Lasting Valor(ISBN=) 英文原版

　　Lasting Valor tells of some of the most dramatic acts of
courage attempted in the entire Mediterranean theater during
WWII–acts that resulted in Baker’s being awarded the Purple Heart,
a Bronze Star and Distinguished Service Cross. On April 15, 1945,
as part of one of the last segregated outfits to go to war for the
United States, Lieutenant Baker knew he and his men were being
deserted when, during the battle for Castle Aghinolfo in Northern
Italy, his white commander told him he was going for
reinforcements. Caught three miles behind enemy lines, and with
half their comrades in arms dead, they refused to turn and run.
Although he was decorated for his efforts, the army quietly
surpressed this action until 1997, when Baker was awarded the Medal
of Freedom by President Bill Clinton.
　　Lasting Valor also reveals Baker’s early life. An orphan raised
by grandparents in nearly all-white Cheyenne, Wyoming, he survived
a rocky adolescence and went on to live in Father Flanagan’s Home,
and then to fight to join a segregated army. His years in the army
are recounted, and give us a rare glimpse into the life of a World
War II black infantryman. It is a powerful book; as The Washington
Post praised: “Whites should read this book to learn of Baker’s
accomplishments against a background of severe prejudice. Blacks
should read it for the heroism it reveals. Everybody should read it
for the power of its narrative.”

　　Orphaned at age four, Vernon J. Baker was raised in Wyoming by
his grandparents, in a town with just a dozen other black families.
During adolescence, he spent two years at Father Flanagan’s Boys
Home in Omaha, Nebraska. He graduated from high school in Iowa,
worked as a railroad porter. He fought to join a segregated army,
and was sent to Italy with one of the few all-black regiments to
see combat in World War II.
　　Mr. Baker fought in Italy, earning a Purple Heart, Bronze Star,
and Distinguished Service Cross. He was one of the most highly
decorated black soldiers in the Mediterranean Theater. On January
13, 1997, fifty-two years after Mr. Baker’s World War II military
service, President Clinton presented him with the nation’s highest
decoration for battlefield valor, the Medal of Honor.
　　Mr. Baker stayed with the Army, lived through its desegregation,
and became one of the first blacks to command an all white company.
He joined the Airborne along the way and made his last jump at age
forty-eight.
　　After retiring from the Army, he spent nearly twenty years
working for the Read Cross. Today, he lives in Northern Idaho with
his wife. Heidy.
　　Journalist Ken Olsen also grew up in Wyoming. He is an
award-winning writer from Spokane, Washington Spokesman-Review,
which featured his widely hailed series on Vernon Baker. His
free-lance work includes essays published in the Left Bank series
of literary anthologies produced by blue Heron Publishing Co. He
also is the coauthor of a winter guide to Yellowstone National
Park. Mr. Olsen, his sweetheart, Samantha, and their faithful dogs
live in northern Idaho.

　　PROLOGUE
　　There is a pain–so utter,
　　It swallows substance up,
　　Then covers the Abyss with Trance,
　　So Memory can step
　　Around–across–upon it.
　　–EMILY DICKINSON
　　I am haunted by the memory of nineteen men; men I left on a ridge
in northern Italy five decades ago.
　　I still hear a German commander scream “Feuer,” howitzer shells
whistling in, followed by the whish, whish, whish of mortars, the
trees around us shredding. Wounded and dying men screaming. My only
medic killed by a sniper as we try to withdraw.
　　A film of burned cordite covers the roof of my mouth and cottons
my tongue. It’s April 1945 in Italy’s Northern Apennine Mountains
and my men and I have been trading bullets and grenades with the
German Army for so long that the air is more spent powder than
oxygen. I know, as soon as this taste bites my tongue, the images
will follow.
　　I gather dog tags from my dead comrades, time after time,
figuring their bodies probably never will be recovered, that their
families deserve to know where and when they died. I see the living
wrestle rifles and ammunition from the dead and mortally wounded,
taking from those who have given everything, so the rest of us can
live and fight a little longer.
