I survived the attack of a ruthless swarm of bloodsuckers and a grenade tossing maniac

Sometime in 1966, for a few days, some Marines from my battalion, including me, were sent to a hill on the perimeter at Chu Lai to watch over an infantry company’s equipment while they were in the hills chasing North Vietnamese ghosts—intelligence said a regiment of NVA had slipped into South Vietnam.

There weren’t many of us—just enough for two Marines to man each of the small bunkers near the base of the hill that was surrounded by coiled barbed wire and then rice paddies.

As daylight faded, the hum of a billion mosquitoes greeted our ears warning us of what was to come as we waged war with the bloodsuckers and lost.

Looking for a way to escape, several Marines scrambled into the largest bunker at the top of the hill—it stood two stories tall with a thick slab of cast iron for a roof offering protection from Vietcong mortar rounds.

Those Marines thought they would be able to escape the bloodsuckers by moving inside the bunker. But as fast as they went in, they came out—screaming like schoolgirls. The bunker was full of rats and when the first Marine’s boots landed on the dirt floor, the rats climbed his legs in a frenzy.

I watched the few who had gone in come shooting out like rockets—eyes wide with shock; faces pale. These were all men who had fought in combat without showing fear when confronted by an enemy who wanted to kill them. Before the cast iron hatch at the top was slammed shut, one Marine tossed a fragmentation grenade in the bunker and it went off with a muffled blast.

Hours later, during my watch between midnight and four, I heard a rustling noise near the wire. There would be long stretches of silence (if you didn’t count the sound of distant firefights and the glare of flares along the division perimeter), then another rustling as if someone were crawling up the hill. I couldn’t see anything and thought it might be a small animal.

When my watch ended, I visited the only latrine that was close to the top of the hill. It was a screened, plywood box with a four-hole plywood bench. Inside, it was black as ink and smelled of urine. Under the bench were four half-empty, fifty-five gallon metal drums with several inches of diesel fuel in each one. In the mornings, the drums would be dragged out from under the plywood bench and set on fire. When it wasn’t raining, hundreds of columns of black smoke could be seen drifting into the morning sky over Chu Lai as the shit was burned.

I had stomach cramps—probably from the twenty-one-year-old canned rations I’d had for my evening meal.  Or maybe from the water we drank that had a strong taste of chlorine to it.

I leaned my weapon just out of reach against the three-foot high plywood wall in front of me and sat. Above the plywood was a screened in open space that allowed air to flow through while keeping the mosquitoes out.

There was a tin roof and the shitter was probably the only place to escape the mosquitoes. If it hadn’t been for the stink, I’d have slept there. On both sides of the shitter was a line of tents where the grunts (infantry) kept their gear and slept when they weren’t in the field.

That’s when the grenades started to go off.  I glanced to the left and saw a shadowy figure running fast along the line of tents tossing a grenade through each opening. I reached for my weapon but a wave of cramps doubled me over as the diarrhea gushed out.

For an instant, I thought I was going to be dead when a grenade was tossed in the shitter.  But from the outside, it must have looked empty and I was spared that fate.

No one died or was wounded on that hill that night. The tents were empty because the grunts were in the hills hunting an elusive enemy, and most of us were in the smaller bunkers near the concertina wire. I was closer than anyone to the lone killer who had slipped inside the wire.

That was just one night out of hundreds during my combat tour in Vietnam.

_______________________

Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran.

His latest novel is the award winning suspense-thriller Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.

And the woman he loves and wants to save was fighting for the other side.

To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper left-hand column and click on “FOLLOW!”

Turning children into killers

I’m currently watching The Walking Dead, season three on DVD, and the main character’s son—Carl—who isn’t even a teenager, has become an efficient killing machine of both humans and zombies.

But that isn’t what this post is about because The Walking Dead is fiction.

In this post, I am writing nonfiction for someone who has no voice. We now know that many who grow up to be racists, criminals and killers were victims of parental neglect, but this post isn’t about that either. [Turning Children into Killers]

This post is about George Sandefur—a smoker who died from an aggressive form of lung cancer—and I have not forgotten one story he told me at lunch one day when we were alone in the staff lounge.

