My Mind’s Musings

This is the second of the Character Trait articles that I wrote for our base newspaper. (See the first article under Character Training)  Just a reminder that this is written for a broad audience that come from all different religious backgrounds.

This week’s character trait for discussion is courage. This is one of the Navy’s three core values – honor, courage, and commitment. Courage conjures up pictures in our minds of brave men and women facing life threatening situations, no matter what the cost. Perhaps it is the bravery of the men at the battle of the Alamo, who fought for what they believed in even though facing almost certain death. Perhaps scenes from Saving Private Ryan, or other similar movies come to mind, when soldiers bravely faced bullets and shrapnel for their comrades and their country. More recently, we have the example of those passengers aboard Flight 93 who willingly gave their lives to keep an airplane from being used to bomb a Washington D.C. site on September 11, 2001. This type of courage is physical courage – being willing to put yourself physical well being at risk to accomplish a mission.

There is another type of courage, however, that is just as much, if not more important. That courage is moral courage. Without moral courage, the physical courage will probably not be there, either. Moral courage is the having the character to do the right thing even when it is not popular. Hugh Thompson was one of those people. On March 16, 1968, Thompson, a helicopter pilot, stopped the My Lai massacre by putting his helicopter down between the Vietnamese villagers and the U.S. Army soldiers. He confronted the leader of the Army platoon and coaxed civilians out of hiding to be flown to safety. He successfully stopped any further killing. You might think that this should not have taken any courage to stop unlawful killing of civilians, but as a result of his actions, Thompson was hated by many in the Army. For many years, his actions were not applauded, but scorned. It was not until the late 1980’s that attitudes towards him began to change, and the Service Academies started having him come in and speak about military ethics. It was not until 1998 that he and his crew mates were awarded the prestigious Soldier’s Medal by the U.S. Army. Army Major General Michael Ackerman put it best when he said, “It was the ability to do the right thing even at the risk of their personal safety that guided these soldiers to do what they did… [the three] set the standard for all soldiers to follow.” Moral courage is more than putting your life on the line; it is doing the right thing without worrying about the consequences.

So the question is, how do we build courage? Physical courage, in my opinion cannot be taught. It proceeds from moral courage, therefore, it is simply the actions demonstrating who you are on the inside. Moral courage comes from knowing what you believe and holding unwaveringly to those beliefs. We live in an age where that is not popular. Postmodern philosophy would tell us that there is no truth or right or wrong, and you can believe anything that you want to. The problem is that there is right and wrong, and it takes courage to stand up for what is right. Through our religious traditions, our upbringing, our education, we may come to slightly different beliefs about what is right or wrong; but ultimately there will be beliefs that are truly right and truly wrong. Developing moral courage is developing that belief system to the point that your integrity is so high that when confronted with a situation where it is easier to do the wrong thing, you will still do what is right.