Managing Editor
As residents of the greatest nation on Earth, we eagerly await special and meaningful holidays to arrive every year. No matter if it’s Thanksgiving, Christmas, or Independence Day, there are occasions where we take time to reflect on what these holidays mean and why they were created.
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| A portrait of five-star U.S. Army General Omar Bradley hangs outside the hallway near his old office at The Pentagon in Washington, D.C. Bradley maintained an office at The Pentagon until his death in 1982. PHOTO BY JIM GARAMONE, DOD |
Each time I walked around the building, I would discover something I hadn’t known about before, or run into someone who inspired other soldiers, sailors, airmen or Marines.
If I needed to deliver paperwork to the Joint Chiefs of Staff on a Saturday, I would pass by the office of General Lew Allen, a four-star general and the U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff at the time. He liked to work on weekends because it was quieter then and on at least three occasions he invited me in to have coffee with him.
He wanted to know what I felt about military service from my perspective as an E-3 Airman First Class and he would ask me what I thought about my military pay, how to keep good people in the Air Force and my thoughts about college basketball. His favorite team was the University of Maryland, and he showed me an autographed photo he kept in his office of then-Maryland coach Lefty Driesell.
He was kind and caring and I always felt he listened to what I had to say, even though he was a four-star general. After he retired from military service, he served as the director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and worked closely with NASA to make space shuttle missions safer after the Challenger explosion in 1986.
Once I had the opportunity to meet legendary U.S. Army General Omar Bradley, who maintained an office at The Pentagon until his death in 1982. He had been General Dwight Eisenhower’s field commander for American soldiers during the invasion of Normandy on D-Day and rose to the rank of five-star general after World War II. He also was the first chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
I had met him one afternoon when he was leaving his office for the day. By then, General Bradley was in his late 80s and only came to his office every other month. He asked me where I was from and about my parents. When I told my father about my meeting the general, he said Bradley was one of the top generals he served under as a soldier in Libya in 1943.
In February 1981, I attended a ceremony in The Pentagon courtyard where U.S. Army Master Sergeant Roy Benavidez was awarded the Medal of Honor. He was given the honor for his courage in combat near Loc Ninh, Vietnam in 1968.
While part of a 12-man Special Forces patrol, Benavidez and his team were surrounded by a North Vietnamese infantry battalion numbering more than 1,000 troops. Caught off guard and armed only with a knife, he jumped from a helicopter some 30 to 40 feet off the ground with a medical bag and ran to help members of the patrol who were trapped. He joined his comrades who were under unrelenting enemy fire despite sustaining numerous wounds, Benavidez saved the lives of at least eight men.
During the battle, an NVA soldier encountered Benavidez and stabbed him with a bayonet. He pulled it out, drew his own knife, killed the NVA soldier. He later shot two more NVA soldiers with an AK-47 rifle he picked up while providing cover fire for members of his patrol who were boarding the helicopter. In all, Benavidez was treated for 37 different bullet, bayonet, and shrapnel wounds he sustained during the six-hour battle against the enemy.
Another time I was humbled to meet retired General Jimmy Doolittle, who inspired Americans during the early days of World War II by leading a daring air raid on the Japanese mainland in April 1942.
Doolittle commanded a group of 16 bomber crews who took off from the USS Hornet on a one-way mission to bomb Japan, after that nation had crippled the U.S. Navy fleet at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii slightly more than four months earlier. Each member of Doolittle’s raid knew their planes didn’t have enough fuel capacity to bomb the target and make it back safely, but they flew their missions anyway. Of the 80 airmen who participated in that mission, three died and 15 planes were lost. But Doolittle’s raid demonstrated that the Japanese mainland was vulnerable to American air attacks and boosted America’s moral at a dark time in U.S. history.
Each of us owes a measure of respect for the men and women who wear the uniform of the United States and the ongoing struggle for freedom. Honoring those who served on Veterans Day is the perfect way to do that. <
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