"Fortune and Love befriend the bold" (Ovid)

......Recently, in Tucson, while Congresswoman Gifford lay on the ground after being shot with a bullet that pierced her head, one of her assistants ran to her aid in order to stop the bleeding.  That act apparently saved her life, and this man was hailed as a hero.  No doubt he was--he saved a life.  At the time-- the gunman had been killed-- so it wasn't as if this man ran through a hail of gunfire to get to Ms. Gifford.  Now, who has the right to have earned the title of "hero"?   According to Aristotle, a hero is not one who is fearless in the face of danger, but one who overcomes his sense of fear in the face of danger and meets the the challenge in spite of his fear. The firemen and policemen who entered the towers in 9/11 were certainly not without fear--if not for themselves, then for the people whose lives they were attempting to save.  I'd like to think that my father, Michael, was a hero; he went on a very dangerous mission in WWI. As was I in WWII, he was attached to a flight squadron, the 27 Aero Squadron. Mine was Fleet Air Wing 7.


..... A note written in Nov. 1933 by LtCol Harold E. Hartney, the commander of the 27th Aero Squadron during WWI (my father's commander officer) certified that Michael had contracted a medical problem (poison gas canisters) during a mission behind enemy lines in 1918. This certification allowed my mother to obtain compensation from the Veterans' Administration before my dad's death  in 1933. The pension amounted to $100 a month.


.....My son, Joel, did a little research, and here is where it gets interesting: Hartney, it turns out, was a Canadian who was assigned to train/lead the American squadron after the U.S. entered the war. He eventually became a U.S. citizen. In 1940, he published a memoir, "Up and at 'Em," that details a lot of action during WWI. Anyway, in the letter he had written in 1933, he said that my dad had gone on a mission in July 1918 to locate a few missing pilots, including Capts (or Lt.?) Elliott and Wanamaker. In the book, Hartney says that Elliott was shot down and killed on 2 July 1918. On this exact day, 15 years after coming into contact with the gas, Michael died. Here's something even more interesting, Joel continues, whom do you think shot Elliott down? It was none other than Hermann Goering, who went on to become the head of the Nazi Air Force during WWII ! Wanamaker was shot down that same day by Ernst Udet, Germany's no.2 ace, but he was captured and survived the war. Hartney previously had been shot down and was seriously injured by none other than the original Red Baron himself, Manfred von Richthofen! Now I am the official Red Baron Zorro, and I did some shooting down myself--but this time it was Germans, not Americans. My father lost both of his legs and his left arm as a result of the poison gas in his system. He died when he was 33. He was a hero.