I Hope They Don't Make Me Choose

This really pissed me off.

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Man Without Honor

Greg Hallenbeck was like many men of his generation. He had to work hard to get a good start in life. A tough, stocky kid, part Sioux Indian, he managed to get to the University of Washington in the teeth of the Great Depression.

By that time his parents were separated. His mother helped him through school by working as a switch board operator in Tacoma, Wash. To pick up the rest of the financial slack he had to work all his spare hours at various jobs. During the summers he worked in a gold mine in Idaho, his home state.

If the work was a burden, Greg didn't show it. He realized that his university education was a privilege and he took full advantage of it. He signed up for ROTC, made the university wrestling and swimming teams, joined a fraternity and graduated four years later (1934) with a degree in aeronautical engineering.

With his Army ROTC commission he served with the Coast Artillery Reserve in Washington state. Meanwhile, he had been fortunate enough to land a job as a draftsman at Boeing Aircraft, in Tacoma, after graduation. He loved airplanes and he wanted to fly.
And fly he did. Into history.

He joined the Marine Corps Reserve in 1936 as an aviation cadet. He got his wings in 1937 and accepted a commission in the regular Marine Corps later that year. By 1940, he was at Pensacola Naval Air Station as a flight instructor, as the clouds of World War II loomed ever closer to the United States.

Greg didn't wait for the war. He went to it. He joined the American Volunteer Group, later known as the famed Flying Tigers, to help defend China against Japan. In his military career since graduation he had become known not by his stepfather's name, Hallenbeck, but by his father's name, Boyington.

By the time the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, Greg Boyington was a Flying Tiger squadron commander who had already shot down six Japanese planes over China.
No time for details here. Gregory "Pappy" Boyington became a legend fast. He was dubbed Pappy by the younger pilots of his famed "Black Sheep" fighter squadron because of his "advanced" age. He was, after all, 31, and most of them were in their young 20s.

Pappy Boyington led by example in the air war over various Pacific islands. During one period, in 1943, he shot down 14 Japanese planes in 32 days. On October 17, 1943, Pappy led a force of 24 Marine fighters over the Japanese fighter base at Kahili, on the island of Bougainville. They circled the base repeatedly, daring the 60 Japanese fighters on the field to come up. When the Japanese responded, Pappy's boys shot down 20 of them before scooting back to base without losing a plane.

He displayed extraordinary leadership, extraordinary acumen as a pilot, and extraordinary courage, no matter what the odds against him. On January 3, 1944, during a huge fighter action over Rabaul, Pappy shot down his 28th Japanese plane and was himself shot down in the wild aerial melee.

Unseen by his fellow pilots, he bailed out, dropped into the ocean, and was soon picked up by a Japanese submarine. The Japanese did not report his capture and while he spent 20 months of torture and near starvation in prisoner of war camps, he was listed by the U.S. as missing in action.

In March 1944, Boyington was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His comrades thought it was a posthumous decoration. But Pappy survived the prison camp, was freed at the end of the war, and stood in the White House on October 5, 1945, still recovering from the physical and psychological effects of his imprisonment, as President Harry S Truman draped the nation's highest award for bravery around his neck.

Flash forward 61 years. A move is afoot, naturally enough, one would think, to honor Greg Boyington, Class of 1934, at his alma mater, the University of Washington. A resolution comes before the august Student Senate for a statue honoring the Medal of Honor winner. Not "a large statue, but rather something on a small scale" (according to the minutes of the senate).
Ahem.

A distinguished "Senator," Jill Edwards moves to table the matter. Discussion ensues on who this Boyington is and why he should be honored. One student says he had read about Boyington and thought the university should be proud of him.

Distinguished Senator Jill Edwards questions "whether it was appropriate to honor a person who killed other people."

She further wonders whether "a member of the Marine Corps was an example of the sort of person UW wanted to produce."

Another distinguished Senator, Ashley Miller, "commented that many monuments at UW already commemorate rich white men."

Student Senator Karl Smith casts some oil on the troubled waters by suggesting that the resolution honoring Boyington be stripped of any mention of "destroying 26 enemy aircraft." Perhaps, in this way, Colonel Boyington's "service" could be acknowledged, but "not his killing of others."

Discussion then ensues on the finer point that "a destroyed aircraft was not necessarily indicative that a pilot had died."

We will spare you the rest of the deliberations and ruminations of the UW student legislative body, filled as it is with pious parsing and handwringing and ahistorical thumbsucking over how to mention that embarrassing Medal of Honor in some way that would leave no trail back to the fact that it was won in a war, where killing took place, to stop an aggressor bent on subjugating at least one half of the globe.

If you are an alumni of UW, you should be pissed or ashamed or both.

If you are not an alumni you should at least be embarrassed at the fact that this kind of "thinking" is too, too normal from the present generation of college students (and professors) all over this country.

Fortunately, Pappy Boyington did not live to see this pathetic half-lit circus on his old campus. He died January 11, 1988. He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery with the highest military honors of the nation for which he fought with such skill and bravery. He is much more a credit to UW than all the bright young things who now populate its Student Senate.

Ralph Bennett is a TCS contributing editor.