At the time, he taught math and I taught English at Giano Intermediate School in La Puente, California and it was the early 1980s. He had the classroom next to mine. George told me this story a few years before the lung cancer took him.

You see, George served in the U.S. Army in the Korean War [1950 – 1953]. He told me about one patrol on a cold day. The narrow trail they followed clung to the side of a steep mountain he didn’t know the name of.

George brought up the rear and from his vantage point saw several young Korean children coming their way. None of these kids could have been over ten. The rest of American patrol had gone around a fold in the mountain and couldn’t see the children.

George stopped. He sensed something was wrong, and when he saw the machine gun strapped to the back of a little girl, he knew that the other troops in his patrol were walking into a trap and certain death.

He was the only one who had a clear shot, so he pulled the trigger.

It turned out those kids were heavily armed with explosives and the machine gun. All that little girl had to do was lean over so the seven or eight-year-old boy standing behind her could pull the trigger to kill the US troops.

George took lives that day but also saved lives, and he was left with a mental scar that followed him the rest of his life.

That one defining moment changed who George was and how he saw the world.

_______________________

Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran.

His latest novel is the award winning suspense-thriller Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.

And the woman he loves and wants to save was fighting for the other side.

To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper left-hand column and click on “FOLLOW!”

Beating Claude Van Damme at the Splits

At first, you’re probably going to wonder why this post is on this blog. Be patient, because you will see why after you watch the videos.

First, watch Van Damme as he does the splits between two moving Volvo eighteen wheelers; then scroll down and watch Chuck Norris—with the help of some special effects that includes the U.S. Air Force—beat Van Damme’s at his own game while spoofing him at the same time.

And, no laughing allowed!

Now for a bit of info: The United States is the only country on the planet with the ability to airlift an army anywhere in the world and go right into battle. As you will see in the next video, the C-17 Globemaster III may land and take off from dirt airfields. The U.S. Air Force has 223 of these monsters. There are also C-130E and C-130H cargo aircraft in addition to a few others.

“American power can be projected quickly to anywhere on the face of the earth as a result of the Air Force’s capability for rapid mobility. The Air Force’s 122,000 air mobility Airmen provide swift deployment and the ability to sustain operations by delivering essential equipment and personnel for missions ranging from major combat to humanitarian relief operations around the world. Mobility forces also provide in-flight refueling, which is a unique Air Force capability and the linchpin to joint power projection at intercontinental distances.” (U.S. Air Force)

Now for the conclusion: In December 2013 U.S. Air Force C-17 Globemaster III aircraft flew French Troops [Van Damme is French but Chuck Norris is an America] in addition to troops from other African nations to restore security in the Central African Republic.

_______________________

Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran.

His latest novel is the award winning suspense-thriller Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.

And the woman he loves and wants to save was fighting for the other side.

To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper left-hand column and click on “FOLLOW

Rewriting history, literature and film to fit Popular Political Correctness

In the early 1980s, I was working toward an MFA and one of my courses was a self-directed project monitored by a faculty adviser. The project was my memoir of fighting in the Vietnam War. A few years after completing the memoir, I took it to UCLA Extension’s Writers’ Program where the professor convinced me to convert it into fiction—a suspense thriller. The professor was a woman, who later helped find a literary agent to represent my novel.

I spent several years in the program with her as my advisor, and the final product after endless revisions and feedback from the professor and other authors in the program was “Running with the Enemy”. It was fiction but true to my experience of war and its horror.

Fast forward to publication and then June 11, 2013 when a reviewer by the name of “S” posted a 2-star review on Amazon—a review I’m actually proud of.

S concluded her review with:  “I was sucked in by the nitty gritty feng shui of the book, then repelled by the over use of sexual violence and testosterone dousing. Even though the ending was predictable, I still liked that the good guys won and the bad guys lost. However, the limited roles by the female characters left me feeling that half the story still lies buried and voiceless.”

I’m proud of that 2-star review because the book I wrote was about the war I fought in—not the story S wanted me to write that would have been a lie. In the 1960s, the only American women who served in Vietnam that I knew of were nurses and they did not serve in combat units. There were no women in my battalion.  Not one.

What I think S wanted was to see women kicking the shit out of men and beating the men at war. But that wasn’t my Vietnam. Tuyen, the only major woman character in the novel—the others were minor characters—was a half breed, a Eurasian, who had been sexually and physically abused by her half-brother since she had been a young girl.

