Heroes

Everyone has flaws and strengths, but some people manage to overcome enough of their inherent flaws to change the course of history for the better--and for the betterment of their fellow human beings. Here are some of my favorites, my heroes if you will, who have improved the human condition through their decency, their hard work and their sheer competence.

Col. John Paul Stapp (MD and Ph.D, USAF), preparing for a rocket sled run in New Mexico. Photo courtesy of Edwards AFB History Office, USAF.

Col. John Paul Stapp (MD and Ph.D, USAF).

You’ve almost certainly seen him in a grainy, surreal, slow-motion black-and-white film clip from the 1950s, but you have probably never heard his name. That’s unfortunate because his life’s work has saved thousands of lives around the world, and continues to save numerous lives every day. A medical doctor and Ph.D in the U.S. Air Force decades ago, Col. Stapp is the man whom you have seen in the famous series of rocket-sled film frames where the camera is looking into his eyes as the vehicle decelerates and his face distorts horribly as he slams to a halt in a fraction of a second. Col. Stapp risked his life and his health (especially his vision) as he rode rocket sleds in New Mexico over and over again. He did this to gather crucially important data that would save the lives of pilots who would have to eject from high-speed jet aircraft. If you ever need to gather data through experiments that are fearsomely risky, the only ethical approach is to use yourself as the experimental subject. That’s just what Stapp did, about 30 times. (Chimpanzees were used for some sled rides that were too risky even for the Colonel, so we also owe a debt of gratitude to our primate cousins who were not given a choice.) Before Stapp began to ride the USAF rocket sleds, it was believed that humans could not withstand more than 18 times the force of gravity (18 G’s, that is) of sustained deceleration force. Stapp eventually broke the 18-G barrier none the worse for wear (well, a little worse, actually; he was injured on some of the rides). He went on to survive deceleration forces as high as 46 G’s, although he was temporarily blinded by the effects of his final, 46-G ride. To put it another way, Stapp routinely and intentionally subjected himself to (and survived) crash forces that exceeded a collision with a brick wall at 120 miles/hr (about 190 km/hr). If that had been all he had ever done, his work would have been memorable enough. But he did much more.

Stapp realized that, if a person is properly restrained in any rapidly decelerating (that is, crashing) vehicle, he or she can withstand extremely high G-forces for relatively long periods of time, contrary to the popular wisdom that preceded his work. In his day thousands of people died every year in automobile mishaps because their cars stopped but their bodies didn’t. The Air Force, for example, was losing far more of its personnel to automobile crashes than to airplane crashes. Stapp realized that many of those deaths were needless. If people could be properly restrained inside cars, he reasoned, they would often be able to survive crashes in the same way that he survived his sled rides, by being firmly connected to the vehicle body. He began pressuring automobile design engineers and government regulators to do simple things that would make car crashes more survivable. This included the installation and use of seat belts, shoulder harnesses, and air bags. The manufacturers initially resisted the measures that he proposed, of course. No doubt they thought it would be a waste of money to put restraints into autos. I can just hear the whining: “This will cost too much money; we’ll go out of business if we do this,” and so forth. But Stapp was standing in the room with President Lyndon Johnson and consumer advocate Ralph Nader when Johnson signed the bill for mandatory safety-belt installation in autos into U.S. Federal law in 1966.

Stapp died peacefully in 1999 at the age of 89 in Alamogordo, New Mexico. His life’s work continues through the Stapp Car Crash Conferences that are annually sponsored by the Society of Automotive Engineers. I think about him every so often when I strap myself into my hot little BMW Z-4 roadster. We all should; everyone in the world who has ever used an automobile or flown in an airplane owes him a debt of gratitude. I would hope that I can exhibit his kind of rationality and bravery in the pursuit of knowledge.

Benjamin Franklin. Most people probably have some knowledge of Ben Franklin, so I won’t explicate his biography here. I will say that he’s one of my all-time favorites because I constantly see my own attitudes and sometimes even my experiences echoed in his own life and his writings. Largely self-made and always liberally forward-looking, Franklin epitomizes my own brand of optimism and critical thinking. He also had a terrific sense of humor, apparently very similar to my own. I hugely admire his wide range of interests that led him to become an inventor, scientific investigator, businessman, politician, and international diplomat. I am in awe of the fact that Franklin turned 70 years old in 1776, the year that he helped draft the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia, and then went on to Paris (with John Adams as his crusty but lovable (or not) sidekick) where he was instrumental in convincing the French to support the American Revolution. He was still witty, charming, and very much a ladies man at an age that few people reached in those days. Fantastic! Of all the founders of the USA, he is the one that I would most like to be able to walk around with for a day, and then have dinner with, talking and laughing about all sorts of topics and making plans for the future.

