A couple for the historical record:
Former Texas congressman Sam Johnson.
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Archive for the ‘Heroism’ Category
Obit watch: May 28, 2020.
Thursday, May 28th, 2020Father Vincent Robert Capodanno.
Monday, May 25th, 2020Father Capodanno was ordained as a Catholic priest in 1958. He did missionary work in Taiwan and Hong Kong. But he felt a stronger calling.
So he enlisted, went through Officer Candidate School and was commissioned as a Lieutenant in 1965. He served with the United States Navy Chaplain Corps, and was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 7th Marines, 1st Marine Division. Later he was transferred to the 1st Medical Battalion, 1st Marine Division to finish out his first tour. He took six months of leave, and then re-enlisted and was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 5th Marines. Shortly after that, he was reassigned to the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, 1st Marine Division.
The troops called him “The Grunt Padre”.
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He became a true father to young boys on the front lines. He was “out there” with his men where he lived, ate, and slept as they did. To the young recruits thrust into the terrifying reality of battle, he was always available in his tent where anyone could drop in for comfort and guidance.
He shared his salary, rations and cigarettes with anyone in need. He could always be counted upon for a cold soda or a book from his reading library. When Christmas came around and soldiers felt forgotten, Father Vincent saw to it that no Marine was without gifts which he obtained through a relentless campaign from friends and organizations all over the world.
More importantly, he heard confessions for hours on end, instructed converts, and administered the sacraments. His granting of General Absolution before battle unburdened the consciences of the Marines and instilled in them the courage to fight. His mere presence in a unit was enough to lift the morale of all on patrol.
When men died, he was at their side so they would not die alone. He gave them Last Rites encouraging them to repent and persevere. In addition, he wrote countless letters of personal condolence to parents of wounded and dead Marines and offered solid grounding and hope to fellow Marines who lost friends.
When the pseudo-peace movement began to oppose the war, Fr. Vincent raised the spirits of demoralized soldiers in the field. He encouraged his men to oppose that same brutal communist system, which still oppresses Vietnam today.
When his second tour of duty was up, he begged his superiors for an extension. That extension was denied: he was supposed to go home in November of 1967.
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Father Capodanno was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his actions.
The Catholic Church is considering the case to canonize Father Capodanno as a saint. As I understand it, he has been named “Servant of God”, which is the first step in the process, but I can’t tell if there’s been any progress on this since 2013.
Obit watch: May 20, 2020.
Wednesday, May 20th, 2020Annie Glenn. The phrase “love story for the ages” is over-used, in my opinion. But it fits here. She and John Glenn were childhood playmates, and were married for 73 years.
“I could never get through a whole sentence,” she told The New York Times in 1980. “Sometimes I would open my mouth and nothing would come out.”
But in 1973, in her 50s, she decided to address her stuttering by participating in a fluency-shaping program developed by Dr. Ronald Webster at Hollins College (now Hollins University) in Virginia.
“I cannot make telephone calls, so John called and enrolled me,” she told The Boston Globe in 1975. “The first requirement was to do a taped interview. That established the fact that I’m an 85 percent stutterer, which is in the ‘most severe’ range.”
She immersed herself in Dr. Webster’s intensive, three-week program. By the end of it, she said, she could do things that had been beyond her before, like go to a mall and comfortably ask a store clerk where to find something.
“Those three weeks, we weren’t allowed at all to see our family, or to call, or anything,” she said.
“When I called John” at the program’s end, she added, “he cried.”
She became a champion for people with speech disorders and an adjunct professor in the speech pathology department at Ohio State University’s department of speech and hearing science. In 1987, the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association created an award in her honor, known as the Annie, presented annually to someone who demonstrates, as the organization puts it, her “invincible spirit in building awareness on behalf of those with communication disorders.”
“Annie Glenn remains a hero to many of us who in various periods of our lives couldn’t get a word, a thought, or a sentiment past our lips,” David M. Shribman, executive editor emeritus of The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, wrote in February in The Boston Globe on the occasion of Mrs. Glenn’s 100th birthday.
“She fought her condition, to be sure,” Mr. Shribman, a stutterer himself, wrote, “but she also fought for broad public understanding of stuttering, for the idea that stutterers weren’t merely shy, weren’t unintelligent, weren’t social pariahs.”
