America’s Servicemen Live Life on the Grenade

Petty Officer Michael Monsoor, a Navy SEAL, was part of a security detail in Ramadi, Iraq, on Sept. 29, 2006, when an insurgent lobbed a grenade at his position. Mon soor, 25, threw himself on the grenade to shield his comrades from the blast. He died a half-hour later.

"He never took his eye off the grenade," said one of the men there that day. "His only movement was down toward it. He undoubtedly saved mine and the other SEALs' lives, and we owe him."

A couple of months later, in early December 2006, Pfc. Ross McGinnis was on Humvee patrol in Baghdad when someone threw a grenade into the vehicle. McGinnis -- a 19-year-old who went to an Army recruiting station on his 17th birthday and signed up through the delayed-entry program -- did just as Monsoor had. He smothered the blast with his body. "He had time to jump out of the truck," said Sgt. Cedric Thomas, one of the men whose life McGinnis saved by sacrificing his own. "He chose not to. He's a hero. He was just an awesome guy."

Both Monsoor and McGinnis were awarded posthumous Congressional Medals of Honor.

TODAY, Memorial Day, it is tempting to romanticize the deaths of those who have lost their lives while serving in the nation's armed forces. But the brutal truth is that most do not die as Monsoor and McGinnis did, in gallant moments of willful self-sacrifice for their friends and mates. The hell of war is that it does not afford soldiers many opportunities to choose the manner of their dying.

Soldiers die when they step on a land mine or catch a sniper's bullet while shaving. They die when their planes are shot down and when mortar rounds land in a forward emplacement. They are immolated inside tanks, and pancaked when their chutes fail to open. They are cut in half by machine-gun fire and blown into bloody chunks by roadside bombs. They are butchered in their sleep or in the chow line by surprise attacks or sorties from the air. They are mowed down quickly by technology's impersonal scythe, or taken out slowly by the ancient enemy known as sepsis.

Others die far from the field of battle, on training missions or in simple accidents, on clear blue-sky days when it seems as though nothing in the world could go wrong. As a character in The 13th Valley, a novel about Vietnam, says: It's not the bullet with your name on it that you have to worry about. It's the one marked "To Whom It May Concern."

And yet.

THE MEN and women who join the armed forces know this when they sign on for service. They know Patton was right when he said that "the object of war is not to die for your country; it is to make the other bastard die for his." They know they might die anyway -- and that their deaths might be grisly rather than gallant. They know even the gallant deaths are grisly, too.

Military service is life atop a live grenade. No one knows when it will detonate.

In a sense, then, the men and women of the armed forces are -- all of them -- exactly like Monsoor and McGinnis. They threw themselves on the grenade as soon as they put on the uniform. In order to protect the rest of us.

Many are lucky enough to land on grenades with long fuses. They get up again eventually, and live out their natural lives.

Today, we honor the rest.

If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility. --Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Contact A. Barton Hinkle at (804) 649-6627 or .