You want great athletes? Try these guys. R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. tells about some exploits that, strangely, do not make the headlines:
Yet my enthusiasm for the NFL stars’ athleticism has been overshadowed this year by reports of far more prodigious athleticism demonstrated last April by the members of something called Operational Detachment Alpha 3336 of the 3rd Special Forces Group. Their contest took place in Afghanistan’s Nuristan province, far from the television cameras and the garrulous commentators. This twelve-man Green Beret team fought a seven-hour battle uphill in a freezing mountainous valley after being pinned down by a couple of hundred or more insurgents. They and a few dozen Afghans, whom they had trained, got out after killing between 150 and 200 of the enemy. Half of the Green Berets were wounded – four critically. This past week 10 of these men received Silver Stars, the largest number of Silver Stars distributed to such a unit for a single battle since the Vietnam War.
“We were pretty much in the open,” Staff Sergeant Luis Morales of Fredericksburg, Va., told The Washington Post. “There were no trees to hide behind.” In the course of the battle he was shot in the thigh while tending to a wounded team member. Then he was shot in the ankle. He kept on fighting. They all did, even Staff Sgt. John Wayne Walding, of Groesbeck, Texas, who saw a bullet nearly amputate his right leg below the knee. Walding is quoted, “I literally grabbed my boot and put it in my crotch, then got the boot laces and tied it to my thigh, so it would not flop around. There was about two inches of meat holding my leg on.”
Readers might want to review Staff Sgt. Walding’s statement a couple of more times. These men are not only very tough. They have a presence of mind that is incomparable. I submit they are our greatest athletes. What is more, they perform not for money or celebrity but for love of country and, surely in some cases, to fulfill their historic role as soldiers, ideally as the greatest soldiers. The politically correct might wince, but the heroism of such soldiers adds to life’s meaning for them and for those of us who believe there is more to life than the hum and the drum.
Read the rest of the account, which details just what all Special Forces guys are able to do. Did you know about these exploits? Why don’t the newspapers tell about these stirring victories, rather than just try to make us feel sorry for our troops?
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