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March 19, 2010

In praise of heroes — real ones

The Free Press

MANKATO — It began with a bull session at the Mankato Veterans of Foreign Wars post.

VFW member Tim Adams said the guys were kicking around a question that had been sticking in their craws: How come there aren’t any heroes anymore?

Though hardly new, it’s a query that deserves revisiting from time to time, if only to serve as a gauge for how far we seem to have fallen away from being able to recognize — never mind duly honor — true character and heroism.

So Adams decided to do his part by penning one-page summaries on the recipients of this nation’s highest military decoration, the Medal of Honor.

Specifically, he wrote about the six men who have received the honor, all posthumously, since 1975.

The 45-year-old Adams says he wrote the brief cut-to-the-chase bios for his fellow VFW members and, more pertinently, for young people growing up in a society that skews ever more errantly when it comes to role models.

Take Tiger Woods, the best golfer in the world and arguably of all time.

He’s in shame mode now, but take this to the bank: If he should win the Masters Tournament next month, people will once again confuse sports-achievement character with real character and put him right back on a pedestal.

And speaking of confused role modeling, might as well bring Paris Hilton into the mix.

There was a time when having your grainy sex tape exposed to the world made one a pariah. Now it’s a savvy, if inadvertent, celebrity career move, emblematic of a once tongue-in-cheek axiom that’s become cold fact: There’s no such thing as bad publicity.

These are things that rankle Adams and others who recall a time, not that long ago, when it would be unthinkable to voluntarily humiliate oneself on daytime TV — get Jerry Springer-ized, to coin a term — in exchange for the pathetic 15 minutes of “fame” that goes with it.

Adams flew Navy helicopters for 11 years, served in Operation Desert Storm and was mobilized with the Navy Reserve following 9/11.

His heroes are the real deals, Medal of Honor recipients such as Michael Murphy, a Navy SEAL in Afghanistan who continued to radio for help to save his mates’ lives even as Taliban bullets riddled his body, and Jason Dunham, who fell on an Iraqi grenade so that two fellow Marines could be spared.

“One of the benefits of being in military service is that you get to see people at their ‘bare metal,’” Adams says.

In that realm there are no filters, no spin, no artifice to hide behind. What you see is what they are, Adams says, and from that springs trust, character and respect.

Adams realizes it’s not Hollywood’s job to give real heroes their due — blue Avatarians and “romantic comedies” that are neither hold sway now — “but what great movies these would make” he says of the Medal of Honor men.

But the Audie Murphy movie train left the station long ago. Audie Murphy, kids. Google him. He was like Rambo, only real.



Brian Ojanpa is a Free Press staff writer. Call him at 344-6316 or e-mail bojanpa@mankatofreepress.com.

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