STEPHEN DEN BESTE says clearly what most people of good will already know:

The implication that heroes are unusual, better than the rest of us, is wrong. Most real heroes are not extraordinary men; they are ordinary men in extraordinary circumstances.

And they know it, which is why they do not brag. They may have been heroes, but they saw many others be heroes. They know they are not extraordinary.

Uncommon valor is a common virtue. That's why hundreds of firemen charged into the WTC towers on September 11, 2001, and died there. And after one tower collapsed, that's why the firemen in the other tower did not flee, and in their turn also died.

Real heroes know that decorations are only given to those who were lucky enough to be heroic while someone important was watching. Real heroes will have seen many other heroic acts which were never acknowledged by anyone, except by the other members of the team. And ultimately that is the only acknowledgement they truly value, for only their teammates really understand what they went through.

A man who brags about his heroism is no hero. And the men who served with him will know it.

From -- The price of heroism

THIS LINK: STRENGTH (part 1) NOW.

THIS LINK: STRENGTH (part 2) NEXT

DAVID ENDERS IS A 23-YEAR OLD American spending his time as a "freelance journalist" in Iraq. His Learning Lessons of War on the Streets of Baghdad includes an interesting list of things his university somehow failed to teach him:

How to clean and fire an assault rifle. My co-workers and I had one in the house for "protection," though I'm not particularly sure what I would have done had we been in trouble. I've been encouraged, by Iraqis and foreigners, to carry a pistol as well, but can't bring myself to do it. I was robbed by the police (three of them, one of me); the neighbors killed a pair of looters on our front lawn; looters threatened to kidnap me. That, and the fact that unknown assailants are shooting at reporters, all drive home the futility of owning an assault rifle and having no intention of using it.

Proper etiquette at checkpoints, American or otherwise. Even though I speak American English, I often thought the soldier was waving me through a checkpoint, when what he really meant was, "Stop or I'll put lots of holes in you and your car, [expletive expletive]!"
[snip]

What to do when you're at a news conference and Donald Rumsfeld won't call on anyone but the pool reporters. It's frustrating, being the youngest person at a news conference. Rumsfeld seems to call only on the faces he recognizes, and I wasn't one of them. I considered throwing my shoe or trying my professor's tactic of simply interrupting, but I figured all the Special Forces guys in attendance would arrest me. So I never had the chance to ask the question I've been dying to know the answer to: "How can you say things are going well when people are shooting rockets at the airport before your plane lands ... sir?"

How to recognize and identify various unexploded bombs and munitions. For a short time, a land mine sat on the sidewalk outside our office, and we often saw other types of explosives lying about. And let's not forget the ones people keep planting in the roads and in front of buildings.
[snip]

Making other people comfortable with my activities. "No, it's OK, Mom. That explosion wasn't anywhere near our house. No, everyone's fine. What am I eating? I'm eating Iraqi food, Mom. It's good. Lots of oil."

Determining who wants to kill me and who doesn't. "Where am I from? France. Good to meet you, too."

FROM ONE SOLDIER'S PHOTOLOG ON YAFRO:

"On the far right is a true American Hero! I want to tell you about my friend. His name is First Lieutenant Dave. Dave was the type of officer who looked after his men all the time. He had all the attributes you wanted in a leader. He was selfless, led from the front, caring, hard, tactically and technically proficient, and above all a friend. He was the man you wanted with on your right when the bullets were flying. I was engaged in a firefight with him in May and he was the bedrock of stability. He led his platoon calmly and with experience. He showed me what an officer should be. On the night of October 18, 2003, he was leading a resupply convoy when his vehicle was directly engaged with rocket propelled grenades and well aimed small arms fire. Immediately his gunner was killed by the initial onslaught. Dave was hit in the femoral artery. The vehicle hit a berm and pinned the driver underneath the front wheel. Dave immediately exited the vehicle and returned well aimed fire in order to destroy the enemy. Despite his wounds, he moved around the vehicle and freed the pinned soldier. He then moved the vehicle away from the area. He then returned fire onto the enemy prior to collapsing from his wounds..By this time, a reaction force was on site in order to kill the enemy. He fought hard and led the way saving the lives of his fellow soldiers. Dave was killed doing his job. He is sorely missed by his comrades. He was a fine man, leader, and friend..You will never be forgetten!! RLTW He is on the far right of this picture with his hand on his hip."

