All the politicians get the headlines.

They pander to the anti war pacifists, you know, those pacifists who claim they never would hurt a flea, and if we just sang Kumbaya things would be peace and love?
Right. That’s why “insurgents” shot 30 plus of my fellow doctors/nurses/ teachers/ nuns/priests/pastors and an elderly bishop in just the last six months I was a missionary in Africa. That’s when I decided that I might not want to kill to defend myself, but I sure as hell would defend my friends and patients.
War is hell, but sometimes refusing to fight back against groups who kill the innocent to terrorize the weak can lead to massacres as in Rwanda, or Idi Amin’s Uganda. Or the chaos of Central Africa. Or the starvation in Zimbabwe.
Sometimes, a war is needed, because without peace and order, anarchy and the rule of the gun reigns, and those who are killed tend to be those without guns.

And so when the Taliban kill a public health doctor for trying to stop a polio epidemic, and behead teachers and burn down schools for daring to teach girls to read and write, then I wonder: who is our neighbor? And do we pass our neighbor by, justifying our behavior because action is always messy, and we want to be pure as the driven snow?

Yet some people do recognize a need for war, because the alternative is worse.

But with a politicized MSM, we rarely hear such heroism lauded. (we rarely hear any heroism lauded, but that is another story).

So how many of you heard about Sgt Buddy James Hughie?

Quick, I don’t see any hands raised here…wasn’t mentioned on CNN this morning.
But it did get mentioned in the home town paper.

The TulsaWorld reports:

“Hughie was killed Feb. 19 when he left his covered post to bring medical aid to injured Afghan soldiers.

“This was a soldier who cared more about others than he did himself,” said Brig. Gen. Myles L. Deering, the commander of the Oklahoma National Guard’s 45th Infantry Brigade.

“He didn’t have to be in Afghanistan, he didn’t have to serve that 45 days in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. He was there because he believed in what he was doing. More importantly, he backed those beliefs by action.”

It was not Hughie’s first trip overseas. He was in Afghanistan during 2002-03 and had volunteered for a second tour of duty.

The true test of a man is not what he does one time, but in the pattern of a life.

In his short life, Sgt. Hughie showed us a man whose quiet heroism was not a showy action but a choice in many different ways.

Shame to a MSM that shows us celebrities congratulating themselves and receiving prizes for their “heroism” and ignoring the real thing.

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Nancy Reyes is a retired physician living in the rural Philippines with her husband. She was Army National Guard and her husband a World War II veteran. Her only war experience was while a missionary in Africa. Her home before moving to the Philippines was in Oklahoma. Her webpage is Finest Kind Clinic and Fishmarket.