Wednesday, March 26, 2003
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Wednesday, March 26, 2003 |
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Thank God for the heroes By JOHN HATCHER On the very day of the beginning of hostilities in Iraq, I stepped back in history and was honored to meet the oldest living Congressional Medal of Honor winner from any war and the last surviving Medal of Honor winner from December 7, 1941. His name? Lt. John Finn. He is 95 years young, lives by himself in his ramshackle of a desert home in the eastern California desert among native Indians he and his wife loved so dearly. I asked him about the action that earned him the nation's military honor. He replied, "I didn't have enough sense to come in out of the rain. The Japanese came early in the morning, kicked the hell out of us and left. That's the whole story." But the rest of the story is nearer to the truth: "I was lying in bed in my beautiful new quarters with my beautiful blonde wife and I said, 'It's Sunday. Who's flying those planes?'" Soon after, he received a message to go to the air station in Kaneohe driving the short distance at a sedate 20-mph pace. As he neared the installation, he saw that the base was under attack and pushed the car into full throttle on a race to the airplane hangars. "I saw the red meatballs on the bottom of the wings of the planes that were flying," he recalled. Finn, who pulled a .50 caliber machine gun into an open area and proceeded to launch his own attack while the air hangar behind him burned, was in plain sight of enemy diving planes as he began to fire. He didn't stop firing until the last plane left. "I was all charged up," he recounted. "I was mad!" Sadness in his voice, he remembered, "It was terrible the loss of life, the loss of property." When the battle was over, Finn was badly injured and bloody, with at least 21 shrapnel wounds. He had lost the use of his left arm and could barely walk, but Finn felt there was still work to be done. Instead of reporting to the aid station, he pulled fragments of shrapnel from his chest and returned to the air station to supervise the rearming of planes. It was the next day when he finally went to the hospital where he remained until Christmas Eve. The rest is history. For his heroism, Admiral Chester Nimitz presented Finn with the Medal of Honor Sept. 15, 1942 on board the carrier U.S.S. Enterprise. The citation reads, in part: "for extraordinary heroism distinguished service and devotion above and beyond the call of duty." Nimitz spoke of Finn's "magnificent courage in the face of almost certain death." "His complete disregard for his own life, in staying with his machine gun although [he was] many times wounded, is the kind of American fighting spirit necessary to victory," Nimitz was quoted as saying. But the intrepid war hero is a modest man who remembers it this way, "Forget the heroism. I just did what I was trained to do." Of course, I asked to see his Medal. He brought it out of a back room and allowed me to hold the nation's highest military medal. Wow! I knew I was in the presence of greatness not so much because of his singular act of heroism Dec. 7, but because of the consistency of his life since. He and his precious wife, Alice, in addition to their own son, raised five orphaned Indian boys and won the hearts of native Americans because they cared for them. Today, the Indians come and check on him every day, making sure he has food, clean clothes, and anything else he needs. He was portrayed in the fairly recent movie, Pearl Harbor. Although he is a white man, he was played by a black movie actor. And the thing that blesses me is that it didn't matter to him who or what color of a person played his role. John Finn continues to make the point: he was just doing his job. I think that is what blesses me also about our men and women in uniform: they are doing their jobs. A hero is a person who does his or her job regardless of the attack, adverse circumstances, and the temptation to take cover and run. "God, give us heroes in our homes, businesses, communities, courts, legislatures, and for sure, on the battlefield."
John Hatcher is pastor of Outreach International Center 1091 South Jeff Davis Drive Fayetteville, Georgia 30215 770-719-0303 |