Here’s an example of what I like so much about Franklin. While he was working in England and Holland in 1768, at the age of 62 (in an age when few people reached that age at all and almost a decade before the events of the American Revolutionary War in which he would play such an important role), he undertook a systematic set of scientific experiments related to an observation that he had made of the motion of boats in canals. He did this on top of all of his other, unrelated work at that time.

His chance observation was that boats in Holland moved more slowly in shallow canal waters than in deeper waters when using the same amount of motive power, even though in all cases the boats were not touching the bottom. Later, back in England, he set out to understand this observation by building a water trough fourteen feet long, six inches wide and six inches deep, which he nearly completely filled with water. Then he inserted a second board that could be raised and lowered to vary the effective depth of water in his model canal. He built a model canal boat that was six inches long (the same length as the canal width) and 2.25 inches wide (a little over a third of the canal width), and which drew one inch of water. He thus devised a clever experiment in which the boat’s draft was significant in comparison to depth of the “canal”, but in which the boat’s width was just a small fraction of the canal width. He had, in effect, isolated the effect of the boat’s draft compared to the canal depth. Now he was ready to begin his set of experimental runs.

Franklin moved his little boat down the length of the canal with uniform motive force by attaching a thread to its bow, running the thread over a pulley at the far end of the canal, and weighting the thread with a shilling coin. He timed the boat as it ran along the canal by counting to ten over and over again, as fast as he could, and counting each set of ten by raising a finger. He made several runs at each of several water depths and averaged his results for each water depth. He tabulated his results as follows:

Water depth Average time to run canal length with uniform motive power applied

(inches) (arbitrary units)

___________ _______________

1.5 101

2 89

4.5 79

Thus did Franklin not only single-handedly verify that the shallow-canal resistance effect was real, but he furthermore quantified it rather precisely. How many world leaders could do that today? Franklin went on to speculate as to whether the effect was substantial enough to justify the cost of digging deeper canals. He was a man who regularly applied rationality to every problem, be it physical or political. This was the kind of systematic and high-caliber thinking that he brought to bear on most problems, and which he later exercised in Congressional debates in Philadelphia in 1776 and as an ambassador to France in the succeeding years during and after the American Revolution. Franklin exhibited the kind of relentless rationality that we need to see more often at all periods in history, including now, and which I always try to exhibit myself.

Charles Darwin. I think Darwin is one of the coolest people who has ever lived because he was able to deduce, through careful observations and the application of top-notch logic, that every form of life on Earth must be related to every other form through lines of descent from common ancestors, all the way back to a single, original organism. Furthermore, he was able to deduce that the mechanism of change from one type of organism to another must be the differential success rates of various features in those organisms relating to their ability to live from day to day and ultimately to reproduce and pass on their successful characteristics to their offspring. He did this at a time when the Earth was thought to be quite young, too young for such evolutionary process to have happened, and when nobody really knew anything about genetics. Brilliant! He deduced the history of life on our planet, and the way that it has changed itself over time, and he passed on his insights and his arguments in well-written, thoughtful books and publications.

As an example of Darwin’s ability to develop deep and accurate insights from physical observations of the Earth, he single-handedly and accurately inferred how coral atolls must form. The tricky thing about atolls, in explaining their origins, is that corals can only grow near the ocean’s surface, and yet the depths of coral rings in atolls may be well into the zone of perpetual darkness. How could a coral island (which is what an atoll really is) develop in extremely deep water if corals can only grow in shallow water? Darwin solved the problem by observing that well-developed coral atolls occurred at the ends of island chains, and that the islands at the opposite ends of those chains were always active, and very big, volcanoes. So he realized the physical lineup of islands along the chains represented a time sequence of atoll development. He inferred that, as islands in the chain got older and wore down, with their shores gradually subsiding (and as we now know, with the sea floor sinking deeper and deeper as the tectonic plate on which the islands ride moves steadily away from the volcanic hot-spot), the corals kept growing upward at a rate that just matched the downward rate of island subsidence. We now know, from the theory and observation of plate-tectonic behavior and from core-drilling on atolls, that Darwin got it exactly right. He had two brilliant insights in this case: that the sequential spatial lineup of island chains represented a time development series from younger to older islands, and that geological subsidence could be a steady, long-term effect with which even slow-growing corals could maintain a steady and countervailing pace of growth upward as the rock underneath subsided downward. He did this in a time (the early 1800s) when no one had a clue how old the Earth was, and when the idea of uniformitarian change in geology was just beginning to be accepted. Wow. That’s my kind of brilliant intellect.

(The only thing that Darwin couldn’t take into account was the then-unknown effect of periodic ice-age-related changes in sea levels on atoll development.)