If you have ever seen the film or the stage play of “Miss Saigon”, you might understand how women are still treated today in Southeast Asia and when that woman was a Eurasian like Tuyen, the treatment was worse, and the term for her was Bụi đời, the “dust of life”.

In fact, “Life was frequently difficult for such Amerasians [and Eurasians]; they existed as pariahs in Vietnamese society. Often, they would be persecuted by the communist government and sometimes even sold into prostitution as children.” [Benge, Michael (22 November 2005). “The Living Hell of Amerasians”. Front Page Magazine]

I think what “S” wanted from me as an author was to write a story that would fit a world she wanted—one that didn’t exist in my world.  She wanted a kick-ass female character.

The latest example of this popular political correctness demanding that history and literature be rewritten may be found in the film “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug”. Tauriel is a female elf who is a kick ass super warrior. The problem is that in the original Hobbit written by J. R. R. Tolkien, there are no major women characters and another fire-breathing modern day feminist—another S—also wanted the plot of this novel rewritten when made into film.

This revisionist was Nicole Lyn Pesce writing for the New York Daily News who said, “The women’s rights movement has made it to Middle-earth. The first ‘Hobbit’ film was criticized by some—like me—for its testosterone-heavy cast, so director Peter Jackson has brought in a kick-ass chick for the sequel.”

Does this mean we should rewrite history due to a modern, popular, political-correct movement? I don’t think so.

My novel was a man’s story just like “The Hobbit” was written by a man. In fact, you may want to read an essay about how J.R.R. Tolkien’s service in the British Army during World War I may have influenced his fiction. [JRR Tolkien and World War I by Nancy Marie Ott]

If Tolkien were alive today, would modern feminists be criticizing him for not including kick-ass women warriors in his novels, who didn’t exist in his day as they didn’t exist in mine?

I have news for “S”. If she had read my novel to the end, she would have discovered Tuyen kicking some serious male ass in the Golden Triangle near the conclusion of the novel. In that scene, Tuyen is so violent she even shocks the kick-ass recon Marine who loves her. Maybe Tuyen just didn’t kick enough male asses to satisfy S or someone like Nicole Lyn Pesce.

Here’s a bit of advice for today’s modern day feminists. Don’t wish for something you know little to nothing about. Take it from someone who has seen war up close and personal, you really don’t want to go there. If men are willing to go to war and die to protect women from that horror, let them.

_______________________

Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran.

His latest novel is the award winning suspense-thriller Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.

And the woman he loves and wants to save was fighting for the other side.

To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper left-hand column and click on “FOLLOW!”

 

What has America accomplished as the world’s so-called cop?

To research this topic, I Googled “history of America’s role as global policeman”, and ended with 433-million hits in a third of a second.

I’m going to list the first five:

Americans Tire of ‘World Police’ Role

Syria: The end of America’s role as global cop?

Should America Be the World’s Policeman?

Should America withdraw as the world “Police/peace keepers”?

What if U.S. stops policing the world?

I didn’t read the posts, because I was more interested in rating America’s performance as the self-proclaimed world’s police force?  To do that, I compiled a death count from all the wars, civil wars, revolutions, and genocides since the end of World War II, and I’m sure it is an incomplete list.

It was difficult to come up with a precise number so there are two numbers and the actual number of deaths could be anywhere between the low and high estimates.

1945 – 1950: The expulsion of Germans after World War II was called a population transfer but in reality it turned out to be an ethnic cleansing. The death count was 500 thousand – 3 million

1950 – 1953: Korean War. The death count 400 thousand – 4.5 million

1955 – 1975: Vietnam War. The death count was 800 thousand – 3 million

1965 – 66: Indonesian massacre of anyone connected to the Indonesian Communist Party. The Death count was 100 thousand to 2 million.

1967 – 1970: Nigerian Civil War and genocide. The death count was 1 – 3 million

1971: Bangladesh genocide. The death count was 26,000 – 3 million

1975 – 1979: Cambodian Genocide. The death count was 1 – 3 million; another 800 to 950 thousand died of starvation. The only reason this tragedy ended was because Communist Vietnam invaded and stopped the insanity. Where was the United States? Why did it take one communist country to stop another one from slaughtering its own people?

