AM radio, Long Drives, and No Heroes
So I am driving home from a business trip and listening to some classic country music station on AM skip radio, hoping for some Johnny Cash, when a Paul Harvey segment comes on. Paul Harvey? I wasn’t sure he was still around. Maybe he is not because if he is he must be about 150? It may have been an old recording for all I know, but his story was really cool and got me to thinking.
He talked about a guy named Jim, who was in the middle of the WW2 Allied beachhead landing in Italy, with the U.S. 3rd Infantry Division, during Operation Shingle, at Anzio.
He was the tallest guy in his company, 6’7”, so his sergeant ordered him to jump out of the landing craft first because he would have the least chance of drowning. (Doesn’t that sound like a good time.) Once they took the beach, Jim was given the mission to capture a farmhouse where a German machinegun nest was set up. Following hand to hand combat, hand grenades, mortar shells blowing up all around, and lots of stuff that is a hell of lot more fun to watch in a movie than to really do, Jim succeeded in taking the gun (by which we mean killing all the Germans), but was then hit in the leg by a machine gun bullet. The force of the bullet knocked him into an icy creek, where he lay for 18 hours before being found. The bones in his leg were shattered. His recovery in military hospitals took a year, and he always afterward walked with a pronounced, and famous, limp.
Needed to stand on a box to climb on his horse.
If you haven’t figured it out, the guy was James “Jim” Arness, or Matt Freakin Dillon, for those of us who grew up watching Gunsmoke. This is the guy who shot a bad guy in the OPENING CREDITS of his show each week, How cool was that! (well at least until it became a little too non-PC). But let me tell you, that was tame stuff compared to the account of what he actually did in Anzio. The Paul Harvey segment stirred my interest, so I read the full account of his actions on the net, and I highly recommend it to everyone. It is un-freakin-believeable. If you think he played a badass on TV (and I surely do) it was nothing compared to what he did for real.
His military awards and medals include: the Bronze Star; the Purple Heart; the European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal with three bronze campaign stars; the World War II Victory Medal and the Combat Infantryman Badge.
All this got me to thinking about the difference in Hollywood stars from my childhood and the pretenders we have today. Back then, it seems Hollywood took American heroes and made them stars, guys like Audie Murphy and Lee Marvin. Jimmy Stewart, Clark Gable, they were big stars when they enlisted, and Stewart in particular flew bomber missions, something that took so much balls I can’t even imagine it. Their service to their country reads like their movies, but more spectacular.
Today we make stars out of America-hating punks like Sean Penn and Alec Baldwin, or morons like Joy whoever-her-dumb-ass-is on the View, or Sean Combs. We have a society where being a patriot is likened to being a redneck moron – Where are the heroes? My generation had heroes to look up to, guys like US Marshal Matt Dillon of Dodge City, but somehow we failed to raise a new generation of them. How was our parenting so flawed? Why does Hollywood no longer make Stars out of real life heroes? Why did we choose to “tune it, drop out, and get high” instead of being heroes to our kids like our folks were heroes to us? I wonder if Jim would say it was worth it?
Comment by Brandon on 23 October 2008 at 10:51 am:
I’m going to go with the lack of universal conscription as part of your heroes problem Rag. When EVERYONE in a generation was in the military, a good chunk of them had done something incredibly brave (or foolish depending on who you ask) and could be called a hero.
Comment by Tom on 23 October 2008 at 12:09 pm:
Nah, Brandon, that ain’t it. You’ve got my book–go back to the piece I wrote about my father landing at Omaha. He enlisted because he wanted to avoid honest work on the farm, not from any patriotic desire.
People are not heroes out of a “higher calling” or “patriotism.” They’re heroes on a “oh my fucking God” basis–doing things above and beyond the call of duty because if they didn’t one of their friends would die or the sonuvabitch that shot at them’d get away.
Many of the riflemen of WW2 never fired their guns during a combat–they didn’t see any reason to risk getting their heads blown off when they couldn’t even see an enemy. There was an entire analysis called “Men Against Fire” that was written by an Army historian who conducted interviews with the soldiers. In the interviews, they discovered that the bigger the weapon that the soliders wielded, the more likely they were to fire. Other factors which increased the liklihood of engaging included the number of other soldiers present and the presence of NCOs in the same area.
Other armies during WW2 fired more because of their training–the Germans and Japanese used whistles to signal troops over a large portion of the battlefield. The Soviets used flags to command and (until late ‘42) Commissars with guns *behind* the troops to shoot slackers.
What Americans *did* have in spades was an individualism that showed under extreme stress. On Omaha, the officer corps were decimated during the early waves. The troops were stuck on the beach with 70% casualties. Any other army, with the possible exception of the Japanese, would have caved in and died on the beach. It was the individual soldier’s tendency toward innovation and self-reliance under disasterous conditions that enabled them to find a way to blow holes in the barbed wire and flank the pillboxes.
Americans are nothing special en masse, not in combat, not in economics, not in social innovation. It is as individuals, rising to challenges that we outshine the rest of the world. We have not lost that yet and I hope that we never will. We just have not had anything particularly stressful to fight against lately.
