Duty" (Workman, 2006).