I don’t want to give away the end of the obit: I encourage you to go read it.
Obit watch: April 4, 2020.
Saturday, April 4th, 2020Rear Adm. Edward L. Feightner (United States Navy – ret.).
In his 34 years of Navy service, as a combat pilot in the Pacific, an instructor and a test pilot, Admiral Feightner flew more than 100 types of planes.
While he was a junior Navy officer, he twice shot down three Japanese planes on a single day and took part in battles in the Caroline Islands, the Marianas and the Philippines.
In the late 1940s, he became one of the early test pilots at Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland. He flew or analyzed the systems for fighters, transports, helicopters and just about any other type of aircraft envisioned by the Navy.
He became the head of the Navy’s fighter design program and was twice awarded the Legion of Merit for his testing and administrative activities. He received four Distinguished Flying Crosses for his combat exploits.
In the early 1950s, Admiral Feightner was a member of the Navy’s Blue Angels, whose close-formation flying and acrobatics thrilled crowds at air shows.
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Admiral Feightner was credited with his first “kill” when he shot down a Japanese dive bomber off the Santa Cruz Islands in October 1942. He downed three torpedo bombers off Rennell Island on Jan. 30, 1943, and became an ace (a pilot with at least five kills) when he shot down a Zero fighter off the Palau island chain in March 1944.
He shot down another Zero off Truk in April 1944 and downed three Zeros off Formosa (now Taiwan) on Oct. 12, 1944.
Admiral Feightner was 100 when he passed.
Ira Einhorn is burning in hell.
Steven Levy’s book on the case, The Unicorn’s Secret: Murder in the Age of Aquarius is available in a Kindle edition, and that’s probably the way to go if you want to read it. (As far as I know, that’s the only book about the case, though it was written before Einhorn’s capture and extradition: I don’t know if Levy updated subsequent editions or the Kindle version.)
A slightly belated Christmas present…
Wednesday, December 25th, 2019The CBC Radio adaptation of Frederick Forsyth’s The Shepherd.
There’s a lot of good stuff (if you’re a plane buff) linked from that page and elsewhere, including:
- A recreation of the flight path in the story using X-Plane.
- Restoring a Mosquito.
- An interview with the late Dave Barrett, former Pathfinder.
- What was it like to fly a Mosquito.
If you are a plane buff, I commend both the CBC links and Forsyth’s work to your attention.
(For those who may be unfamiliar with the story: young pilot is flying home for Christmas and suffers a total electrical failure over the north Atlantic. He has virtually no instruments, fog has set in, and if he bails out, he’ll probably freeze to death in the ocean. At the last possible moment, he’s led to a safe landing at an old RAF base by a Mosquito. And then the story goes in some unexpected directions from there.)
Nothing more to add…
Friday, December 20th, 2019Obit watch: October 10, 2019.
Thursday, October 10th, 2019My morning went down the drain (for reasons I’m not authorized to talk about) so I’m only getting to this now:
Francis Currey, American badass.
Here is his citation from the Congressional Medal of Honor Society’s website:
He was 94. His death leaves two surviving recipients of the Medal of Honor from WWII.
Ice water looked at him and said, “Damn, dude, you COLD!”
Wednesday, September 25th, 2019Captain Alfred Haynes, big damn hero, has passed away at 87.
Aviation buffs know this name well. For everyone else: Captain Haynes was the pilot of United Airlines Flight 232 on July 19, 1989. He was flying a DC-10 to Chicago from Denver.
About an hour into the flight, the engine mounted in the tail of the plane “exploded”. (It was later determined that a cracked fan disk had disintegrated.) Fragments of engine parts took out all three of the plane’s hydraulic systems. This was something that was never supposed to happen: the crew was actually in radio communication with United maintenance people who flat out could not believe the plane had lost all hydraulics (since the plane had three redundant systems). This was supposed to be impossible, and there were no procedures for dealing with this kind of emergency.