-- italyjumper's Yafro Moblog

WITH THE NATION’S FAUX INTELLIGENTSIA still reeling from “shame-shock-horror,” and the Hounds of the Blathervilles in full cry for Donald Rumsfeld's head on a pike, the likelihood of the picture above being seen on the front pages of the "leading" newspapers, or at the top of the news on any of the network news shows approaches absolute zero. After all, just what is the story here? Why should it be of interest to the Americans these “news organizations” supposedly serve?

The story concerns a medal given to a Marine: Marine Receives Navy Cross. The marine in question is Capt. Brian R. Chontosh. “Chontosh” -- an unusual name, one that should be easy to search. But go to Google News and search for “Chontosh.” The hits are meager to say the least. As of this writing, there are eleven. To put this in perspective, a search for “Kerry Medals” returns 1,680 references from Google News while “Iraq Prisons” is a bonanza of reports and commentary -- 8, 660 to be precise. With such an overwhelming glut of news why should any news organization feature a story about the Navy Cross being given to a Marine? What’s that story got, anyway?

The story is this:

Chontosh, 29, from Rochester, N.Y. , received the naval service's second highest award for extraordinary heroism while serving as Combined Anti-Armor Platoon Commander, Weapons Company, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division, 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom March 25, 2003.

While leading his platoon north on Highway 1 toward Ad Diwaniyah, Chontosh's platoon moved into a coordinated ambush of mortars, rocket propelled grenades and automatic weapons fire. With coalition tanks blocking the road ahead, he realized his platoon was caught in a kill zone.

He had his driver move the vehicle through a breach along his flank, where he was immediately taken under fire from an entrenched machine gun. Without hesitation, Chontosh ordered the driver to advance directly at the enemy position enabling his .50 caliber machine gunner to silence the enemy.

He then directed his driver into the enemy trench, where he exited his vehicle and began to clear the trench with an M16A2 service rifle and 9 millimeter pistol. His ammunition depleted, Chontosh, with complete disregard for his safety, twice picked up discarded enemy rifles and continued his ferocious attack.

When a Marine following him found an enemy rocket propelled grenade launcher, Chontosh used it to destroy yet another group of enemy soldiers.

When his audacious attack ended, he had cleared over 200 meters of the enemy trench, killing more than 20 enemy soldiers and wounding several others.

Try to imagine, for only a moment, what those actions entail. Try to put yourself, if for only a moment, on the ground and in the boots of Capt. Chontosh. Try to envision what it is to walk down a trench filled with people whose only mission is to kill you. They number more than 20. You are one. They are all armed. You have one rifle and one pistol. When you run out of ammunition, you have to take up the arms of the enemy. You don’t know if they are loaded or to what extent. But you keep going. In time, after you have killed 20 soldiers and wounded others, the shooting finally stops. Somehow, you are still alive. Somehow, your comrades are still alive. For now.

Could you walk down that trench? I couldn’t. I know all the usual answers: training, duty, responsibility to the men under your command. None of them really answer the question, do they? Call it courage and hold your manhood cheap if you cannot begin to match it.

But you heard nothing about it, did you? You heard, instead, about the sadists until you couldn’t stand to hear any more and then you heard more. You heard about the man from an ancient war who did or did not toss medals away until you couldn’t care about it less and then you heard more.

