Bird Droppings January 8, 2024

Can we say true heroism and humility are spelled the same?

Even though I am one of the worst spellers in this local area, I know heroism and humility are technically spelled differently. I will concede to using words to come up with a perhaps catchy title for my daily morning wanderings. I sat and listened to our President after the shooting of Congresswoman Gilford nearly three years ago as he spoke to a group in Arizona at a memorial service for those killed in the shooting in Tuscan. I will admit his words moved me, as I think most people in this nation were.

“Though I appreciate the sentiment, I must humbly reject the title of hero because I am not one of them,” “We must reject the title of hero and reserve it for those who deserve it.” Daniel Hernandez, a twenty-year-old intern of Congresswomen Gilford, was credited with saving her life by Arizona Governor Jan Brewer and President Barrack Obama

Daniel, as he was interviewed, went on to say the real heroes were the First responders and doctors and nurses who cared for the injured and prevented any additional loss of life. As I ponder this morning, a young man jumping into the fray as he heard gunshots, as do many of our service men and women, and saying he is not the hero is a humbling moment for me.

I recall my father’s stories of World War II and the battle of Iwo Jima in the South Pacific. For you non-history buffs, the US military brass devised a plan to island-hop through the South Pacific to Japan to end the war.

This idea was formulated knowing we would lose many men as the Japanese were well-fortified and dug in. Iwo Jima was a blood bath, to say the least. US Marines were dropping as they left the landing craft or pontoon bridges from the LSMs. My father was a medic on an LSM. This was a boat with a drop-open front to allow landing craft and tanks to roll out into shallow water or onto pontoon bridges, along with the Marines who were on board. As my father tells the story, a young Marine nineteen at the time fell between two pontoons. These structures are large enough to support a tank and chained together to make bridges from seacraft to shore.

My father heard the young man’s call for help and jumped from his boat to the pontoons. As he looked over the scene, it was not good. The young man’s leg had been tangled in the chains connecting the pontoons. His right leg was in shambles and nearly sheared off from the movement of the chain with the waves. My father had to move quickly. Tanks and waves were shoving the pontoons together as they moved. Dad jumped down between the pontoons and explained he would need to amputate the young Marine’s leg in order to get him to safety. He offered a swig of whiskey that he carried in a flask for such ordeals in his back pocket. The young Marine said he did not drink. Using his Navy survival knife, he poured some of the whiskey on the knife and proceeded to take off the Marine leg.

As the pontoons came together, Dad threw the young man up onto the nearest pontoon, climbed up, and cauterized, and sutured his wound. Add to this machine gun fire and mortar rounds all around as well. Dad then lifted the young man and carried him down the beachfront to the hospital’s outgoing landing craft.

Across my father’s Navy shirt was embroidered his nickname on board the LSM, DOC. The Navy and Marine Corpsmen saw him and heard him barking medical orders about the injury and assumed he was an officer. The young man was given priority and made it to the hospital ship and survived. Sounds simple, yet during the several hundred-yard walk down the beach, the dug-in Marines were yelling at my father to get down, and bullets were whistling all around him. As he would say, as he told the story, a guardian angel was watching over him, and that was all he could recall. He said he was in a daze as he carried the young Marine. It was what he had to do in order to save his life. Another few minutes would have been wasted, and he would have died on the beach.

Days later, when his commander questioned him about the incident, he was offered a heroism medal from the Navy. However, being a young college man himself, he asked if he could get a raise instead of a medal. It was not until many years later, when he went for health care at the VA hospital, that he applied for a Purple Heart to get a better accessible parking space. He was in his eighties at the time.

Heroism and humility are spelled differently, perhaps, but there is a fine line connecting the two. It has not been that long ago that the first Medal of Honor was given to a living soldier in many years. We seem to have far too few heroes in today’s world. I look at a shooting in Arizona and see several. There was a nine-year-old girl who believed in her country and in her congresswomen enough to be there to see her. There is a congresswoman who chose to meet with her constituents one-on-one in public. While he claims he is not the hero, a young man who did not hesitate when the shots rang out and did what he could. I also saw our President, whose gray hair is more noticeable now, standing before the families of those lost and grieving, talking about healing. We do have a nation of heroes, it seems if we so choose to look at it, as I think back to that day and another comment by Daniel Hernandez.

“On that Saturday, we all became Arizonans, and above all, we all became Americans,” Daniel Hernandez

On some days, it is difficult to try to sort and reflect. Yet, in our reflections, we can find solutions, be it in government, family, friends, or education, which I tend to tie in loosely each day I write. Today, let us all reflect on our heroes and also keep all of those in harm’s way on our minds and in our hearts. Let us always give thanks. Namaste.

My family and friends, I do not say this lightly,

Mitakuye Oyasin

(We are all related)

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