Insight: Humility doesn’t need to be noticed

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

I recently read a magazine article which drew distinctions between a sense of humility and having excessive pride in an achievement that you’ve accomplished.

The article’s author mentions that humility is a character trait of self-esteem and suggests that lofty achievements do not require you to brag or gloat about them, while pride is a personal quality of recognizing that you’ve personally done something significant and are happy about it.

In the article, it cited a survey saying that most Americans found that humility was not a character trait that translated to life satisfaction and not something sought in a leader, a great athlete or a movie star. Results of the survey indicated that Americans look at our culture as a competition where only the best person lands the job, wins the Olympic medal, is elected to a government position, or can afford the purchase of an $8 million home.

The author related that in the day and age that we live in, it’s tough to understand the need for humility in our society and how we all deal with each other every day.

This made me think of some of the people I have admired in my lifetime, and what made them special to me.

I’ll start with my father, who was a World War II veteran. He never wanted to be a soldier, in high school he had his mind set on becoming a mechanical engineer and designing things to make people’s lives better. Yet on his 18th birthday in 1943, his draft notice from the U.S. Army arrived in the mail.

Trained for the infantry, he was assigned to a combat unit bound for Libya and Morocco and then to an outfit participating in the liberation of Anzio, Italy from the Germans. During that battle, a vital communications line at a forward outpost had been severed, so a volunteer was sought to see what had happened to it and to restore it. When that volunteer didn’t come back, a second volunteer was sought. Again, hours passed, and it was determined that a third volunteer was needed to find out what had happened and repair the broken communications line.

That third volunteer was my father. He followed the line all the way to the outskirts of a small village where he saw the bodies of the two volunteers from his unit laying on the ground by the broken line. He determined that they were dead and worked quickly to fix the broken communications line. Suddenly, he heard a gunshot and felt pain in his back. A German sniper in a church bell tower had shot him and my father lay still and played dead hoping that when darkness fell in a few hours, he could get to safety.

Within 15 minutes, my father noticed the German sniper walking toward him. He bent over and started going through the pockets of the other two dead volunteers from my father’s unit. In great pain and bleeding profusely, my father raised his rifle and shot the sniper. He crawled to the communications line and restored it to operational status. Medics transported my father for treatment and he survived. Not long after, he was awarded the Bronze Star medal for bravery and heroism for his actions in combat.

Years later when I asked him about his time in the U.S. Army, he told me it was “nothing special.” He told me about traveling across the Atlantic Ocean on a troop ship and what the American encampments were like in Libya, but he left out the combat details of his military service. I found after his death about the specifics from paperwork he had stashed away in his closet.

I attribute his not wanting to talk about his experiences in combat to humility. He grew up during the Great Depression and coming from a family of eight kids, he had set a goal to be the first in his family to graduate from college and to own a home. The way he viewed it, his military experiences were necessary to preserve our American way of life and protect everyone’s future freedom to pursue our goals in life.

Many of the military veterans I’ve had the privilege to meet and interview in my journalism career have similar stories. It’s like they have compartmentalized their combat experiences, put them in the rearview mirror and hit the gas pedal to move forward. They have not forgotten seeing good friends and colleagues lose their lives but choose to live in the present day with humility, rather than relive the horrors of war.

The same thing can be said of Hall of Fame National Football League and Major League Baseball players that I’ve interviewed through the years. For the most part they are nostalgic about their achievements, but do not brag or gloat about them. As one college basketball player I interviewed once told me, his greatest thrill was in making the college team when only a select few players are chosen to compete at that level.

To me, genuine humility is something we all should strive for. It’s a willingness to forego pretense and accept that we are all human deep down inside.