Three Men

35 years ago, I spoke at length with a government official who was looking into a “revised” claim about AIDS—namely, that HIV wasn’t the cause. This man was, for me, a shock to talk to. He was GOVERNMENT, but he was open, frank, very smart, friendly, and an official cliché never passed his lips. What???

Years later, I learned he’d been a prisoner of war in Vietnam. He’d spent an outrageous amount of time in a prison camp. If I recall correctly, it was more than a year—in truly horrific, vicious circumstances. And yet there he was, in 1988, talking to me, and he was the most balanced and real government person I’d ever encountered. I read somewhere that his religious faith had sustained him through a Hell on Earth.

On the other hand, at my college in 1955, I met a distinguished, intellectual, brilliant young Classicist who taught Greek and Latin and Greek philosophy. He was a congenial man of great generosity. He was maybe five feet two and weighted no more than 125 pounds. In WW2, he’d served in the Pacific, and during a combat operation in the Burmese jungle, he was separated from the men in his outfit. For 10 highly dangerous days, he walked alone in the jungle toward what he thought was his base. He finally made it.

People asked him whether his religious faith had seen him through. He staunchly replied he was an atheist and there was no afterlife. There were only, as he put it, “rocks, all the way down.”

In 1911, at the age of 11, my father lost his father. So he was now the man of the family, in New York, who had to support his mother, brother, and sister. His childhood dream of becoming a doctor was finished.

He found a job sweeping floors in a factory. He left that job and went to work for a textile company, going out to collect lunches for the staff and doing other simple tasks around the office.

Over the next 30 years, he tirelessly worked his way up to become the company’s head salesman and head of design. In 1943, when I was five, he moved us from New York to a suburb, where he’d bought a beautiful house.

He, my mother, and my sister spent many years in that house. My father was a proud and happy man for having accomplished what his father couldn’t. My father made a life for us.

There was no band playing for him, there was no awards ceremony. He didn’t need that. The proof of what he’d accomplished was all around him.

His heroics were every day.

I thought of these three men today. Because of what happened in the hurricanes. There are families in the South who have been torn apart by death, injury, and loss of their homes. And some of these families, against all odds, will find a way to stick together.

The news won’t cover their recovery in the months and years to come.

But those families won’t need the news.

They’ll have the most important things they need inside themselves.

-- Jon Rappoport