Hero

By Roger Darlington My all-time favourite film is “Lawrence Of Arabia,” and if I have a favourite scene from the movie, then I guess it is the one of Lawrence’s triumphal return from the Nefud desert, having gone back to rescue the Arab Gasim. The crossing of the Nefud desert …

Date: Week before Christmas, 2004 Place: Central Texas  All I really wanted for Christmas was to do something to support our troops. I prayed on this goal daily until I thought I had received an answer, about how to help the troops. I started searching and found a great list of troops requesting …

In January 2000, leaders in Charlotte, North Carolina, invited their favorite son, Billy Graham, to a luncheon in his honor.  Billy initially hesitated to accept the invitation because he struggled with Parkinson’s disease. But the Charlotte leaders said, “We don’t expect a major address. Just come and let us honor …

When you coached at our high school, you were not assigned a homeroom, so in 1986 after retiring from head football coach, it was SOP that I was assigned an  11th-grade homeroom for the first time in 10 years. On the first day of school, usually the first activity  of …

— Author unknownThe soldier stood and faced his God Which must always come to pass…He hoped his shoes were shining Just as brightly as his brass. “Step forward now, you soldier, How shall I deal with you?Have you always turned the other cheek?To My Church have you been true?” The soldier squared his …

On June 9th, 2016, my unit was dispatched to assist the York City Police Department in the apprehension of a man with an arrest warrant named James Nickol. He was wanted for felony escape and had prior burglary charges. Our team met up with the City Police and developed a …

— A True Story Joe Kittinger is not a household aviation name like Neil Armstrong or Chuck Yeager. But what he did for the U. S. space program is comparable. On Aug. 16, 1960, as research for the then-fledgling U. S. space program, Air Force Captain Joseph Kittinger rode a …

As Reported In The SF Chronicle

On the front page story of the San Francisco Chronicle on Thursday, Dec 15, 2005, you would have read about a female humpback whale who had become entangled in a spider web of crab traps and lines.

The fifty-foot whale was weighted down by hundreds of pounds of traps that caused her to struggle to stay afloat. She also had hundreds of yards of line rope wrapped around her her tail, her torso and a line tugging in her mouth.

I was a surgeon in the United States Army during the Civil War. After the battle of Gettysburg, there were hundreds of wounded soldiers in my hospital. Many were wounded so severely that a leg or an arm, or sometimes both, needed to be amputated.

One of these was a boy who had been in the service for only 3 months. Since he was too young to be a soldier, he had enlisted as a drummer. When my assistants came to give him chloroform before the amputation, he turned his head and refused it. When they told him that it was the doctor's orders, he said, "Send the doctor to me."