Bring a Hankie

Once in a while, something that I read moves me to tears.

Read Ben Stein's last column.  You, too, may need a hankie.

Real stars are not riding around in the backs of limousines or in Porsches or getting trained in yoga or Pilates and eating only raw fruit while they have Vietnamese girls do their nails. They can be interesting, nice people, but they are not heroes to me any longer.

A real star is the soldier of the 4th Infantry Division who poked his head into a hole on a farm near Tikrit, Iraq. He could have been met by a bomb or a hail of AK-47 bullets. Instead, he faced an abject Saddam Hussein and the gratitude of all of the decent people of the world.

A real star is the U.S. soldier who was sent to disarm a bomb next to a road north of Baghdad. He approached it, and the bomb went off and killed him.

A real star, the kind who haunts my memory night and day, is the U.S. soldier in Baghdad who saw a little girl playing with a piece of unexploded ordnance on a street near where he was guarding a station. He pushed her aside and threw himself on it just as it exploded. He left a family desolate in California and a little girl alive in Baghdad.

Comments

[Eskimo]

Unfortunately those stories get little play in the media when you have Abu Ghraib, all day, every day.

[Bill]

Ben is right, but he forgot Flight 93. To me they are a special group of heroes. They knew for a fact they were going to die, and rather than "go gentle into that dark night", or cower in terror, they found worthy action and saved many more lives. They were the first effective attack in the war on terrorism, and they created a new precedent for passengers defending themselves.

Ben could have also mentioned all the Iraqis that literally risked their lives to vote. What would our turnout be if we had such barriers to face?

My thanks to Ben for bringing it to our attention.

[Peg K]

Bill, you make an excellent point. Further - is there little doubt that had the Flight 93 heroes not taken down the plane in Pennsylvania, either the White House or Congress - and its inhabitants - may well have been destroyed?

Beyond the sheer awfulness of that act ... what would it have done to our nation? Difficult to imagine.

Thanks for reminding us, Bill.