If you were unfortunate enough to read the words of George Will, professional spinster, this morning, you read his handy guide to S&M:

Americans must not flinch from absorbing the photographs of what some Americans did in that prison. And they should not flinch from this fact: That pornography is, almost inevitably, part of what empire looks like. It does not always look like that, and does not only look like that. But empire is always about domination. Domination for self-defense, perhaps. Domination for the good of the dominated, arguably. But domination.
--No Flinching From the Facts (washingtonpost.com)

That’s what the Washington Post brought you this morning. Why? Because you haven’t had your nose rubbed in this enough yet. How does George Will and the Washington Post know this? Because it would seem that, as of this morning, Donald Rumsfeld still has his job. That’s what is important to the writers and editors of the Post and the other “leading” news organizations today. The prison story with its tops and bottoms and naked images that can be run in the paper with a little discrete blurring here and there is important to these organizations because it is something they can understand. It’s permissible porn and they like it, they really, really like it. Indeed, it would seem that George Will likes it a little too much.

Courage, though, real physical courage that requires a man to put the lives of his comrades above his own life, is beyond the shrunken moral scope of those who’ve spent the last week grinding out every last drop of rancid, phony outrage out of the Iraq Prison centerfolds they been displaying. Outrage and shock may have been permissible and even correct at the outset of the incident, but now doesn’t it seem as if there’s an element of perverse enjoyment creeping into the whole thing?

I began this comment thinking that it was an outrage that a report on the heroism of Capt. Brian R. Chontosh wasn’t deemed worthy of comment by the “leaders” of the “leading news organizations” of the United States.

I’ve changed my mind.

It is they who are not worthy of him.

===
UPDATE: More on this remarkable man at Bob Lonsberry: SOMETHING THAT DIDN'T MAKE THE NEWS

Still more at: BLACKFIVE: Captain Brian Chontosh - Someone You Should Know

Glenn Coggeshell is running for congress at The Lord of the Political Rings

The battle for middle earth has begun
In Washington DC.

"I fight not for what is gained, I fight for what can be lost."

With the choices we're getting , it is obviously time to send a Tolkien fan in. It might be just the ticket. At the very least, we can say "Now, he's really ready to cut the fat out of government."

Excerpt from the entire letter via The Conservative Cajun

"And oh by the way, we do have some common ground. I'm with you on not sending jobs out of the country. I have been against NAFTA since it's inception and believe it should be repealed.

"Now having said that I have an idea how you can help bring jobs back into the United States.

"Why don't you have your wife talk to the folks who run Heinz Foods and
get them to move all their factories into the U.S.A. since the lion's share of them are in foreign countries? That ought to help some."

Pat Tillman 1976-2004

The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.

To-day, the road all runners come,
Shoulder high-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It whithers quicker than the rose.

Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears:

Now you will not swell the rout
of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.

So set, before its echos fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.

And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl's.

-- A.E. Housman

If you want to know what Iraq is like right now on the ground, you owe it to yourself to read the entire entry from ginmar's Live Journal titled: The Alamo is over-rated as a tourist attraction, dammit.

Excerpt:

We faced a force of four to five hundred rebels, with mortars, RPGs and various handheld weapons. There were four US soldiers---myself and the other people in my team----about twenty coalition soldiers, and thirty or so scared British and Aussie expats, including the British governor. The coalition soldiers had a couple tank/hybrid vehicles, but they didn't have much ammo for them. By midnight, everyone was running out. We kept impressing this on Higher, and they just couldn't get that through their heads. What the fuck good are they? We are running out of ammo. We will be over-run if light hits this place in the morning and finds us still here.

More than that, it was the concrete reality that you were going to die. I felt that a few times yesterday, last night, and this morning. Escape attempt after attempt fell through, and those mortars started hitting the grounds, the gate, the vehicles. The enemy sent word that when darkness fell, they were going to over-run the compound and exterminate everyone there. The whole Iraqi security force just up and quit. One guy claimed that his mother had had a heart attack and he had to go home. I heard that on the radio myself. It's the dog-ate-my-schoolwork excuse as applied to battle.

Fallujah was on everyone's mind, but nobody---thank God----said it.

I can't even grasp that we lived through it. I don't think it's hit me yet.

What makes it worse was that we kept trying to get reinforcements and air cover and evac, and eventually we had to do it ourselves. We called up around 1500 because it became apparent that we weren't going to get out, requesting air cover. We thought it would be over by 1700. By then, though, we realized something else was going on---darkness falls at seven. We heard that the whole province was under control, and that Sadr's representatives had offered a cease fire while they negotiated. No other government building in the province was not under his control. Our little force, outmanned and outgunned, held him off for better than twenty hours, and then slipped out under his nose.

