I pity the younger generation as they savage their sensory input with ipods and video games. They can be in a crowd, yet as isolated as anyone afflicted with blindness or deafness. They are as detached from human encounter as any cloistered monk. They totally miss the angels and heroes among us.
I suspect that I am equally blind to the heroes and angels, but sometimes I get it right. When I do, it is a blessing. To me. Let me share with you a story a story where doctor meets hero.
I was called to a rehab facility to consult on a patient. He was in his late 80’s, with some minor urologic complaint. He was recovering from a joint replacement surgery. Upon completion of his rehabilitation, he would return to a nursing home where he lived alone, a widower.
In reviewing his chart, I saw that he was on heavy duty antidepressants and was undergoing psychiatric evaluation. The staff confirmed a deep depression, such that it actually complicated his rehabilitation. When I arrived, he was in physical therapy, which is done in a huge room with lots of work stations, the room crowded with patients and staff, even family members.
There he was, a slight fellow with tousled white hair, somehow seeming even smaller than his given size, as though his spirit had imploded within him. He gave me an obligatory smile and agreed to a little interview.
His urologic questioning done, I went on, as is my habit, to take a military history. Had he served? Yes. In wartime? Yes, World War II. What theatre of operations? CBI, loadmaster. Being a graduate of a military college and an Air Force veteran, I knew immediately the import of this revelation. You will search hard to find an endeavor as unknown to the public yet as hallowed in the Air Force as CBI. God gave me a nudge, and I knew what to do.
I stood and said to everyone around us ‘folks, if you have the time, I want you to gather around us. I want to tell you a story, a story of heroism. For surely, you are in the presence of a genuine hero.’ The staff, even some patients, gathered around this patient and me. I gave this man a very long, slow, military salute. This is the story I told to them:
The year is 1942. It is the darkest year of the Second World War. Japan has committed one million ground soldiers to conquer China. China is fractured between emperor forces, communist forces, and the forces of Chiang Kai-shek who sought to establish a democratic nation. Without supplies, Chaing could not prevail and would have to surrender. This would free up a huge number of Japanese ground forces to shift into opposing our soldiers fighting their way up the Pacific archipelago.
That combat was already bloody and brutal. The Japanese had closed the ‘Burma Road,’ the only overland route into China from India; India being under British Allied control. The only Allied alternative was to fly supply planes ‘over the hump.’ CBI was the China-Burma-India theatre which undertook flying planes over the Himalayan Mountains to bring supplies to the Chinese army.
The flights were brutal: crossing over the world’s high mountains, hampered by cold, poor oxygen delivery, poor maps, dangerously fickle storms. Then to descend into China where they could be met by Japanese fighter aircraft, Japanese soldiers on the ground, or to find that Chinese peasants had moved their cattle onto the meadows that had been cleared for landing strips. Unload, then back over the hump.
In the course of their effort, these boys lost over 500 planes and nearly 2,000 men. They delivered nearly a half million tons of supplies and kept China in the war, keeping Japan’s ground forces committed and unable to shift to the defense of Japan.
The staff got the memo, crowding closer to him, giving him genuine smiles of admiration, touching his shoulder. He was sitting up straighter, shoulders square. He, predictably, denied the label of ‘hero’. I told the staff that every hero I have met has denied being a hero. When they hear the term used, in their mind they cast back and label, as heroes, those 2,000 young men who never returned, whose bodies are even now caught in the eternal snow of those mountains.
As I returned to visit my heroic friend, I was glad to see that the staff had begun to treat him with the genuine deference due to a hero. A later report reached me that, upon his return to the nursing home, he was off his antidepressants. His heroism had been reported by the rehab staff to the nursing home staff.
What had I done? Nothing, except to remind this man, and the people around him, of a time in his life when he was relevant; a time when, but for him, the world would have been fundamentally, and negatively, transformed. A time when he fought to keep the world free; yes, even free for ipods and video games.