　　I hear, over and over again, my company commander telling me he
is going for reinforcements. I stare long and hard at Captain John
F. Runyon as he gives me that story. He trudges away, disappearing
forever into the late morning haze, the haze of exploding shells,
bodies, and blood. Yet today, I cannot remember a detail from his
face, except that it was a white man’s face, whiter yet, nearly
translucent, with fear.
　　Blame? Rage? Perhaps. I am angry and aghast that he never
returned. But more likely this memory lapse is habit. There was no
reason to memorize anything distinguishing about Runyon or any
other white commander. A white officer in charge of black troops
could ask to be relieved of his command at any time and that wish
had to be granted immediately.
　　The rest of us were black Buffalo Soldiers, regarded as too
worthless to lead ourselves. The Army decided we needed supervision
from white Southerners, as if war was plantation work and fighting
Germans was picking cotton.
　　Harsh as those words seem, I can’t work up much bitterness
anymore. Yet, I cannot forget the faces of the men who died beside
me, nor can I stop wondering if, as their platoon leader, I am
responsible for their deaths.
　　I am haunted by what I cannot remember. Everywhere I go, people
ask me to recite the names of those nineteen men I left in the
shadow of Castle Aghinolfi. No doubt studio audiences and readers
would be more satisfied if I could give dramatic discourse about
how several men, closer to me than brothers, died agonizing but
glorious deaths, imbued with heroism that stirs God Bless America
in every soul.
　　I cannot.
　　I cannot remember the names of the men of my platoon who fought
with me and died at the castle or the dozens of other villages and
canals, ridge tops and mountain valleys. I only remember bringing
back handfuls of dog tags.
　　I cannot stare down those battles in search of every emotional
detail. I now realize the mistakes I made, the recklessness of my
bravado, the myth of invincibility that only existed when I was
young and naive–which is why we send the young and naive to fight
our wars. If I put fifty-two years of knowledge and perspective
next to the names and the memories of the men for whom I was
responsible I court insanity.
　　After the first combat death splattered blood across my face I
realized there is no glory. I numbed myself in order to go on. I
divided my mind into compartments, putting emotion into one,
soldiering into another. I lived and worked from the compartment of
soldiering. If I made the mistake of getting too close to somebody,
I forced myself to forget about it after his face exploded or his
intestines spilled. I didn’t dare sit and mourn. I had to keep my
wits about me or I would end up being carried out on a stretcher or
left for the vultures and blowflies.
　　Fatigue at first disarmed me–making me more vulnerable to grief.
Soon fatigue was my friend, helping to deaden my brain and the part
of my soul that wanted to well up, overflow, and drown me with
grief. Occasionally I could not quell it and ended up heaving my
guts out, first with bitter gushes and then racking, dry retches.
It felt horrible, not so much for the stomach spasms or bile
rushing out of my mouth as for the fact that I was losing
control.
　　I never feared dying. I always feared losing control.
　　It’s not that I don’t love these men and mourn their passing.
It’s not that I don’t count the ways I might have prevented their
deaths. That’s the luxury and the damnation of having the time and
opportunity to look back. That’s part of the haunting. But gunfire,
mortar rounds, artillery shells, and booby traps don’t allow any
perspective. I focused on the desperate need to survive that
moment, capture a few hundred feet of hillside, a trench, a machine
gun nest. If I survived one minute, I figured out how to deal with
the next.
　　After years of trying to forget, of regretting many deaths, I
have been handed the hero’s mantle. I wear it uneasily. People have
considerable expectations of heroes. We are not to falter in the
spotlight; we are not to have made many mistakes in the past. Being
a black American raises the ante.
　　”Black youth so desperately need heroes such as yourself,”
well-wishers constantly tell me, as if this is the ultimate
compliment. It is not. It is the ultimate pressure to constantly
re-examine memories long buried in emotional self-defense. It
magnifies my shortcomings and my guilt.