This has changed. I look forward to the next ten years.
Comment by Joshua on 23 October 2008 at 5:13 pm:
I cant imagine the courage it must have taken to be a WWI or WWII fighter pilot, or to be one of the guys taking the beaches at Normandy. While I don’t buy into any particular generation being greater than any other, my generation lacks the toughness and the willingness to do hard work of my grandfather’s generation, and because of that, we might be in trouble
Comment by Todd on 23 October 2008 at 6:48 pm:
I’m fairly ignorant when it comes to history and pop culture. I know the names “Sean Penn” and “Alec Baldwin,” but I couldn’t tell you anything about them other than that they’re movie stars. To make a long story short, I don’t have any facts to bring to the table to support or oppose your thesis.
However, I can comment about human psychology and the writing style of your post. The post has a nostalgic feel to me. As a general rule, people will overrate things from their childhood and underrate those from middle to old age. The old heroes seem more heroic, and the old villains fade with time. The new villains stand out, and the new heroes don’t seem so special.
“We have a society where being a patriot is likened to being a redneck moron” — I don’t think this is true, in general. Yes, some people are anti-American and will feel anyone who likes anything about America is a moron. I don’t think there are a lot of people like this, and these people existed 50 years ago, too.
There is a specific brand of “patriotism” that is probably correctly associated with moronity. I am talking about “patriotism” that requires blind, unquestioning trust in authority. I’m talking about “patriotism” that requires ignorance and fear of the fact that we’re just one of many countries in this world and that the other ones have some effect on us (and we have an even bigger effect on them).
It actually seems quite strange to me that military heroes would become movie stars. It seems most natural to me that movie stars should be, well, those who are best at being movie stars. People with excellent acting skills that look good on film and have a knack for drawing attention to themselves (even if it means eccentric behavior and being a poor role model for children).
And I’m not sure about tuning in and getting high (these things are hard to statistically measure, since the means of tuning in – radio, TV, internet – have changed, as have the drugs of choice), but does the current generation drop out more often than yours did? I know college graduation rates are far higher than they were back then, but I have no idea about junior high and high school graduation rates, literacy levels, and other measures like that.
Comment by Mugs on 24 October 2008 at 11:29 am:
Ragnar, I may be the only one who understood the sentiment behind your post. Perhaps, this is because I sense we come from the same generation – the “Me” generation. I too lament the passing of the World War II guys. They filled my life growing up. My father was a Marine on his way to the Pacific when they dropped the bomb. The Japanese wounded my Uncle Tony twice on Iwo, once by bayonet. Our friends, the Wendt brothers served in three different branches. Wally Wendt was on two ships sunk in the Pacific. His brother piloted twenty bombing missions over Germany and then signed up for twenty more. The third Wendt fought with Patton through France and Germany.
These guys are leaving us now. My father and Tony are gone. When I see an old man driving too slowly or walking with the aid of a cane I wonder where he has been and what he has seen. When this young generation (like the ones who propel this blog) looks at us, I fear they see precious few heroes. And so they look elsewhere and create heroism in those who never earned it. Or in the case of some responders, they think you overrated it or underrated something or that we won the war by never sticking our heads out of the foxhole.
I think it is our fault, not theirs. They do not know what a hero should look like. We are the ones who brought them Presidents like Clinton, George Bush Jr. and now probably Obama. I think it is safe to say these are the first three “Me” generation Presidents. I can’t picture any of them surviving 5+ years in the Hanoi Hilton. I can’t picture them surviving 5+ days. We live in an era where words are more important than deeds.
I am depressed now. I just found out Mr. Rogers (of Mr. Rogers Neighborhood) was not really a Marine sniper. Apparently, rumors of his seventy-five kills in Nam are not true. Too bad, it was a good story. I know why it seemed so believable and why it spread so wide. It did so because when we were young we knew many like Mr. Rogers. All were ordinary men. Few showed their scars. Wearing long-sleeved sweaters to hide the tattoos or burns seemed like a natural thing for a man of that generation to do. It protected the kiddies.
And, by the way, I do believe Jim would think it was worth it. That’s just the man he was. I knew Jim. And so did you.
Comment by Ragnar on 29 October 2008 at 8:49 am:
I do think some of you guys are missing a little of the point here. First of all, to assume that everyone was a conscripted soldier is pretty far off. A whole bunch of these guys volunteered, enlisted, signed up, whatever. And more to the point, most of the country came together and did their part, or at least did something, for the cause. Victory gardens, women working in the factories, gas rationing, metal collection drives, it was remarkable. There were heroes everywhere, and not just because they were drafted and had to hero-up or die. Well actually that was kind of it, because victory was not only not assured, it was not looking too likely there for a while.
I read one account of a naval officer who said he first realized we had to eventually win, when he recognized that our shipyards were building more victory ships each week than the Nazis were building torpedoes.
And I think the reason we made movie stars out of some of the war heroes is simply because we admired them and wanted to see more of them, to know more of them. We don’t think like that anymore.