A Hero

I like listening to a military band play John Philip Sousa marches. At this point in history, Sousa is my only patriot. I like rock bands that pay tribute to the troops too but, no matter what genre, I have mixed feelings as long as soldiers remain in Afghanistan. I respect them for the heroism that burns in their hearts. Such disregard for personal comfort and commitment is to be admired. While I want to honor their commitment, I condemn the mission our government charges them to complete. I worry that cycles of violence will never end as long as we celebrate myths of redemptive violence. Heaven knows, the decade-long onslaught of military spending and lost lives has not brought the Middle-East or Manhattan truer healing. When I was in New York for a few days, the tragedy of September eleventh, 2001, floated back into salience. Yet one night our host managed to put even that in perspective when she began to talk about the use of ‘comfort women’, human experimentation and other atrocities sanctioned by the Japanese government during their campaign to rule the Pacific. On the other side of the globe, Nazi Germany brought destruction and holocaust to every part of Europe they touched. Not only were people tortured, sterilized, executed and otherwise treated worse than animals but this happened, every day, by the order of powerful nation-states, spilling over their borders and threatening to dominate the world. Young men rose to the challenge of thwarting that tide of evil. One of them was my grandfather, Byron Lee Rice.

Byron flew bombing missions in a B-17 Flying Fortress based in Italy. As the grandson of a veteran, I might have heard a battery of heart-throttling war stories. He told me about how miserably cold is was in Colorado when he basic-training and how happy he was to join Cadets. He did mention a night when they took some flack in combat but several more times he told me about the time that a new crew-member lost his nerve and panicked. Byron turned the plane around and landed, against regulations. “I told them ‘this guy doesn’t have the heart, he’s going to make the mission dangerous for the whole crew’”. Being such a nice guy, Byron got the private a desk job. “The next time I saw him,” said my Grand-dad with a crooked smile and a chuckle, “the kid out-ranked me! Can you believe that?” Then, Grandpa would laugh and start talking about farming or ice-fishing again. My grandfather was never shot-down and, because of that, everyone wanted to be in his crew. It seemed like my grandfather acted out of duty rather than heroism: he got-in, got-out and got-home to Grandma, giving flack and fighters a wide-berth. The other guys benefited.

Can you believe that? I did for a while.

However, my grandfather was a hero. Heroism was thrust upon him. Rice was so mechanically inclined, it was like a super-power. He started flight-training as a co-pilot, cruising over barns in Iowa by the side of his college-educated pilot. One day, the pilot was taking pass after pass, unable to land the plane, and Byron started muttering directions to him. “If its so easy,” said the pilot, “then why don’t you just do it?”. He did it on the first try; he also did not like that pilot, partly because this officer impregnated a young-woman but refused to marry her. That pilot went down on another mission a few days before my grandfather flew his own first mission. He grew into a father-figure for his nearly teenage crew members. They were pulled out of bars by their shirt-collars, countless times, before big missions: Lieutenant Rice kept high-standards. They say he never cheated on Grandma and I believe it without corroboration: even at 23 years of age, my grandfather was made of honor and family loyalty. That was the hero I needed, after my Dad left my Mom—someone who persevered until death.

I knew him for being depression-grade thrifty and tough. Past the age of eighty, he was driving tractors and climbing into the trap-door above the stair-case to put ice-cream buckets under leaks in the attic. When the curators at the Kalamazoo ‘Air Zoo’ offered to help him into the cock-pit of a B-17, he grabbed the hole with both hands and hauled himself in unaided. I watched him trim brush with chainsaws and mow-down chipmunks with a 22-caliber rifle: he could do everything on a farm that needed doing. Yet, it still surprised me when I found-out that he was an unsung hero. After he died, while we were trying to figure-out why Grandpa saved empty cans of spray-paint, Grandma finally came forward with the medal. I was wrong: he did not steer clear of trouble—he out-flew it. That night they took a shot of flack, the plane was not just a little holey. An entire engine was blown away and over 300 holes riddled the fuselage—and the crew. The condition of the craft warranted a bail-out but some of his crew were in critical condition, too. Byron used his super-powers to get them home. He flew the would-be wreck for hours, one engine short, to get his boys the help they needed. Not one was lost. The United States’ government awarded him the Distinguished Flying Cross... which he never mentioned to me once.

I was honored to play taps at his grave-site.

I knew my Grandfather to be a pacifist, of a quieter variety. “They told me it was the war to end all wars, Johnny,” he once said, “but it didn’t end’m,”. In spite of World War II, I think that Vietnam made him a pacifist. My uncle Alan came home with a hole in his leg (friendly fire) and brought with him months of hellish, jungle nightmares that everyone could hear. To fight a war is one thing; to send your child to war is another. “I asked him,” said my Grandmother, “why he never talked about his medal and he said ‘I never want to glorify war, Betty—war is terrible.’” By the time the Korean war was in progress, my Grandfather had followed my Grandmother into the Friends’ (Quaker) tradition. Grandma said he spent years talking to Reverend Tone, a veteran himself, about the possibility of people being in the factories he bombed—German people like his grandparents. It cut him to pieces.

He was a greater man than he ever said, or allowed to be said, so that only death could make him shine. He was made of honor and family loyalty. My grandfather sat through virtually every band-concert my cousin, sister and I ever played-in. He would not admit that he could not hear well or that he didn’t even like music. He loved us. He could not have been happier to see me pick-up a book, not a gun, and go to college. Byron Lee Rice was a depression-grade father, too: my uncle Delbert told us that Grandpa made him apologize to a neighbor for something he had not done. “You might not have done it but she thinks you did—man-up and make it right.” This man poured himself into farming, which he loved, and into a trailer-factory job to support his four children. More than merely supply them, he set the standard for granite-hard determination. When Delbert was too sick with cancer to bring his crops in, my Grandfather donned his overalls and got the job done at age eighty-eight, just months before his own diagnosis. After dodging flack, working with heavy machinery and enduring open-heart surgery, Byron Lee Rice died of a powerful disease that could kill anybody: pancreatic cancer. He died a young-man’s death with the peace and dignity of the old.

My grandfather went to war to prevent terrible empires from over-running our planet. At the same time, boys and girls mistake our appreciation for an endorsement and that is unacceptable. My Grandfather went to war with the right heart but he would want us to learn from his lesson: war never ends. The only right way to honor my grandfather at his funeral was to tell stories about the farmer, family-man and man-of-God we loved for the better part of a century. I say, let us celebrate our veterans for what they do afterward, living lives of determination with missing limbs, rancid night-terrors or new careers—or all of the above, with courage burning in their hearts.

One of my Grandfather’s greatest acts of heroism took place in the relative peace of the eighties. Gary Wright, my Grandmother’s nephew, stood-up at Grandpa’s funeral and told us a story. When Gerald Wright died he left his sons land. Still, Gary did not have the resources to buy seed or pay for fuel to plant his share. Banks in the community turned him away, which hurt deeply because they knew him and his family. Perhaps Gary was just a risk to them but he was family to someone. Gary said, “Uncle Byron pulled me aside after church one day and he said ‘Gary, I’ve been talking with my brother Stan—we want to loan you the money to plant Gerald’s field.’” My Grandfather and his bachelor brother, a couple farmers who had genuinely sweat for every cent, were willing to take the risk the banks would not. That is heroism: they laid their hard-earned money on the line for a young man who might have gone bankrupt without them.

“—and I paid it back to the last dime,” said Gary.