　　I did not seek this final chapter to my life. I moved to a remote
cabin in the backwoods of Idaho, with easy access only to good elk
hunting, to escape attention. The Army came looking for me as part
of its own self-examination. Its historians created this heroic
image, and the media happily made additions. The public added
another measure.
　　Once handed mythical stature, I have not been allowed to step out
of the spotlight. Even if the mantle fits me as sloppily as a
father’s shirt fits his infant son, I am expected to stroll about
my stage as if my outfit was tailor-made. If I ask for something
more my size, I will be cast as ungrateful. And with enough hype,
media attention, time as a poster boy for this cause or that, I
have magically grown into the shirt, this stature. At least in the
eyes of the public.
　　I am not an icon for any ideal. I am an old soldier, a loner, a
man more fit to fight wars than deal with peacetime society. My
mistakes are as numerous as any man’s. My regrets likely loom
larger.
　　My hero’s mantle has been crafted out of carnage, the senseless
sacrifice of young men and my mad-dog desperation to outlast the
enemy and disprove the fiction that black soldiers were afraid to
fight. It is not cause for national celebration nor the incarnation
of heroes. It is reason for us to mourn our losses and question our
motivations.
　　I love those nineteen men like no other souls. I cannot give
their names, but I carry their faces in my mind with nagging
clarity. They visit me in the night, or when I’m sitting on a
downed tree awaiting an elk. Or when some other small event
triggers a memory of what we shared. The faces say nothing. They
only stare at me with the final look they gave death.
　　
　　These men, these faces, are the reason I am here today, the
reason I was selected for the Medal of Honor. They are the
heroes.
　　ONE
　　All that troubles is but for a moment. That only
　　is important which is eternal.
　　–Inscription in Milan Cathedral
　　Summer 1944, Northern Italy
　　The August air was Louisiana thick and heavy as we picked our way
across the Arno River on the remains of a bridge demolished by the
retreating Germans. The jagged shards of concrete rose and dove in
the muddy channel as if they were razorback tombstones rather than
a passageway. This awkward jumble was the only option. We were in
too much of a hurry to wait for the engineering corps to pull
together a pontoon bridge. The river was all that stood between us
and our crack at the shooting war.
　　The Arno runs at a pleasantly slow pace from the mountains of
north central Italy, through Florence, down to Pisa and on west to
the Ligurian Sea. It traverses cultivated fields, grape arbors, and
the ever-present olive groves that stood sentry even when legions
from the Byzantine era fought Germanic warriors here 1,500 years
earlier. The chocolate water added one more stirring contrast to
the collage of hazy blue mountains, deep-green fields, dusky trees,
and glassy, aqua ocean.
　　The wrecked bridge was a regular element of the German’s
insurance policy–delay or divert us as long as possible–often
taken to hideous extremes. The Ponte Vecchio in Florence, an
ancient, stunning structure that is part art, part bridge, survived
only because a German commander defied Hitler’s orders to destroy
everything as his troops pulled out. No telling what Der Führer
planned for Michelangelo’s works.
　　Standing within squinting distance of the leaning tower of Pisa,
our company–Charlie Company–proudly led the 370th Infantry
Regiment as it traversed the obstacle course over the Arno. Much of
what remained of the bridge was submerged, making the crossing more
swim than hike. Sergeant Willie Dickens, the diminutive company
comic, ended up neck-deep in water, leaving visible only his head,
his rigidly upthrust arms, and the submachine gun he was trying to
keep dry. He reminded me of a cartoonish prairie dog who had just
popped out of a burrow, holding its front paws high as if
surrendering to the sheriff.
　　Dickens was from North Carolina or Mississippi, the way I
remember it. He was the youngest of a large family that had
subsisted with a team of mules on forty acres so pathetic that no
white man cared that they were black folk with property. There
hadn’…