Published Wednesday, September 29, 2010 1:59 PM
Updated Wednesday, September 29, 2010 2:00 PM
Some 55 of 87 living recipients of the Medal of Honor, our nation’s highest military decoration for extraordinary valor in our nation’s conflicts, will be in the Lowcountry for the gathering, so if you happen to meet one of them, thank him. He did more for you and me than any of us can possibly know.
The thing of it is, for any of us not to know who they are and what they did is downright egregious. Fortunately, we all have a chance to do a little better by them this week.
I have had the rare honor to have a chance to give back – however so slightly – to be part of the team that created a new book, “The Medal of Honor: Our American Heroes.”
The book, while written to appeal to a general audience, is also aimed at school-aged youth. The idea was to not only pay tribute to the heroes who received the medal and give a comprehensive history of the medal itself, but to help present our heroes as what they are: ordinary people who had to rise to extraordinary circumstances.
Unfortunately, in today’s society, our youth seem to be inundated with far too many bad role models and questionable “heroes.”
But how do we make concepts such as duty, honor, and patriotism real in this our instant gratification, short attention span world? More important, at least to kids, how do we make it cool?
One way, we believe, is to teach our youth not only about what these heroes did – because in the abstract, you have to admit that what they did was, in fact, pretty cool -- but to show them as what they are: real human beings who have lived real lives.
They didn’t come from the planet Krypton. They came from dusty farms and mountain hollows, orphanages and mansions, big cities and tiny towns, loving families and broken homes. They came from all racial and ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds. And they all, somewhere along the way, developed within themselves the attributes of character that allowed them to rise to and prevail over whatever circumstances in which they found themselves.
They are America in every sense of the word.
And they were all kids once, too.
In short, they are us.
To that end, we gathered information from those who were willing to share it and wrote stories from their perspectives as children. My job, one of the most rewarding I’ve ever undertaken, was to write those childhood vignettes.
It was a fascinating journey on so many levels; I don’t know that I can adequately explain it all here. Suffice it to say that we all did this project as a labor of love and a heartfelt gesture of thanks. I know I gave my best effort; I also know that it was far from adequate.
I just hope I’m somewhere in the ballpark, even if I’m just a splinter on the bench.
And to each of you gentlemen who wear the medal – indeed, to all who wear the uniform, thank you and God bless.