Category: Heroism

Scrabbling Through The Rubble

Heroism

…or, not all heroes are gunfighters.

I thought I’d share a few WhatsApp exchanges with y’all.  This is about SARZA, which is a privately-funded search & rescue organization based in South Africa (!), and which sent a team to help out in Turkey.  Here’s a first-hand account from one of the SARZA team:


A little background:
“Mark” is a skinny kid of about 23.  He’s also one of the top S&R operators in South Africa — hence his selection to join the SARZA team — and has been involved in countless life-and-death rescues all over South Africa.  He’s also a skilled drone pilot, which they use to find people in distress, pinpoint trouble spots and so on.

“Sally” is Mark’s mother, and her husband is New Wife’s brother (who just spent Christmas with us) so Mark is my nephew by marriage, so to speak.

Words cannot express our pride in him and his work.

Four Down, Six To Go

Heroism, History, Literature

Okay, maybe three and seven out of the ten listed.  (I read Undaunted Courage, about the Lewis & Clark expedition, not Lewis’s account, but that should count for something.)

Of the others, Storm of Steel  impressed me the most.  Ernst Jünger must be the greatest soldier who ever lived, if for no other reason that he survived all four years of WWI in the trenches of the Western Front, not as some staff flunky or quartermaster’s orderly, but as a front-line rifleman.  And not a whiny little brat like Remarque‘s Paul, either:  just a man of steel — which could have been the title of his book, come to think of it.

I’ve been wanting to read Last Train  for years, but just never got around to it.  Ditto Death Company, if for no other reason than to fill in the many gaps of my knowledge of the Italian Front.  Both duly ordered.

I’ll get after the rest in due course — it’s an excellent list, so thanks to the folks at Intellectual Takeout  for that.  (If they aren’t on your list of daily reads, fix that now.)

The Right Stuff

Heroism, History

For my long-suffering Brit Readers, who often have to deal with my barbs and jibes:

For my Murkin and Non-Colonial Readers, here’s a brief explanation if this heroic man is unknown to you.  We have no such role model, try as the DemSocs may to create one:

Our guy [sic]  definitely had the more striking outfit, although it’s probably not the best choice to adopt if one is trying to sneak into a government building.

Killer Chick

Heroism

If you watch this little episode and don’t fall in love with KC, we can’t be friends.  (Here’s her story, if you don’t have the time to watch the video, although the video does her more credit.)

And astonishingly, she went back out the very next day (in a new aircraft, as hers was just scrap at that point).

I’ll bet that there is not a man alive — a real man, that is — who wouldn’t take a bullet for KC.