1975 – 80: Operation Condor in South America was a campaign of political repression by right-wing dictatorships sponsored by the United States. The death count was 50 – 80 thousand.

1979 to Present: Afghan Civil War. The death count is 1.5 – 2 million

1980 – 1988: Soviet War in Afghanistan. The death count was 600 thousand – 2 million

1980 – 1988: Iran–Iraq War. The death count was 500 thousand – 2 million

1983 – 85: Famine in Ethiopia. The death count was 400 thousand – 1 million

1990 – 98: Sanctions against Iraq imposed by the United Nations Security Council that caused excess deaths of young children 175 – 576 thousand

1994: Rwandan genocide death count 500 thousand – 1 million

1998 – 2003: Second Congo War’s death count 2.5 – 5.4 million dead

1998: Sudan famine. Death count was 70,000

After I compiled the list, I thought, what exactly has the United States accomplished to bring about world peace and save lives as the world’s so-called cop? Maybe the world would have been better off if the United States had stayed home and saved a few trillion dollars.

If you want to know how much the United States spends as the world’s so-called cop, visit data360.org to discover that answer, but you may have to spend an hour or so adding it all up. I wanted to find one number but could only find annual lists.

Last year, the world’s top 15 military spenders spent $1.753 Trillion combined, but 39% of that was the United States. The People’s Republic of China was number two at only 9.5% of the total. I found this information from a List of countries by military expenditures on Wiki.

I think that if a real cop in the United States had a similar record, they would be suspended from active duty followed by an investigation and then—for sure—a trial.

Do you think the citizens of the United States should vote in the next Presidential election on America continuing its job as the world’s so-called cop? After all, every American who pays taxes is footing the bill so shouldn’t all the citizens of a democracy have a say?

And of course this brings up another question: Is the United States really a democracy?

_______________________

Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran.

His latest novel is the award winning suspense-thriller Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.

And the woman he loves and wants to save was fighting for the other side.

To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper left-hand column and click on “FOLLOW!”

Who’s behind the Pentagon’s cooked books?

You may have heard of corporate welfare and subsidies from the federal government paid to millionaire farmers not to grow food. I’m sure you’ve heard of the GOP’s drive to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits—entitlements that were earned and paid for by US workers and employers.

But how much have you heard about the welfare—fraud might be a better word—to industries that build weapons for the US Military?

 “Because of its persistent inability to tally its accounts, the Pentagon is the only federal agency that has not complied with a law that requires annual audits of all government departments. That means that the $8.5 trillion in taxpayer money doled out by Congress to the Pentagon since 1996, the first year it was supposed to be audited, has never been accounted for. That sum exceeds the value of China’s economic output last year.” Source: Yahoo.com

And a special report from Reuters.com says, “The Pentagon’s doctored ledgers conceal epic waste. … In its investigation, Reuters has found that the Pentagon is largely incapable of keeping track of its vast stores of weapons, ammunition and other supplies; thus it continues to spend money on new supplies it doesn’t need and on storing others long out of date. It has amassed a backlog of more than half a trillion dollars in unaudited contracts with outside vendors; how much of that money paid for actual goods and services delivered isn’t known.”

Then there is this from The Wire.com: “Accounting Fraud and Waste Is Standard Procedure at the Pentagon”.


Examples of Waste in Defense Budget

And when Republicans want to cut budgets, where do they want to slash and burn? Business Insider reports on a list of “20 [so-called] Huge Spending Cuts Republicans Want to Make Right Now”.

1. Eliminate the Presidential Campaign Fund that was intended to make elections more honest

2. Eliminate funding for administrative costs of Obamacare

3. Repeal the David-Bacon Act that required federal government construction contracts include provisions for paying workers prevailing wages and benefits.

4. Eliminate funding for National and Community Service Act programs like AmeriCoprs, Senior Corps and Serve America

5. Prohibit union activities by federal employees

6. Eliminate education programs for children like Head Start, career and technical education programs, etc.

To discover the rest of the twenty budget cuts the GOP wants to make, visit Business Insider @ Business Insider.com, and if you do, see if anything on that list cuts Pentagon waste/fraud; corporate welfare or farm subsidies?