Without hydraulics, the pilots lost all normal control of the plane: they couldn’t move the flaps, elevators, or rudder. They couldn’t steer the plane or control ascent or descent. Captain Haynes and his crew (which included a DC-10 instructor pilot for United) figured out how to control the aircraft using only the engine throttles. They flew the plane for 44 minutes to Sioux City, Iowa, varying power to the engines to turn, climb and dive.
“Nothing in United’s training would have prepared the pilot for something like this,” John P. Ferg, a former director of flight operations for the airline, told The New York Times at the time. “By all laws of airmanship, he shouldn’t have gotten that close to the runway.”
Without the standard tools for slowing and steering the plane, Mr. Haynes approached Runway 22 of Sioux Gateway Airport going much too fast and descending at a much steeper angle than what was normal for a landing. As the plane tried to touch down, the right wing clipped the ground and the aircraft broke apart amid smoke and flame.
There were 296 people on the plane. 184 survived. 112 died.
Mr. Haynes would often say in later years that his thoughts were with those who did not survive — 111 that day and another a month later.
“It was very hard to get past the guilt of surviving,” he told New York magazine in 2009. “My job had been to get people from point A to point B safely, and I didn’t do it. I felt that I had killed them.”
Many of the accounts I’ve seen say that Captain Haynes resisted being called a hero. But:
Because of a promotion the airline was running, there were numerous children on the flight. One was Mr. [Spencer] Bailey, who was 3 at the time and today is a journalist and host, with Andrew Zuckerman, of the podcast Time Sensitive. He remembers nothing of the crash but learned about the efforts of the crew in later years.
“I would not be here, alive and typing this sentence, were it not for the actions of Captain Haynes and those who were in the cockpit with him,” he said by email. His mother, Frances, died in the crash, but his older brother Brandon survived.
“Brandon and I both know that day will always remain a part of us, but our lives continue onward, growing far beyond it,” Mr. Bailey said. “And for this fact, that we lived on and were able to grow up past July 19, 1989, we largely have Captain Haynes to thank.”
And:
I emphasized “and his crew” above for a reason. After he retired, Captain Haynes traveled around the country giving talks. I always wanted to see one of his presentations, but never did. (There’s an archived transcript of one here.) One of the things he emphasized was the importance of crew resource management (CRM) which was a relatively new concept at the time. (The FAA didn’t make CRM training mandatory until after the incident, but it was already part of United’s training.)
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Great moment from the CVR transcript:
Sioux City Approach: United two thirty-two heavy, the wind’s currently three six zero at one one three sixty at eleven. You’re cleared to land on any runway …
Captain: [Laughter] Roger. [Laughter] You want to be particular and make it a runway, huh?
(That CVR transcript is also the final act of “Charlie Victor Romeo“.)
He was also a well regarded Little League ump, which makes me smile:
“If he weren’t an airline pilot, he could be a professional umpire,” Jim Chavez, a Little League district administrator, said in 1989, when Mr. Haynes was in the news because of the crash. “He knows the book. When Al calls a strike, you know it’s a strike.”
On Dan Haynes’s Facebook page, the many tributes to his father were as apt to mention the umpiring as they were the heroics.
“A legend in aviation for sure,” one reads, “but he was so much more. I’ll never forget seeing him at the Little League regionals in San Bernardino, where he was the master of ceremonies. He gave a great speech in front of thousands, and then went into a booth behind the outfield, put an apron on, and started selling corn on the cob to raise $ for LL.”
(Subject line hattip: adapted from something FotB RoadRich once said about a different pilot in a different context. Errors and omissions are mine alone: I welcome any additions and/or corrections anyone has to offer.)
Obit watch: September 12, 2019.
Thursday, September 12th, 2019T. Boone Pickens. Oklahoma State football hardest hit.
Diet Eman has passed away at 99.
Ms. Eman, at 20, was living with her parents and bicycling to work at the Twentsche Bank in The Hague when, in May 1940, the Germans, hours after Hitler had vowed to respect Dutch neutrality, invaded the Netherlands. Her sister’s fiancé was killed on the first of five days of fighting. (A brother died later in a Japanese prison camp.)
Some of her neighbors, fellow churchgoers, argued that for whatever reason, God in his wisdom must have willed the German invasion. But Ms. Eman — herself so deeply religious that she would leave assassinations, sabotage and, for the most part, even lying to others — could find no justification for such evil.
