The Heroic Moment

“Just after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, I talked my mother into signing papers [for me] to join the Navy . . . I had just turned 15 years old.”

The story of this man, a distant relative of mine, is one that was repeated countless times as America entered World War II. Men and women of all ages of that “Greatest Generation” eagerly answered their nation’s call. The stakes were high and the contrast stark: Axis tyranny or American freedom. Hitler was devouring Europe; Mussolini was covering his flank, and Japan was beginning its ruthless expansion into the resource rich Philippines.

We were not a people of self-doubt in 1941, either individually or as a nation. My relative was only 15 when he joined, but he believed he could make a difference in that great struggle. And when, at 17, he leapt eighty feet from the deck of his sinking aircraft carrier into the icy North Atlantic, he still believed. He dragged a struggling fellow crew member, and then another, to a nearby lifeboat. It was his heroic moment, and he stood firm.

Millions of such moments made up the long battle that ended in victory for the Allies in 1945. There was a single-mindedness, a confidence, and a national will to win that was the mark of that generation. To lose would mean bowing beneath the yoke of tyranny; no longer “We the people,” but merely subjects of a ruthless dictator.

Indeed, the stakes were very high.

I had the great privilege on Sunday to be in the presence of a few dozen service veterans, some of whom had served in that war, at a Veterans’ Day memorial service in Poughkeepsie. As

the flat November sunlight streamed through the few remaining leaves, and as we listened to a list of America’s battles being read, I thought about my relative in the cold, dark, North Atlantic. I thought about Pickett’s third desperate charge across a devastated cornfield in Pennsylvania a century before, and about “The Angle” a few moments later, when brothers from North and South struggled with screams and shouts in bloody handto hand combat at the high-water mark of the Civil War. I thought about the disease-ridden trenches in World War I, and the phosgene gas that cut men down by the thousands, their lungs disintegrated and coughed, with their lives, onto the cold ground. I thought about the oppressive heat of

the Vietnam jungle, and the deafening roar of a Viet Cong ambush, as high-velocity rifle rounds shredded the foliage, and cruelly reached out to bring another brave young man to his eternal rest.

And in each of these heroic moments, and countless others, America’s veterans stood firm.

Today we find ourselves in a quieter, but no less deadly fight. The enemy prepares

their attacks in distant cities

or in remote, near-stone-aged villages. Their weapons appear to be bombs and guns and fuel-laden jetliners. But they are not. Their weapon is terror. It is terror, and it is a will to win that is driven by religious fanaticism— by far the most frightening motivation for any enemy. They fight not for country or for people; this enemy fights for an entrance into their perverse, diabolical view of heaven.

And for our warriors, in this battle perhaps more than in any before, defeat and victory are not always easy to discern. Here is why our warriors deserve our special thanks and diligent, prayerful support. Our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines fight an enemy that is cunning and elusive. It is an enemy that doesn’t wear a uniform and doesn’t belong to an army. And as was demonstrated by the tragic events at Fort Hood, it is an enemy that we cannot—or sadly, will not—identify, even when they wear our uniform, sit at our mess tables, and counsel fellow soldiers.

But in the battle at Fort Hood, brave men and women stood firm against a barbaric, cowardly enemy. And certainly, if the leaders of those brave men and women can summon only a small part of the courage that has marked the great heroes of the past 232 years, our victory against this enemy will be sure as well.

If you haven’t done so already, thank a veteran today. You’re walking in a free land because each of them, when their heroic moment came, stood firm.

There is no greater gift one citizen can give to another.

—Clint Sherwood,

for the COURIER