The Courage of the Few

 

The anniversary of the 1836 Battle of the Alamo recently passed. 

 

It is a singularly unimpressive battle site until your imagination lets you see where Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, Bill Travis and 80-90 others fought and fell for Texas freedom. Then I felt the power of the Texas Revolution. Fewer than a hundred Texians and settlers and locals witnessed General Santa Anna’s troops raise the red flag of no quarter. They knew they were going to die. All of them.

 

The Augusta, GA, Chronicle wrote, in part, on April 9, 1836,

 

“Let the call which the brave and gallant Texians have made, be heard throughout the union, let it reverberate upon our mountain tops, and along our sea board, and we trust to God, that the response will be worthy of a free people. Our fathers, our brothers, and our friends in a distant land, have hoisted the flag of liberty, inscribed upon it, Freedom of Conscience. And we cannot, we will not, stand tamely by and see it go down in blood and despotism.”

 

The defenders were afraid, but they fought and died on the ramparts, at the gate, and in the courtyard. The few surviving defenders were summarily executed. A handful of women and a black slave were spared. Santa Anna interrogated each of them and the story came out. A few stories of individual bravery came out but it was a story of 100 hungry, harried, and hard-pressed men fighting to the death. That’s all it was, a lost platoon of Texians who wouldn’t quit and who would someday become Americans and enter our hallowed lexicon.

 

America lost over 7,000 of our sons and daughters in Iraq and Afghanistan. Parents and husbands and wives grieved. I didn’t. It’s too many for me to contemplate. There were no editorial exhortations like there was in Augusta in 1836. 

 

We lost 58,000 in Vietnam, 36,000 in Korea, and again only soldiers and families grieved. Only we know what we lost. We didn’t know it just because the gummint told us. We knew it because we were there and each of us saw his little slice of the war.  Too many didn’t come home after seeing it.

 

The American community seemed to care back then, in Texas, 1836. Certainly in WWII, and mostly in WWI. Not much in Korea and not at all in Vietnam. Today, we seem to not care. We pursue meaningless trophies and things but not many of us pursue a better future for America. 

 

A hundred Americans killed here or there scarcely raises an eyebrow. We gave away our blood and national treasure in Afghanistan and almost no one but veterans cared. Only those who had sacrificed something for me, and even they didn’t speak up loudly.

 

Why didn’t we all speak up loudly? Are we that afraid? Has the courage of our few not translated to the courage of the many? Why not? Why is there no Afghan Veterans Against the War?

 

We can speak. The First Amendment guarantees that for all time. Do we lack the courage to speak? We might be cancelled. Our friends may disagree with us. I’ve lost friends over opinions three times. The gummint tells us what it wants us to believe and we docilely go along. I did, until now.

 

We were told what to believe about Vietnam and I did believe it. It was beyond my ken that the gummint would lie to me about a war. I was docile while evil men led us to slaughter.

 

I highly recommend three books that tell us exactly how we lost in Vietnam.

 

1.     The Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsberg

2.     A Bright Shining Lie by Neil Sheehan

3.     Vietnam: An Epic History of a  Tragic War by Max Hastings

 

The books are the barest essentials for understanding the war and the leaders of the war, all of them.

 

Then get back to me and we’ll talk about what patriotism means.