Legal Commentary

Where Do We Get Such Men?

And each man stands with his face in the light of his own drawn sword. Ready to do what a hero can.
---Elizabeth Barrett Browning

In the short interval between first seeing this story about how Iraqi soldiers turned tail and ran in the face of enemy fire, complaining that they hadn't received enough heavy weapons support (their enemy had none), yet managed to load all the furniture and appliances they could find on the backs of their trucks before pulling back, I've been haunted by a story I first read almost ten years ago, a story about two American soldiers who asked, repeatedly, to be inserted into the middle of a maelstrom in order to save the lives of only a few of their brothers in arms.

Mark Bowden's book, Black Hawk Down, and Ridley Scott's movie based upon that book, recount the story of Delta Force snipers Randy Shugart and Gary Gordon on October 3, 1993 in Mogadishu, Somalia. Although the movie, out of dramatic necessity, compresses the time, Shugart and Gordon, armed only with their sniper rifles and sidearms, and later with weapons scrounged from the downed aircraft, fought off hundreds of armed Somali gunmen and defended a downed helicopter's crew for over an hour until they ran out of ammunition and were overwhelmed and killed. The lone survivor, pilot Michael Duran, in his later book, In The Company Of Heroes, credits both with extraordinary bravery and with saving his life.They both received the Medal of Honor.

The scene from the movie, as tense and horrific as it seems, can't begin to approximate reality, but it's the best we nonparticipants have:

When my father, late in his life, began to open up about his experiences in combat in the South Pacific during World War II, he told me that when you boiled it all down to the salt, what men fought for was one another, for their "brothers." High-flying concepts like God and Country weren't irrelevant, but they weren't what gave a man the ability to, as my father, a Navy corpsman to a Marine automatics weapon platoon, did repeatedly: rise up from a prone position behind cover when a wounded man screamed, knowing the Japs would rain down grenades and rifle fire because they loved to kill the corpsmen. What gave him the will to do it was the fact that his brother was hurt and he had to save him. Just as his "brother" would do for him.

I think that it's always been so, and I think that in this scene from "Black Hawk Down," the character Hoot (a thinly disguised portrayal of a real-life D-boy named John Macejunas, a man so fierce that he was dubbed a "mutant strain" by his fellow Delta Force operators) tells it truly. Incidentally, although the movie ends with Hoot planning to go back out alone in uniform, Macejunas went back out alone to search for the missing dressed as a Somali, armed to the teeth beneath his caftan. Those for whom he searched, except Durant, were dead.

At the end of the movie "The Bridges at Toko-Ri," actor Frederic March's character, Admiral Tarrant, asks a rhetorical question about the civilian-lawyer-turned-bomber-pilot, Harry Brubaker, who reluctantly answers a call to duty and dies on a mission of questionable value in an earlier undeclared, and now mostly forgotten, war: "Where do we get such men?"

Men are men, and I suspect that there are such men in Iraq. If so, they'd better start showing up, and not on the side of al-Sadr. I have a sinking feeling that their supply on this side of the line is stretched a might thin.

Full post as published by Counseling Kevin on April 26, 2008 (boomark / email).