Courage and Bravery

Last week we watched a fascinating documentary describing contemporary efforts to simulate a bombing operation that took place during the Second World War when an English inventor figured out a way to get a plane loaded with a special cannister of explosives to fly extremely low over the water that was accumulated behind two of Germany's major dams, and drop them at the precise moment, speed, and altitude that would set them skipping lines stones a youngsters deploys on the lake's surface.  The cannister comes to rest right behind the dam wall sinks, detonates, and the wall is breached, water pours forth, and Germany's industrial might is severely compromised.  The point of all this description is to remark on the extraordinary daring of the young men who flew on those planes, more than just the pilots; many of them were killed by enemy fire since they  were flying low and in view, some had their planes upended by a miscalculated approach which sent up a fierce splash.  They all knew this was a possibility, saw it happen upon occasion, but they went ahead with the operation.  The survivors now in their late eighties all recalled that everyone knew the odds, none expressed anything other than the calm of knowing something that had to be done.  Last night we watched another documentary about the American special forces that went onto the island where the men who were imprisoned after the "Bataan Death March," were held, and in burst of gunfire and daring liberated the camp, and led, or dragged (many so emaciated and close to death that an exit was difficult) them off to freedom.  Again survivors both among the invaders and those saved, now in their late eighties reminisced about the event, exhibiting again the sense of what had to be done with extreme courage and daring--the men who crawled on their bellies up to the gates of the camp--and the men who struggled to survive first the march and then years of hunger and privation, now in their eighties, speaking with a calm about an extraordinary horror.  Stories like this always get to me on a personal level.  I was fifteen when the war ended, so obviously knew nothing about combat first hand, but three years later when I started college the State University of Iowa was inundated with men enrolling on the GI Bill.  There was an immensity of difference between them and me that was difficult to bridge. They were tough, gruff, direct in speaking to the teachers, often from a background that made them ignorant of the niceties of classroom decorum, or having had experiences that made them impatient with the very idea of it.  Conscious of myself as a gay male, and already having the societal idea of gay equaling feminine twisting me, I was again and again shocked to take these slightly older veteran as lovers, their bodies still marred with wounds of all kinds, their hunger and impatience and directness in bed reaffirming our culture's notion of macho male.  They didn't have any time for working out what "gay" was all about; they unafraid and indifferent and hungry.