8-1-25

Despite all of our alleged fragility that the left wants us to constantly be reminded

of humans have an amazing amount of resilience…..we can adapt to almost

anything, anywhere, anytime…..think about the myriad examples of war, famine,

disease, tyranny, and other examples of massive difficulty that have gone on at

various times throughout history, and yet, we are still here…..there is something

innately stubborn about the human capacity to adapt and overcome….and

generally speaking that’s a very good thing……but sometimes, not so

much…..sometimes when humans “adapt” it really comes down to just shrugging

their shoulders and deciding that they have to live with something…..passive

acquiescence in the face difficulty is not the same thing as

overcoming…..accepting something as normal when it is decidedly not is a far cry

from clawing your way back to the top when life has beat you down…..I’m talking

about the difference between surviving and thriving…..and if we are to thrive as a

people it requires an act of the will, not a surrendering of our will…..

I was really struck by this in Afghanistan…..a nation in which an entire generation

had known nothing but war and tyranny for decades…..and they had just grown

accustomed to it…..one of the best examples is how they just lived next to

unexploded ordnance….it was everywhere…..landmines littered farm fields,

school buildings held mortar shells, bombs stuck out of the ground near the

bazaar, and life just went on around it all…..this was not normal, but they lived as

if it was…..I once asked an Afghan man if things were going alright – had they had

any issues with security. He told me matter-of-factly that he would appreciate it if

someone would take the landmines out of his storage room so that he could stock

it with household items instead…..I asked him what kind of mines and somehow

that became “bring me one” in his mind, and the next thing I know his helper

walked in carrying an anti-tank mine like an apple pie and tried to hand it to

me…..but this was a regular occurrence….during one patrol my team noticed old

mortar shells sticking out of the mud in a small village. One of the villagers saw

our interested look and grabbed a few and started pretending to juggle with

them……on another occasion a farmer told us that there were unexploded cluster

munitions (highly volatile) in his field, he would like them to be taken away he

said, but in order to farm he had just taken them and piled them up in a corner of

the field! Sure enough, we went to look and there were almost two dozen yellow

cluster bombs piled up like rocks and we had to blow them in place…….but the

fact that this was life was an acquiescence…..the people had decided at some

point that this was their lot in life so why question it…..life must go on so they

decided to give in to the new normal and just live with it…..but that was a lie,

because nothing about their situation was normal and shouldn’t ever be……

In the epic novel Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand the author (who wrote the book

over 70 years ago) decried a world in which individual achievement was

suppressed and people were told over and over to accept a world in which

success was secondary to looters and moochers…. One quote from Atlas Shrugged

goes straight to my point about choosing to thrive as opposed to just shrugging

into a passive daily survival…..it involves not accepting what we are told is a “new

normal”…..the quote I’m referring to states, “People think that a liar gains a

victory over his victim. What I’ve learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication,

because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that

person one’s master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality

that person’s view requires to be faked…” …..basically, I read that quote to mean

that when we choose to live a lie we have surrendered our own will……when we

are told that there is a new normal and we just need to get on board with it, even

when we know that it is wrong, or harmful, or flies in the face of our own faith or

reason, then we have just lied to those around us and surrendered our will to the

new normal…..we have then let the new normal become our master……

Well, I say all of that to say that I am inspired by people …..normal people….who

do abnormal things…..people who choose not to live small, because they’re told

to…..everyday folks who choose not to accept that life just is what it is…..normal

folks who decide that stepping out on faith, going down a different path, choosing

to live life larger than just normal…..and I heard a story of someone the other day

who inspired me like that…..she led an amazing life and you would never have

expected it from her…..she was a little bitty 5 foot tall petite woman from Paris

who decided to go to war…..and she did, and she became a legend…..Her name

was Catherine Leroy…..she was born in Paris, raised in Catholic schools, studied

music and thought she would become a classic pianist….but she was a free spirit

too….she learned how to parachute to impress a boyfriend and wound up loving it

and earned her French parachutist license as a teenager…..but I 1966, at the age

of 21 she decided to take the path less traveled and go to Vietnam…..in her

words, “I bought a one-way ticket to Saigon, and flew off with $150 and Leica

camera.” She said, “I wanted to be a war photographer, but I had never heard a

shot fired in anger.”……But she went there, and she found the office of the

Associated Press and walked in the door with no credentials….the chief photo

editor decided to give her a chance and handed her 3 rolls of black and white film

and told her that if she could get a photo he used he would pay her $15 per

photo…..she immediately embedded with US troops and went everywhere they

went …..she went to war with them…..she watched them fighting and dying and

she did it all at their level….her photographs became legendary….she was

featured in major magazines….she won awards….but she also won the hearts and

minds of the troops….and on February 22 nd , 1967 she went where no

photojournalist had ever gone…..Catherine Leroy, all of 5 feet tall and 85 pounds

soaking wet, strapped on a parachute and made the only major Airborne combat

assault of the Vietnam war when she jumped into Operation Junction City for the

Battle of Dak To with the 173 rd Airborne Brigade….the jumpmasters had to put

extra weight in her gear because they were afraid she’d blow off the drop zone

being so small…. In the largest Airborne operation since World War II Catherine

Leroy descended under canopy photographing paratroopers as she came

down……Junction City was 82 days of combat in which 282 American soldiers

were killed and over 2700 of the enemy……the day after her jump Brigadier

General John Deane pinned master jump wings with a gold combat star on her

chest……In May of that same year, just a few months later, while embedded with

Marines she was severely injured in a mortar attack…..shrapnel from the mortar

round caused severe life threatening wounds causing the battlefield medics to

believe she was initially dead, but one of her cameras had stopped most of the

damage….she spend several months in the hospital after which she rejoined the

troops and kept right on taking pictures…..in 1968, two years after arriving in

Vietnam, Catherine Leroy was captured by north Vietnamese toops during the

battle of Hue City…..somehow she managed to talk her way out of it, but not

before getting some of the only pictures ever taken of north Vietnamese troops

behind their own lines…..for that one she made the cover of Life Magazine…..She

finally came home, a bit jaded, 2 ½ years after arriving in country……her life was

by no means perfect….she got crazy at Woodstock, bounced around the country

as a hippy for awhile, got into drugs for bit……but she returned to journalism in

the mid-70’s and covered the Lebanese Civil War about which she co-authored a

book…….

Leroy won numerous awards for her work, including in 1967 the George Polk

Awards, Picture of the Year, The Sigma Delta Chi, and The Art Director's Club of

New York. She was the first woman to receive the Robert Capa Gold

Medal Award – "best published photographic reporting from abroad requiring

exceptional courage and enterprise" – for her coverage of the civil war in Lebanon,

in 1976. [15]  In 1997, she was the recipient of an Honor Award for Distinguished

Service in Journalism from the University of Missouri…..she finally passed way I

2006 of cancer…..she was a legend, she built a legacy for her work….

But her real legacy was that she was just a normal person…..who did abnormal

things….just an ordinary girl from the suburbs of a big city who did extraordinary

things….and her legacy was built on the fact that she went where the troops were

and showed the world their real stories….and they loved her for it…..

So yes, I’m inspired by normal people…..that’s where you get the best stories…..

And that’s a wrap for the Rightside Way