First, even though this isn't an American story, Americans were involved in the battle. Atony Beevor's book on Operation Market Garden, Monty's horrible miscalculation to crown himself with laurels, The Battle of Arnhem: The Deadliest Airborne Operation of World War II, closed with this poignant story:
A lieutenant of the
Parachute Regiment, who had married only five days before Operation Market Garden,
suffered a psychological breakdown under heavy shelling. Along with two medical orderlies in a similar
state, he hid in the smaller cellar of a large country house on the western
edge of Oosterbeek. The place was owned
by the Heilbroek family who were sheltering in the larger cellar. But the three men, evidently still frozen by
fear, stayed put throughout the battle and made no attempt to rejoin their
unit.
They were still there on
26 September, after the evacuation of Urquhart’s men across the Neder
Rijn. The Heilbroek family ran a great
risk. If the British soldiers were found
in their house, they would be executed.
They had to beg the Englishmen to escape when the Germans ordered the
population of Oosterbeek to abandon their homes. The Heilbroeks’ son finally persuaded the
three to follow him after dark to the Neder Rijn, where they could swim across
to Allied lines on the southern bank.
The two medical orderlies made it across, but in the fast current the
newly married lieutenant drowned.
Two years later, when
the war was over, the young widow visited Oosterbeek. Presumably, she had heard some of the details
from one of the orderlies, because she went to mee the Heilbroek family. One thing led to another, and not long
afterwards she married the sone who had led her husband to the riverbank.
I next read Eric Blehm's Fearless: The Undaunted Courage and Ultimate Sacrifice of SEAL Team SIX Operator Adam Brown. Brown was a SEAL who had a checkered past leading up to his making the teams. He was a go-getter in high school, including one notorious stunt where he jumped out of a moving vehicle on a bridge to land in the river some sixty feet below. But afterwards, he was largely aimless, which caused him to become a drug addict. He was ultimately arrested, went to rehab a couple of times, married, had children, and made it as an operator on SEAL team SIX. If that were all it was, the story would be unremarkable. Brown was the ultimate team player, always volunteering for whatever job needed done; nothing was beneath him. In a training accident, a practice round made it past his eye protection and compromised the sight in his right eye, which ultimately had to be removed. Then, while in Afghanistan on a mission, he right hand, which was his dominant hand, was crushed with three fingers almost severed. After the surgery, he retaught himself to shoot left-handed well enough to become a SEAL sniper. Then, on what was to be his last rotation before retirement, he was killed on a successful mission to kill a notorious bomb maker. He left behind a widow and two young children.
That story is impressive enough. But what touched me even more was how the SEAL community rallied around his widow and children afterwards. Some months after the funeral and the memorial,fellow operators went back to Arkansas, his home state, and jumped off the bridge where Brown had made his madcap jump some years before. There's a picture of their stunt in the book.
Brown had a tremendous effect on his fellow operators. He was a Christian and would engage doubters in talks about their faith. Several of them later turned to Christ and gave Brown the credit. Sadly, several of the team members who helped Brown's family after his death were tragically killed when their chopper took an RPG in Afghanistan.
The book is a page-turner.
Finally, we rented The Last Full Measure, the story of William H. Pitsenbarger, an Air Force parajumper who died providing assistance to an Army unit that was pinned down in what was the deadliest attack by VC and NVA forces in the Vietnam War. The story has many twists and turns as a civilian Pentagon attorney fights bureaucratic red tape to get Pitsenbarger's award upgraded to the Medal of Honor, which eventually he does. For anyone who is familiar with what Vietnam vets went through during that time and the closeness it created for them, this movie will move you. What Pitsenbarger did defies reason, but also provides evidence of John 15:13, that greater love hath no man this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.
So on this 244th Independence Day, this ungrateful colonial chooses to not only celebrate our independence, but also those men whose sacrifices made it so.
(c) 2020 The Truxton Spangler Chronicles
