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.
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