She and her boyfriend, Hein Seitsma, joined a Resistance group (coincidentally called HEIN, an acronym translated as “Help each other in need”). They began by spreading news received on clandestine radios from the British Broadcasting Corporation, then smuggling downed Allied pilots to England, either by boat across the North Sea or more circuitously through Portugal.
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A plea for help by Herman van Zuidan, a Jewish co-worker of Ms. Eman’s at the bank, prompted her Resistance group to focus on stealing food and gas ration cards, forging identity papers and sheltering hundreds of fugitive Jews.
She said of the German occupiers, “It was beyond their comprehension that we would risk so much for the Jews.”
Ms. Eman delivered supplies and moral support to one apartment in The Hague that in late 1942 housed 27 Jews in hiding. The walls were paper thin. Crying babies and even toilet flushing risked raising the suspicions of neighbors, who knew only that a woman had been living there alone.
Ms. Eman was captured at one point and briefly imprisoned in a concentration camp: she managed to convince the Germans she was an innocent housemaid who knew nothing. Her fiance was also captured and was killed at Dachau.
It has been a bad week for photographers.
Robert Frank, noted for “The Americans”.
“The Americans” challenged the presiding midcentury formula for photojournalism, defined by sharp, well-lighted, classically composed pictures, whether of the battlefront, the homespun American heartland or movie stars at leisure. Mr. Frank’s photographs — of lone individuals, teenage couples, groups at funerals and odd spoors of cultural life — were cinematic, immediate, off-kilter and grainy, like early television transmissions of the period. They would secure his place in photography’s pantheon. The cultural critic Janet Malcolm called him the “Manet of the new photography.”
But recognition was by no means immediate. The pictures were initially considered warped, smudgy, bitter. Popular Photography magazine complained about their “meaningless blur, grain, muddy exposures, drunken horizons, and general sloppiness.” Mr. Frank, the magazine said, was “a joyless man who hates the country of his adoption.”
Neil Montanus. He worked in several different areas of photography, including underwater and microscopic. But he was perhaps most famous as one of Kodak’s leading “Colorama” photographers: he took 55 out of the 565 photos, which were displayed in Manhattan’s Grand Central Terminal between 1950 and 1990.
I kind of wish “On Taking Pictures” was still doing new shows, as I figure Jeffery Saddoris and Bill Wadman would have a lot to say about these two.
Finally: Daniel Johnston, singer/songwriter and Austin icon. Don’t have much to say: for me, he fell into the same category as Roky Erickson.
Obit watch: May 30, 2019.
Thursday, May 30th, 2019I haven’t found a print obituary to point to yet, but Lawrence tipped me off to a Facebook post: multiple award winning horror writer Dennis Etchison has passed on.
Also by way of Lawrence: Louis Levi Oakes, last of the Mohawk code talkers.
The veteran was one of 17 Mohawks from Akwesasne, which straddles the Quebec, Ontario and New York state borders, who received code-talker training while stationed in Louisiana.
Kanien’kéha, the Mohawk language, was one of 33 Indigenous languages used during the war to send encoded messages between Allied forces so enemies could not understand what was being said.
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“I only knew Levi for a very short period of time, but he meant a tremendous amount to me,” said Marc Miller, parliamentary secretary to Canada’s minister of Crown-Indigenous relations. “I can only imagine what he meant to his family and his people who had the privilege of knowing him for far longer.
“Due to the secrecy of his mission in WW II, the extent of his contributions as a Mohawk code talker have only recently been known and honoured. My hope is that we continue to honour his memory and contributions in death much longer than we did in life.”
Obit watch: May 14, 2019.
Tuesday, May 14th, 2019Robert Maxwell, the kind of badass that’s rare these days.
September 7, 1944:
Technician Fifth Grade Maxwell and a few other G.I.s were on observation duty outside their battalion headquarters near the city of Besançon in eastern France when German soldiers got within yards of their outpost and opened fire.
The Germans blasted away with automatic weapons and even antiaircraft guns, seeking to destroy the stone house where the battalion commanders were stationed. The G.I.s on sentry duty were armed only with .45-caliber automatic pistols, but they fired back.
