Where Have All The Heroes Gone

Where have all the heroes gone? First of all, just what is a hero? Bob Dylan, noted singer, songwriter and poet said, “I think of a hero as someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom. Webster defines a hero as a person noted for feats of courage or notoriety of purpose, especially one who has risked or sacrificed his or her life. America has had some heroes in her past. Let me tell you about some of them. The war in the Pacific was far from being decided in 1945 when Franklin Roosevelt died suddenly and Harry Truman assumed the presidency. We had lost 20,000 men on Iwo Jima and Okinawa with more than a hundred thousand wounded and some feared we might lose a million men if we attacked the Japanese mainland. President Truman, showing great courage and notoriety of purpose, ended the war by ordering our planes to bomb two Japanese cities: Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and saved those million lives. Harry Truman was a hero. Here’s a story that came out of Midland, Texas in 1987. While playing in the backyard of a daycare center with several other children, eighteen month old Jessica McClure climbed inside an 8-inch diameter metal pipe and fell 22-feet to the bottom of an abandoned water well.

More than two day later, paramedic, Robert O’Donnell was lowered into a 27-foot shaft dug parallel to the abandoned well and worked his way through a tunnel to where the little girl was trapped. There he reached into a hole cut in the pipe and attached the baby to a small board with a roll of gauze, and wrapped her up like a mummy.

Baby Jessica survived her 56-hour ordeal without food or drink, at times singing a Winnie the Pooh song she learned from her mother. But the paramedic that saved her life didn’t fair so well. Eight years later, in 1995, Robert O’Donnell, killed himself with a single blast from a shotgun. Some say it was the result of a posttraumatic stress disorder.

Still, Robert O’Donnell was a hero. On another, much more controversial front, some say we have been in Iraq a long time, that almost four years is enough and most Americans and some in congress think its time to bring the troops home. But before we throw the baby out with the bathwater, let’s compare the Iraqi struggle with that of our own.

Six years after Tomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin and others signed the Declaration of Independence, we still didn’t have a president. Washington’s once proud army of 35,000 men, wearing shinny boots and brightly colored uniforms, had been reduced to a tiny rag tag force of just 2,000 men. Mistake after mistake plagued the army and there was scarcely a day gone by without a skirmish or full-scale battle with the British. The officers and men had not been paid for months and most every week someone would sneak out of camp and go home.

Then one day the situation worsened and appeared hopeless when Washington was told all his officers had threatened to resign. Without being paid they saw no reason to go on and Washington didn’t know where the money would come from or if they would ever be paid. Still the officers agreed to meet with him and when Washington walked into the room they were standing there waiting for him. But the officers had only one thought in mind, and that was to tell their commanding officer that they were going home.

Washington had prepared a short speech and reached into his pocket and began to unfold the paper, then realized he couldn’t read what he had written there, and began to feel around on his person for a pair of spectacles. Seconds later, as Washington held the glasses in his hands and was about to place them over his ears and across the bridge of his nose, he hesitated, then lifted his eyes and met the stares of all those in the room. He said, “You’ll have to excuse me gentlemen. Serving my country has not only turned my hair gray…but I’m also blind.” And all the officers started to cry. George Washington was a hero. Finally now ladies and gentlemen, after all these years, right here today, this minute, with the political rhetoric in Congress casting a dark shadow over our legislature, people in high places threatening to cut off funds from our troops in the field, every piece of news being sensationalized without any apparent attempt at fair and balanced reporting.

Tell me ladies and gentlemen. Have I missed something? Has something changed? “Where have all the heroes gone?”