In conclusion from Truth-Out.org: “Most Americans don’t know that ‘long-term reforms’ to ‘entitlement spending’ specifically means cuts to Social Security and Medicare.” And that Reuters, Truth-out.org says [a foreign news service based in London] is the only outlet carrying this news.

Complicity is a doctrine that operates to hold persons criminally responsible for the acts of others.

“An individual is complicit in a crime if he/she is aware of its occurrence and has the ability to report the crime, but fails to do so. As such, the individual effectively allows criminals to carry out a crime despite possibly being able to stop them, either directly or by contacting the authorities, thus making the individual a de facto accessory to the crime rather than an innocent bystander.”

But what happens when an individual who is complicit in a crime is a member of Congress? Are elected representatives in Congress exempt from the law?

_______________________

Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran.

His latest novel is the award winning suspense-thriller Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.

And the woman he loves and wants to save was fighting for the other side.

To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper left-hand column and click on “FOLLOW!”

 

Blaming Obama and offering a lame solution: Part 2 of 2

As the war ends in Afghanistan, the federal government should cut at least 250,000 civilian jobs at the Department of Defense [DOD] and return that department’s annual budget to $400 billion or less.

Time Magazine reported [worth reading to discover how spending got out of control at the DOD], “From 2001 to 2012, the active duty military grew by just 3.4 percent. Yet over the same timeframe the number of civilian defense employees grew by 17%, an increase five times greater than the armed forces.”

Here’s my first suggestion to cut the federal budget—start by cutting back the number of civilian contractors who develop and build weapons for the US military.

Second, does the US really need the same number of aircraft carriers as every other nation on the planet combined? China, for example, has one twenty-two-year-old, non-nuclear powered second-hand aircraft carrier, and we hear more about that aircraft carrier in the US media—as of it was a threat to world security—while the U.S. has ten in active service and one in reserve with three more under construction. The only other country with more than one aircraft carrier is Italy and they have two.

The newest aircraft carrier is the Gerald R. Ford, and it cost $13 billion to build with two more to follow—the contracts for the other two should be cancelled saving $26 billion or more.

The U.S. has ten active carriers. The rest of the world combined also has ten, but only France has one that is nuclear powered. All the US carriers are nuclear powered and they are larger—much larger.

Why does the US need such expensive firepower? Where’s the threat?

I’m not going to argue with anyone that the US needs a strong military because at heart I am a hawk who loves what the US is doing as it continues to develop modern weapons second to none in the ability to search out enemies and destroy them—and I think the Gerald R. Ford is way cool, but do we need it? The Gerald R. Ford is an incredible weapon but who was it designed to fight—aliens from another planet?

For god’s sake, we are fighting a gang of international fundamentalist Islamic thugs known as al Qaeda and they don’t even have one aircraft carrier—they don’t even have a country. And the only way they can get an aircraft of any kind is to steal them like they did on 9/11.

Return to or start with Blaming Obama and offering a lame solution: Part 1

______________________

Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran.

His latest novel is the award winning suspense-thriller Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.

And the woman he loves and wants to save was fighting for the other side.

To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper left-hand column and click on “FOLLOW!”

Blaming Obama and offering a lame solution: Part 1 of 2

Rick Newman writing for Yahoo Finance suggests that President Obama could redeem himself for the Obamacare Mess, if he killed part of the government.

If you click on the Yahoo-Newman link above and read the piece, you will discover there is no mention of cutting jobs at the Department of Defense [DOD]. The cuts Newman suggests are so small compared to the annual deficit and size of the national debt, it’s hard not to laugh and cry real tears at the absurdity of it.

Newman points out: “The federal payroll, not counting the beleaguered postal service, is about 8% bigger than it was before the latest recession began at the end of 2007.”

The question Newman should have asked is where did civilian employment in the federal government increase the most, but he didn’t. Instead, he quotes a source that says that in the 1980s, the private sector got rid of an entire layer of middle management and suggests the government do the same thing. Then he points out a few small departments/agencies of the federal government with a combined budget of $81 – $185 Billion, but the federal budget for 2013 was $3.8 trillion and the actual deficit was $680 billion. You do the math.

What I want to know is why he didn’t mention the Department of Defense?