He wanted to keep us there, be his bargaining chips while he tightened his fist around the province. And that fucking governor went along with it. We eventually found out the governor was contacting the command and telling them, no, no Evac behind our backs. He wanted US Marines dropped off and the civilians put in the helicopters while they secured his villa and offices. His own people were running around trying to arrange Evac, and kept counter-manding him. Then he'd go on the air and countermand them. I kept overhearing conversations I wasn't supposed to hear.

I can't describe what it's like. You're wearing twenty pounds of gear in helmet and vest, and the sound the bombs make screeching in seems not so much audible as it sensory. You feel it first. You know what sound a bullet makes going through the air? SWWWWWiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiisssssssssssssssssssssssshhhhh. It seems to burrow through the air with an odd slowness, as if it were greasy and that makes it slip through the air. If I were 11 Bravo, I'd have earned my combat infantrymen's badge, except of course the fact that I'm a woman means I don't get stuff like that. The way the Army has it set up, it doesn%u2019t matter if you do the job, if you're a woman----you're not supposed to do it, so you don't get acknowledgement if you do.

No air cover? No ammunition? No EVAC?

Right now, downstairs, the usual passel of pundits are sifting through the catbox of the 9/11 Commission's "very important work." Right now, in Iraq, there's a shortage of ammunition. And our soldiers in harm's way.

Pointer via: LGF .

The sane and persuasive thoughts of Victor Davis Hanson continue today in The Mirror of Fallujah: No more passes and excuses for the Middle East

The enemy of the Middle East is not the West so much as modernism itself and the humiliation that accrues when millions themselves are nursed by fantasies, hypocrisies, and conspiracies to explain their own failures. Quite simply, any society in which citizens owe their allegiance to the tribe rather than the nation, do not believe in democracy enough to institute it, shun female intellectual contributions, allow polygamy, insist on patriarchy, institutionalize religious persecution, ignore family planning, expect endemic corruption, tolerate honor killings, see no need to vote, and define knowledge as mastery of the Koran is deeply pathological.

Required reading.

The Insight of Allah Strikes Again.

If you don't have Victor Hanson on your reading list, you should. His essays for the last three years represent one of the longest runs of excellence in writing and thinking we've seen in many decades.

Excerpt from "When I Was Young:"

When I was young, my father used to get me out of bed, in a thick John Kennedy accent, and with perfect Bostonian mimicry order me to start the day with "viga." I think he meant "vigor" in the sense of the new Kennedesque idealism at home and abroad. My isolationist grandfather would sigh and concede that Harry Truman was right after all, in spending all our hard-earned tax dollars in strange places like Greece and Turkey and sending relatives and friends to worse in Korea. There was a sort of guarded idealism of the need to promote democratic values, coupled with the tragic acceptance that such sacrifice would always be misinterpreted and caricatured. But the idea, my grandfather also added, was to make places abroad a little freer so Americans would not have to be attacked here at home by those who hated us.

And then I grew old and learned that somehow Iraq was not like Panama, or Serbia, or Afghanistan, where without the UN, Congressional approval, and mostly alone we took out dictators and theocrats and left the foundations of democracy in their place. Instead, something that made no real sense in terms of classical economic exploitation was said to be about "blood for oil," or promotion of the Likud party in Israel, or creating a new empire in the Middle East -- all this about a country that we debated publicly a long time about invading, went to the UN, got congressional sanction, and toppled its dictator in three weeks, and then stayed on for another year to ensure the Iraqis had a chance for the only freedom in the Arab Middle East.

The world has changed. What was once liberal is now illiberal, and the old progressivism has become mean-spirited and opportunistic. What was once idealistic is seen as calculating. When I read about the "Jews" now, it is almost always negative and emanates either from the European left or the so-called liberal university here in the United States. Israel, still democratic and still attacked by autocracies, is now hated rather than respected, not for what it has done, but for what it is. The world snored, for example, this week when suicide bombers were foiled in their attempts at getting at a chemical weapons dump so that they might once more gas Jews. Neither Kofi Annan nor Desmond Tutu, for all their recent media appearances, said a word when Palestinians apologized for murdering a jogger in Jerusalem on the mistaken impression that the poor Arab was a "Jew."

