Sixty six years ago, this fellow, Hank McCall, was on a destroyer in the Pacific in late July, when his ship was called to conduct rescue operations for sailors from the USS Indianapolis. A Japanese sub had sunk that ship, and it had taken the navy four days to discover the ship had been lost. By then, the almost 900 sailors who had jumped into the water were winnowed down to 316 still alive, who had somehow survived those days surrounded by voracious sharks and without food or water.
So Hank had the duty of fishing torsos of dead shark-eaten sailors from the ocean and trying to find their dog tag for identification.
Sometimes the enemy gets lucky, and good men die. We lost 30 Americans in Afghanistan this week when a Taliban insurgent got off a lucky shot with a rocket propelled grenade and took down a Chinook helicopter. If life were fair, our boys wouldn’t get shot down and torpedoed. But, as any warrior can tell you, life is not fair.
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