And then a grenade was hurled over the fence in front of the house’s courtyard and landed beside Technician Maxwell. Using an Army blanket for protection, he fell on the grenade.
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The grenade exploded, knocking him unconscious, tearing away part of one foot and peppering his head and left arm with shrapnel. World War II was over for Technician Maxwell, but he received the Medal of Honor. It cited him for inspiring his fellow G.I.s to join with him in a firefight that delayed the German onslaught and then, having “unhesitatingly hurled himself squarely upon’’ the grenade, “using his blanket and his unprotected body to absorb the full force of the explosion.”
The citation called it an “act of instantaneous heroism” that “permanently maimed” him but “saved the lives of his comrades.”
Mr. Maxwell was 98 when he passed away Saturday. According to the NYT obit, there are three Medal of Honor recipients from WWII that are still alive.
Fleming Begaye Sr., one of the Navajo code talkers.
Mr. Begaye survived the Battle of Tarawa, a costly offensive on a Japanese-held Pacific atoll that took place in 1943. Out of 18,000 Marines who landed on Betio, more than 1,000 died.
“His landing craft was blown up and he literally had to swim to the beach to survive,” Mr. [Peter] MacDonald [also a code talker – DB] said of Mr. Begaye at the White House ceremony.
Mr. Begaye landed on Tinian, one of the Mariana Islands, in 1944 and was “shot up real badly,” Mr. MacDonald said. He spent a year in a naval hospital.
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César González Barrón, aka “Silver King“, died last Saturday. Silver King was a lucha libre wrestler, who also played “Ramses” in “Nacho Libre”. He died during a match in London against “Youth Warrior” (Juventud Guerrera).
Mr. González Barrón was a star in Mexican wrestling, known as lucha libre, in which combatants wear elaborate masks and take on outlandish personas.
At the event in London, called the Greatest Show of Lucha Libre, Mr. González Barrón had reprised his role as the evil Ramses.
He was the son of a famous wrestler known as Dr. Wagner, and he had been wrestling professionally since 1985, according to his profile on the film website IMDB. During his career, he was a CMLL World Heavyweight champion, an AAA World Tag Team champion and had won many other championships.
Goro Shimura, mathematician, passed away about a week ago.
Elliptic curves are pretty important to modern cryptography, and Mr. Shimura’s work is foundational in that area. But there’s more to the story:
So basically, this reduced the problem of proving Fermat’s Last Theorem to proving the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture.
The story I’ve heard (I wasn’t there) is that Wiles spent the better part of two days going through his proof of the conjecture, finally finished it…and then added, “Oh, by the way, by Ribert’s result, this means that Fermat’s Last Theorem is also true. Q.E.D.”
Obit watch part 2: April 9, 2019.
Tuesday, April 9th, 2019Lt. Colonel Richard E. Cole (United States Air Force – Ret.)
He was 103.
Lieutenant (at the time) Cole was Jimmy Doolittle’s co-pilot on the Tokyo raid. He was the last survivor of Doolittle’s Raiders.
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Doolittle, Lieutenant Cole and the other three crewmen of their plane bailed out in rain and fog soon after their bomber crossed the Chinese coast as darkness arrived. Lieutenant Cole landed in a pine tree atop a mountain and was unhurt except for a black eye. He made a hammock from his parachute and went to sleep. At dawn, he began walking, and late that day he made contact with Chinese guerrillas.
He was soon reunited with Doolittle, who had come down in a rice paddy, and their three fellow crewmen. The five joined up with other stranded airmen who had been rescued. The Chinese took them all on an arduous journey, much of it by riverboat, to an air strip, where they were picked up by a United States military transport plane and flown to Chungking, the headquarters for the Nationalist Chinese.
For the record:
Lt. Cole went on to fly transport planes over the Hump. He also served with the 1st Air Commando Group.
Lt. Cole’s page on doolittleraider.com which contains some great photos. Obit from MySanAntonio.com. I had no idea the gentleman lived in Comfort (about 90 minutes up the road from me). Cool story from the Express News in 2018.
Dick Cole’s War: Doolittle Raider, Hump Pilot, Air Commando sounds like a fascinating book.
Rest in peace, soldier.