Now I have an anecdote of courage with a young Marine officer, my dad, facing down an Army general. (This was a doubly “dicey” thing, because Marines and the Army –not to mention the Navy — feel what is called, euphemistically, “interservice rivalry.”)  Then he had to be forthright about it with a Marine general.

It involved my dad, who was then a Marine Corps officer in combat in Korea.

Damaged color photo of my father, then a captain (later a lieutenant colonel). At that time he was the Marine Corps Aide to the Governor of Rhode Island, John Chafee. It was 1965 at an Independence Day parade in Bristol, Rhode Island, standing next to Major General Leonard Holland, Commanding General 1961-83 of the RI National Guard (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhode_Island_Army_National_Guard)

Well, an Army general was in charge of a major attack on the Chinese communist invaders, using US Army troops and US Marines.

He wanted them to assault uphill a strong Chinese firing position located in a cave.

All the butt-kissing-worried-about-their-careers officers all about him, both Army and Marines, said nothing as the General enunciated his insane plan.

But my dad DID speak up, and told the general, in front of a hushed crowd of fellow officers,

“Sir, this plan will result in 80% casualties, and it will NOT take the objective.”

Marines in the snow prepare to assault Hagaru-ri in Korea after Air Force bombing with napalm

A typical Western Union telegram during the Korean War of the kind that a family dreads

 

The Army general was stunned.  And as the silence grew, he cancelled the briefing.

My father, then a captain, filed out, but a Marine general was standing in the back, and he called out to my father:

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“Captain, come over here. Do you really mean what you said just now?”

“Yes, sir.”

“All right. That is all I needed to know. Carry on.”

And then…. “something got said” and the suicidal attack was called OFF.

Decades later, in the 1970s, my dad was dining at a restaurant on Cape Cod, in Massachusetts.

Lo and behold, who comes over to the table but that very general!

He had recognized my dad, even after 20 years, by his face, build and voice. The two men got reacquainted, and the general said:

“Your courage and your speaking up saved a lot of lives that day.

When no one else spoke up, you DID”!

What that was was not just physical courage (and lots of Marines and Army soldiers have that).

That was MORAL courage, to stand up and step forth, to walk into the dead silence of piercing scrutiny,and then, as everyone stares at you, as everyone else is wimping out, to boldly proclaim the TRUTH that saves precious human lives!

My father fought in WWII in the Pacific (Tinian, Saipan and Iwo Jima) as a Marine NCO.

Then he was an officer in Korea. He was wounded many times. He fought many hand-to-hand combats in borth jungles and trenches.

He had to see a shrink (a Navy psychiatrist) for six months after Korea due to PTSD from nightmares.

And he was in a coma for three days after a Chinese mortar round landed near him.

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Rest in Peace, dad.

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……My mother, his first wife, Constance Colwell Nugent

Descendant maternally, as was my father paternally in a different branch,  of Thomas Angell, co-founder of the Colony of Rhode Island Providence Plantations in 1636…

Student at the Rhode Island School of Design 1951-53

The First Baptist Church in all of North America was given its land in 1638 by Thomas Angell from his orchard on what is now called Angell Street on the East Side of Providence.

Houses on Angell Street facing the church

Her parents, John Thomas Colwell of Goole, Yorkshire, England (a federal and state certified accountant) and his mother, Elizabeth Colwell, nee Angell (a full merit scholarship student and graduate of the Ivy League Brown University) in front of their house in Glocester, RI, built in 1792

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Her father John, my grandfather, grilling burgers on a Fourth of July

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…..My eerie experience in 1989, 15 years after my grandfather died