War Hero

There is a fellowship intrinsic to military service that is tough to describe to those who have not lived it. For starters, we were all so terribly young.

I was eighteen years old. It would be another three years before society would trust me to drink a beer or buy a handgun, but Uncle Sam had taught me how to kill a man efficiently and effectively with a bayonet.

John Boitnott got his first taste of war on 7 December 1941 at Pearl Harbor. Serving as a Marine onboard the Northampton-class cruiser USS Chicago, he was wounded during the Japanese aerial attack.

My buddy Sario Caravalho is a fascinating guy. Born and raised in Hawaii, he was one of the US Army’s first Green Berets.

Jack Churchill opted for an English longbow and a Scottish broadsword. Additionally, where normal people might wield such stuff for show, Jack Churchill did not. He used these antiquated weapons to get medieval on the Germans.

The Purple Heart was awarded retroactively for wounds received during World War 1. MacArthur himself was the first recipient. It was standardized across all services in December of 1942. However, the Purple Heart is a military award no sensible person covets.

Maybe it’s the movies. We inexplicably expect life to be clean, tidy, and clear-cut. It just isn’t. It is so much easier to process the world around us when we fractionate people into all good or all bad.

Joe was raised, for the most part, by his maternal step-grandfather, a respected Indian warrior named White Man Runs Him or simply Yellowtail.

While Landry was indeed a jock, he also enjoyed a brilliant analytical mind. Upon graduation from high school, he enrolled in the University of Texas at Austin studying industrial engineering. However, the vagaries of fate soon intervened.