Today, IMFO points to an article by David Deutsch written six weeks after the 911 attacks. She notes:

I've always enjoyed David Deutsch. He's a brilliant, brilliant man. Wry sense of humor too. I'd read his piece shortly after 9/11 happened and was just reminded about it after looking over at The World. It's worthy of a read, at least once. If not several times.

She's right about this. Here is an excerpt:

Richard Dawkins, as usual, talked sense, and made several true and timely points. He praised America as "the principal inheritor, and today's leading exponent, of European scientific and rational civilisation", and he broke a taboo by pointing out that this is "the highest civilisation ever". He took sides: "I want to stand up as a friend of America" -- as do I. But in one important respect, his remarks did not seem to me to reach the heart of the issue. He blames religion, and our convention of "respecting" it. Now, I am no advocate of religion, but religious belief is surely not central to the present disaster. There are plenty of terrorists at large who are not pursuing any religious agenda. There are notorious sponsors of terrorism who are driven by nationalist or socialist ideologies, not religious dogma. And there are plenty of religious zealots who are no danger to anybody (except themselves and their unfortunate wives and children).

That is not to deny that mainstream Islamic culture has exhibited a major moral failure. It seems to struggle even to find the language and the conceptual framework genuinely to oppose the crimes that are committed in its name. Large numbers of peaceful Muslims find themselves in effect condoning mass murder, and painfully few can bring themselves to side with the victims now exercising their right of self defence. Nevertheless it is not the tenets of Islam that have caused the present violence. This is a political evil we are facing, not a religious one. And it is a modern evil, not an ancient one.

Moreover, mainstream Western culture has also exhibited a major moral failure: a refusal to distinguish between right and wrong. The unique glories of our civilisation -- self-criticism, tolerance, openness to change and to ideas from other cultures -- have in many people's minds decayed, under this moral failure, into self-hatred, appeasement, and moral relativism.

The entire essay, WHAT NOW? is more than worth your time. Indeed, it rings more true today than when it was written. His takedown of moral relativists and appeasement specialists is also worth your close attention.

Captain Renault : What in heaven's name brought you to Lileks?
Rick : Mind-numbing boredom. I came to Lileks for the Fargo.
Captain Renault : Fargo? Fargo? We're in Orange County.
Rick : I was misinformed.

Yes, since my mother's family lives in Fargo, I stumbled across Lileks.com years ago by googling "Fargo." Okay, it was a slow day at work, so what? Towards the end, they were all slow days.

Still, I was impressed that anyone could take Fargo and make it more interesting than I thought it was. I'd long used my childhood summers in Fargo as a kind of touchstone whenever meetings in New York turned to what "those people" "out there" would buy. (Even though almost everybody in New York is from somewhere else, there's something in the water that makes you forget what somewhere else is like -- unless you have a touchstone)

If I came for Fargo, I stayed, as so many others have, for 'The Bleat,' a daily journal which sometimes seems as if you're peering over Mark Twain's shoulder as he keeps a diary. Still, Lileks.com grows and develops behind The Bleat, and it rewards intermittent excursions to the Main Menu to see if Lileks has put something up you haven't seen before. Today what was new (to me, okay?) was this:

Puts that bad hair day in perspective, doesn't it.

Again, to restate the point: let's imagine how some people -- hell, a lot of people -- would react if the government put posters like this in bus stops and public buildings today. People would shriek as if they were having burned skin peeled off with a straight-edge razor. They would be convinced that the transformation of America into a fascist state was finally complete. But this was FDR's America. Just so we're clear.
--
LILEKS (James) WW2 Civil Defense Materials

I could explain why this particular conjunction of image and caption is arresting and provoking, but you either see it or you don't.

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• To an Athlete Dying Young
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