- Wounded Marine Gunnery Sgt. Jeremiah Purdie reaching out to a fellow Marine near Hill 484, South Vietnam on October 5, 1966
Kesler is reporting on a speech by Archbishop Chaput from which are drawn the following excerpts.
I spent the 1960s studying to be a priest, so I was exempt from the military draft. I never served in Vietnam. I can’t and don’t claim to know what combat is like. But I have friends who did serve, and no one in my generation could really avoid the war because it dominated our country’s life for more than a decade. The Vietnam War intersected with a sexual revolution and a wave of social turmoil here at home that, in some ways, remain with us today. And yet, along with the war’s bitterness and suffering, there were moments that are frozen in time because they had an impossible beauty. They can move the heart even now. I want to focus on one of them.
In your conference booklets, you’ll find a photograph with the title “Reaching Out.” I want you to study it. October 1966 saw a series of heavy firefights between American Marines and North Vietnamese regulars in the jungles and hills just south of the DMZ. This photo was snapped on Hill 484, moments after a hand-to-hand battle for the hill had ended. The man with the head wound is a gunnery sergeant, or “gunny,” the senior enlisted man in a Marine company.
Two things are obvious. The Marines around the gunny are trying to get him to a medic. And the gunny is doing the opposite – ignoring his own pain to help a wounded young Marine bleeding in the dirt. What’s not obvious is something outside the frame. The same Marines had just dragged the sergeant away from the body of their dead company commander, who had called down friendly artillery fire on his own position to keep his men from being overrun. The beauty in this photograph – what the poet William Butler Yeats called “a terrible beauty” – is the love among men in the shadow of death; men in the extremes of pressure and suffering. Not a romantic love. And certainly not an erotic love. But the loyalty-love of men made brothers by the tasks and burdens they share.
Men don’t often talk about this love, but it’s real. It’s the love that enables a man to sacrifice his own life in service to someone or something more important than himself. It’s the love that takes the male of our species and remakes him into a man. And that leads us to our theme this afternoon: why men matter.
It’s an odd question to ask, isn’t it. Why do men matter? In a healthy time and culture, we wouldn’t need to ask, because the answer is obvious. The role of good men is to provide, to protect, to build, to lead, and to teach, both by our words and by the example of our lives. None of these things is exclusive to men, of course. Women can do all of these things in their own way, with their own particular genius. But men have the special responsibility to create a secure and just society where new life can grow and thrive to ensure the human future.
[snip]
Of course, the ideals of chivalry and knighthood were often ignored or betrayed. Then as now, human beings are inventive and experienced sinners – every one of us. The author Karl Marlantes – who fought as a young Marine officer on exactly the same Hill 484 in Vietnam, two years after the photo in our booklets was taken – says that there’s a reason we humans are at the top of our planet’s food chain. Our species has an instinctive appetite for aggression that every civilization, and the Christian religion in particular, struggle to tame and redirect. In that light, the astounding thing is how often and how fruitfully the ideals of chivalry were actually embraced, pursued and lived by medieval men at arms, rather than abused.
My point is this. C.S. Lewis described Christianity as a “fighting religion.” He meant that living the Gospel involves a very real kind of spiritual warfare; a struggle against the evil in ourselves and in the world around us. Our first weapons should always be generosity, patience, mercy, forgiveness, an eagerness to listen to and understand others, a strong personal witness of faith, and speaking the truth unambiguously with love. For the Christian, violence is always a last and unwelcome resort. It’s to be used only in self-defense or in defending others. But at the same time, justice and courage are also key Christian virtues. And they have a special meaning in the life of the Christian man.
[snip]
The sergeant in our photo was named Jeremiah Purdie. He had a tough young life. His mother died just a few weeks after he was born. He grew up poor and the wrong color in a segregated South. He entered the Marine Corps to better himself and fight for his country; a country that treated him as a second class citizen. Because he was black, he was barred from a combat unit. Instead, he was sent to food services school and put on kitchen duty — more or less as a paid servant. But he never let the bigotry that he endured infect him. He never became bitter. He simply did his job, and did his best. When segregation ended in the Corps, he transferred to a combat unit, and worked his way steadily up the ranks.
He’s an old man in our 1966 photo – a man in his mid-30s leading 18 and 19 year olds after a ferocious firefight, most of them frightened, some of them dying. And all the while he has a piece of shrapnel in his head, and he’s bleeding down his neck. But his heart and his focus are entirely fixed on someone else — one of his young Marines, a white kid, wounded in the mud.
Why do men matter? I study that photo, and I know that at our best, we matter as men because when a man gives himself completely to the needs of others, even to the point of laying down his life for a brother or friend or wife and family, God shows us a particular face of his own love. And that love draws the world a little closer to the beauty that God intended for us all.
Jeremiah Purdie won the Bronze Star and left the Marines in 1968, after two decades of service. But he was never an “ex-Marine.” There are no ex-Marines. There are only Marines and former Marines. He was never forgotten. Many of the young men he led, both black and white, stayed in touch with Purdie until his death in 2005. And it will surprise no one in this room that the central passion of his life, from the time he was a young boy, through all of his military service, on Hill 484, and until the day he died, was his Christian faith. Jesus Christ was the Lord and anchor of his life, not just on that day in 1966, but on every other day before and after.
The lesson today, brothers, is very simple. Photographs fade. The legacy of a good man is forever.
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