KB
05-31-2007, 01:20 PM
American Honor
By PETER COLLIER
May 26, 2007; Page A9
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).
Copyright © 2007 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved
DowJones
By PETER COLLIER
May 26, 2007; Page A9
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).
Copyright © 2007 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved
DowJones