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Memories

Joe Foss, NRA President who earned the Medal of Honor. I got off the plane with him in DC when he was talking about the incident with airport security, and I called some folks who had media contacts.

Not in the official story: that was shortly after 9/11, when they had National Guardsmen (with, I noted, no magazines in their rifles, this was more "security theater") in the airports. Joe told me that when the airport security people gave him flak about carrying his Medal of Honor -- it had vaguely sharp points -- he called over a Guard lieutenant to tell them what it was. The lieutenant didn't know. Foss dressed him down. The lieutenant took it, which (since Foss's next stop was West Point, to give the commencement address) was probably a very good idea.

When I worked at Interior Dept, NRA had an annual meeting at Philadelphia, and one of the other attorneys had a father who'd fought as a USMC grunt at Guadalcanal, and was going to the meeting just to see Foss again, after half a century. I asked him what a man had to do to earn the Medal of Honor at Guadalcanal, where, as one writer puts it, courage above and beyond was an everyday matter. He told me that his father had related some extraordinary things, draining other fighters of gasoline by hand pump while the airfield was under artillery fire and every sane man was in a foxhole, to put gas into his own plane so he could go up and engage whatever was incoming without a wingman.

Heinlein says that there are no deadly weapons, only weapons and deadly men, and Foss was the extreme case of the latter.