In May 2012, the Washington Times.com reported, “President Bush’s last budget, for fiscal 2009, pegged Defense Department civilians at 739,000, according to the department’s latest “Green Book” budget document on total spending.”

But if you check the numbers going back to 1962 comparing the ratio of civilian workers in the federal government to the total population, you would discover that the number of civilians working for the federal government has been dropping for years. The Washington Post.com reported that in 1962 under President Kennedy, 13.3% of the total US population worked for the federal government. By 2012—under President Obama—the federal workforce was 8.4% of the total even counting the 8% increase Newman complains about.

In addition, if we look closer, we discover that between June 2012 and September 2012, civilian workers employed by the federal government shrunk by 40,146 workers to 2,760,569—most of the jobs cut came from the DOD. Click the next link and check it out; you can see the number of workers added or cut by department. Source: opm.gov

In Part 2, I will focus on the Department of Defense—the only department that should see its civilian workforce and budget cut dramatically. In 2000 before 9/11, defense spending was $366.2 billion. By 2013, it had reached $821.6 billion. If we compare average annual defense spending by president starting with Clinton, we discover defense spending under Clinton averaged $335.6 billion annually for a total of $2.648 Trillion; under G. W. Bush the annual average was $605.5 billion with a total of $4.844 trillion, and under Obama, the first four years totaled $3.397 trillion or $849.2 billion annually. Source: US Government Spending.com

Do we ever hear Obama’s critics complain about his increased spending for the DOD? No, because we only hear about Social Security; Medicare and Obamacare—all programs designed to pay for themselves through specific taxes.

The increase in defense spending during the wars on terror; in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost the United States an additional $5.556 Trillion since 9/11.

Continued on November 18 in Blaming Obama and offering a lame solution: Part 2

_______________________

Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran.

His latest novel is the award winning suspense-thriller Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.

And the woman he loves and wants to save was fighting for the other side.

To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper left-hand column and click on “FOLLOW!”

What Makes a Hero? Part 2 or 2

In Conclusion, I think there are heroes around us every day. We just don’t notice them because they don’t fit the average definition of a hero.

The Oxford Dictionary says a hero is “a person, typically a man, who is admired or idealized for courage, outstanding achievements, or noble qualities: [for example] a war hero.

The Urban Dictionary offers seven definitions and some may surprise you. Here are three of them:

2. A hero is someone who gets a lot of OTHER people killed.

3. Someone who helps without anything expected return. Their gesture may be big or small, profound or not, it doesn’t make im’ any less of a hero.

6. A man or woman willing to sacrifice themselves to help others without the consideration of their own safety.

I think the policeman who risks his life to save others; the fire fighter who runs into a burning building to save another person; the soldier who risks life and limb to save his fellow buddies in combat are the easy heroes to identify.

But I’m not talking about these heroes.  I’m talking about the mothers and fathers who get up and go to jobs that may not pay much, are tedious, boring but do it anyway because that’s what it takes to put food on the table and pay the rent. And I’m talking about the mothers and fathers who—no matter how tired they are after a long day at work—are involved in their child’s life; know what that child is doing at school; supports the teachers and spends quality time every day in meaningful conversation with his or her child. That might mean turning the TV off and hiding the iPod, and video games and smartphones.

A hero might be a homeless person who finds a wallet/purse with thousands of dollars in it and returns it to the owner without taking a cent. When honesty is carried to that extreme, isn’t that also an example of heroism?

I think some heroes are individuals who stand up in public and dare to speak out against popular, political correctness [I’m not talking about uneducated opinions] knowing they may face harsh criticism from political/religious groups that disagree with them. Instead, he or she stands firm on his or her beliefs and refuses to be bullied—as long as he or she is not acting out of ignorance and/racism and knows what he or she is talking about.

An example of this type of hero would be Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani student who was shot in the head by the Taliban after speaking out for education rights for girls, because every country; every culture has its own brand of political/religious correctness, but that doesn’t mean it is right.

What do you think it takes to be a hero?

Return to or start with What Makes a Hero? Part 1

_______________________

Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran.

His latest novel is the award winning suspense-thriller Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.

And the woman he loves and wants to save was fighting for the other side.

To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper left-hand column and click on “FOLLOW!”