Sergei Korolev (or Korolyov). My hat’s off to him for his ingenious ability to develop and build, under the worst possible circumstances, rocket technology that would send human beings into space and robots to other planets. He was not only a brilliant organizer and an inspired engineer. He also managed to accomplish his feats inside a political system that was inherently creepy and that did not deserve to have someone of his abilities working for it, and in a society and an economy that could barely support the technical demands of his rocket and space vehicle designs. That same system (or more precisely the people who ran it) denied him the public recognition, the worldwide acclaim actually, that he deserved for his feats of sending into orbit the first artificial Earth satellite (Sputnik I) and the first human being (Yuri Gagarin), but he persevered anyway, in total anonymity. If Korolev had not died prematurely in a botched medical operation, he might well have managed to send a cosmonaut around the far side of the Moon, and maybe down to its surface as well, prior to the successes of the U.S. Apollo flights. It is a tribute to his abilities that his rugged, high-quality rocket designs are still in use today. He presents an example to me of brilliant fortitude.

Dr. Robert Goddard. There can be a fine line between being a competent, brilliant visionary who is ahead of his or her time, versus being a kook. Dr. Goddard fell on the genius side of the line. At a time when heavier-than-air flight was still young, Goddard began to seriously consider realistic ways to leave the Earth entirely and travel to the Moon and other planets. Then he began to experiment with the design and construction of large liquid-fueled rockets. I admire him for his vision, his energy, and his sheer competence. Based on the East Coast but working seasonally with a small group of talented, dedicated individuals at his own desert test range in New Mexico (in an echo of the way that the Wright brothers worked at the Kill Devil Hills of North Carolina while maintaining their home base in Ohio), Goddard developed all of the necessary components for space rockets at the same time that the Germans were making similar strides with a far larger and better-funded effort. He is an example to me of how you have to do what you have to do, on your own if necessary, if you have a vision for a project to be accomplished.

Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub (Saladin, Joseph son of Job). Saladin, known in his own lifetime simply as Yusuf (Joseph) was the governor of Egypt and foe of the latin crusaders in the 1170s and 1180s, an era when the Crusader states were beginning to lose their grip on the cities of the eastern mediterranean coast that had been seized by their predecessors almost a century before, in the First Crusade. He was brilliant, well-studied, compassionate and ethical in an age when the most appalling cruelties were routinely visited upon civilian populations by heavily armed and mostly illiterate nobles. Saladin’s only weakness was political: as a Kurd, he was distrusted by both the Turks and the Arabs who formed the ruling elite outside the Crusader territory. Nevertheless, Saladin was recognized for his unsurpassed military ability. He smashed the Latins at the battle of Hattin in July 1187 and proceeded to take over the remaining levantine coastal cities, moving swiftly primarily by guaranteeing safety for non-combatants if the cities would surrender, and then living up to his word. He recaptured Jerusalem in October. As usual, it was after the fighting that he made his historical mark. Instead of following the precedent set by the Crusaders, in which local non-Christian populations were routinely slaughtered following the capture of a city or town, Saladin guaranteed safe passage to non-combatants. He insisted on scrupulous adherence to the terms of all of his peace agreements, even when such adherence was to his own detriment. He personally paid ransoms for people who could not afford to pay for their own. He treated the Latin soldiers who were his prisoners with magnanimity, with the exception of those who had committed gross atrocities in breaches of earlier peace agreements.

An example is provided by his behavior after he had taken Jerusalem. In pointed contrast to the large-scale, indiscriminate massacre of civilians that the Latin soldiers had committed against the local Muslim and Jewish populations after the city had been taken in the First Crusade almost a century before, Saladin allowed all of the local Christian population to ransom themselves free, with safe passage guaranteed to Tyre, for the equivalent of a few dollars each. He guaranteed his personal funds to pay the ransoms of those who said they had no money. In the spirit of “a deal is a deal,” he even paid ransom for people who officially claimed indigence but who left the city with cartloads of fabulous possessions. He went on to allow Jews to live in the city again (they having been earlier banned from the city by the Latins). He also allowed the Orthodox Christian Church to re-establish itself in the city (as those people had, like the Jews, been earlier evicted by the Crusaders) and he turned over control of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to the Orthodox Church as well, keeping it open for Christian pilgrims.

When Saladin died in 1193 in Damascus, he still retained political power but was nearly bankrupt. He had spent almost all of his personal fortune on helping people in need. In an age when the cruelest savageries were impulsively committed on a large scale by armed men on a routine basis, and when peace agreements meant little, he went down in the histories of both the Middle East and Europe, of Muslims, Jews and Christians alike, as a man who always took the high road with his friends and foes, who was always generous with his purse to anyone in need, who treated all people well regardless of their religion or their origin, and who always lived up to his word. He gave meaning to the word “chivalrous.” I’d like to think that I live up to his example.

