Courage: To Do the Job at Hand

​“America was not built on fear. America was built on courage, on imagination and an unbeatable determination to do the job at hand.” Harry S. Truman

Was there ever a better month for courage than January 2021?  With a pandemic still ravaging our land, teachers are summoning courage to begin again. Some prepare with heavy heart to instruct virtually and try to make it interesting.  Others don masks and return to the classroom in the dark of winter, facing widely separated desks but irrepressible children.  The children don’t realize that the world is on hold.
          
“The World is Temporarily Closed” proclaims the marquis for the World Theater.  And though it feels that way, in fact, the world and life go on.  And our endeavor with virtue this month--and actually throughout life--is “moving beyond fear and having the strength to venture and persevere.” 

Fortunately, Americans are good at courage.  It’s our default setting:  winter at Valley Forge, D-Day invasion, 9-11 rescue teams, United Flight 93 takeover by passengers, Sully landing the plane in the Hudson (in January), and not to mention those irrepressible health care and grocery store workers reporting for duty each day in 2020.  We see courage in the heroes of our history:  not just the obvious Washington and Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr, but Sojourner Truth and Clara Barton and Dorothy Day and Rosa Parks.  They were gritty and determined.  They saw the danger, accepted the risk, then plunged in for the greater good.

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Harry Truman, president of the United States at the close of World War II, said “America was not built on fear. America was built on courage, on imagination and an unbeatable determination to do the job at hand.” We associate Truman with ending WWII, employing the atomic bomb against Japan.  But his inspirational quotation applies to the bravery and sacrifice of conscientious objector Desmond Doss, to whom Truman awarded the Medal of Honor.

During World War II, Doss (despite being granted a deferment) enlisted in the Army and served as a combat medic in the Pacific. A Seventh Day Adventist, he refused to carry a gun or kill the enemy, and endured the scorn of fellow soldiers, who saw him as a coward. But he earned two Bronze medals for heroism in Guam and the Philippines (caring for the wounded in combat).  And Harry Truman awarded him the Medal of Honor for his remarkable bravery in Okinawa.

There, Doss’s unit, stationed on a cliff, came under attack by the Japanese, who cut down nearly every man.  Under constant fire, Doss rigged a stretcher with ropes and a pulley to lower each wounded man to safety—one at a time, over and over. Lord, help me save one more. Truman estimated the number of fellow soldiers Desmond saved at seventy-five men, though Doss said probably fifty.  The Medal of Honor is the military’s highest award, and Doss is the only conscientious objector (he described himself as “conscientious cooperator”) to have won it.  Memorialized by Mel Gibson in the 2016 film Hacksaw Ridge, the courageous actions of Desmond Doss make our daily battle against an invisible foe seem just a bit more manageable.  As Rosie the Riveter would remind us, “We can do it!”

Mary Beth Klee

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