Courage

In this bloodiest of all centuries, uncommon valor has indeed become a common virtue. And nowhere was this more evident than last week, when two Capitol police officers gave their lives in a shootout to stop an armed gunman from intruding into the place where democracy dwells.

Each officer had much to live for. Both had wives and children whom they loved. They were popular with their co-workers and did their jobs well.

Officer Jacob “J.J.” Chestnut, manning the metal detector, was gunned down with no warning. Special Agent John Gibson, hearing shots, knew great danger was close at hand. He stood his ground, stopped the killer in a furious exchange and died. Those he and Chestnut were sworn to protect are alive.

What is this thing called courage? Certainly it is not, except in a very few cases, the absence of fear. Nearly all men know fear. Rather, it is the overcoming of fear that makes ordinary men heroes.

When he “sees the elephant,” no man can say how he will react. He may be afraid, but he may be more afraid of letting down his comrades than of dying himself. Those are the fields of the Lord, where poppies grow in the sighs of a restless wind.

But in this case, we are not talking of men at war. What was there in the blue-collar backgrounds of these two Capitol police officers that led them, when the time came, to stand fast and do what had to be done?

These were not members of an elite force--Marines or Rangers or Seals--born to die. They were a pair of middle-aged men with mortgages and credit card bills, wives to love and children to cherish, guys who worried about their receding hairlines and rising cholesterol levels and fretted about the prospects of the 1998 Redskins. Yet at the end, they showed that honor is not just a word, that they were of the stuff of heroes.

This week the great and the powerful, the anchormen and the political barons, will jostle one another in the Capitol Rotunda and at graveside to pay televised homage to two ordinary men who in death seized a fragment of the glory that eluded them in life.

There will be talk of scholarships for the children, of enhanced pensions for the widows whose lives have been blown apart. And all this is well and good.

But the country will not long remember their names. When the last sad note of taps has sounded and the smell of gunfire from the graveside salute has blown away, life will go on. The yen will continue its fall, the president will (or will not) testify, there will be more killings on America’s mean streets, more hand-wringings.

Yet if we forget who they were, let us at least remember what they did on a hot July day in 1998. They did their duty, paid the price and, in so doing, helped the rest of us to remember, in an age of whining and cynicism, that America can still raise up sons worthy of its past.