Honorable Mention:

Major General (later General) Oliver Smith, USMC. This was a general who saved thousands of his soldiers’ lives by recognizing a developing trap and avoiding it, even though he got into some trouble with his superiors for doing so. In the see-saw actions of the Korean War, the North Koreans had first invaded the South (the Republic of Korea, ROK) in June 1950, pushing the United Nations forces (primarily but not entirely US and ROK armies) all the way down to a tiny pocket near Pusan. The Pusan perimeter was held by heroic efforts that included extraordinary applications of air power. The UN forces later counterattacked with a very risky landing on the western Korean coast at Inchon near Seoul, surprising and panicking the North Koreans and driving them rapidly northward toward the Chinese border. General Douglas MacArthur, who was in overall command of the UN forces in Korea, was determined to destroy the North Korean state altogether. What neither he nor the politicos in Washington reckoned on was the Chinese determination to see to it that US forces did not end up occupying territory directly on the Chinese border of the Yalu River. An analogous situation for the US government would have been the imminent establishment of a Chinese army on the south bank of the Rio Grande following an intervention by those forces in a civil war in Mexico. The Chinese saw the American advance toward the Yalu as as an attempt to compromise their independence, and they had no intention of tolerating that.

The Chinese government put out some diplomatic feelers to the US government, basically proposing that a North Korean rump state occupying a border zone near the Chinese border be allowed to continue in existence. It would encompass only one-fifth of the Korean peninsula. The overtures were ignored. MacArthur was arrogantly determined to achieve total victory despite the concerns that had been voiced by the superpower next door. He assured President Truman, during a meeting on Wake Island, that he would merely brush aside any Chinese military opposition if that country intervened. This was the backdrop for subsequent momentous events.

In the Americans’ pell-mell rush toward the Chinese border, Major General Oliver Smith of the US Marine Corps realized that the American and ROK forces were outrunning their supply lines, losing their air support, dispersing themselves in difficult terrain, and leaving themselves open to flanking attacks. He identified the extremely mountainous terrain through which the Army was advancing to be a place where the invading force could easily be cut off and trapped in the event that the enemy managed to sneak behind them along flanking routes, and he recognized that there were plenty of such routes. He became so concerned that he decided it was time to begin to prepare an escape route along which his men could perform a coordinated, controlled, fighting retreat to safety just in case the precarious situation that MacArthur had allowed to develop happened to fall apart. MacArthur was an egomaniac who believed that he was predestined for greatness, and who did not imagine that there was any chance that anything could go wrong despite the tactical weakness of the US forces’ position in northern Korea. General Smith was, in effect, bucking the will of General MacArthur and his staff in his next actions.

To the distinct irritation of his superiors, General Smith organized a major road construction program behind his 1st Marine Division in the fall of 1950. He slowed his Marines’ advance to just one mile a day, both to support road construction and depot-laying, and to prevent his soldiers from outrunning their logistical support. He built a good road behind his forces, through the mountains and then to the coast. He cached supply depots of food and ammunition--depots that later saved his men. He built a base and an airstrip at Hagaru-ri, at the southern end of the Changjin Reservoir (sometimes referred to by its Japanese name, Chosin). The general had a feeling that the clock was running out for his men. He was right.

Unbeknownst to the reckless MacArthur, even as US Air Force aircraft were bombing North Korean targets right on the Yalu River and GIs were firing mortar rounds over Chinese territory on oxbow bends in the river, thus exacerbating Chinese fears of US intentions in Korea, the Chinese Army was secretly infiltrating between 280,000 to 300,000 soldiers with supporting light artillery into northern Korea. They were smart: they moved at night, hid by day, and camouflaged themselves so well no one in the US Army realized that the Chinese were slowly infiltrating almost a third of a million men behind the US forces in the mountains of North Korea. They were generally not detected by reconnaissance scouts or by aircraft. As for the few indications of the Chinese presence that were noted by US intelligence, MacArthur dismissed them as meaningless. He was certain (for no particular reason grounded in any facts) that the Chinese could not infiltrate a significant number of soldiers into North Korea. In hindsight his attitude was one of sheer arrogance, the sort of arrogance that is always rewarded by comeuppance.

The Chinese struck on the night of 25-26 November 1950. The fighting was ferocious and no quarter was given. The Chinese forces were never as locally numerous as the UN forces tended to believe they were, but they attacked cleverly using skills honed in years of fighting in the preceding civil wars in China, in such a way as to make it appear that they were everywhere at once. In many cases they managed to panic the forces that they were attacking. True to the fears of General Smith, the US Army, Marine and ROK forces were cut off from retreat and from each other, trapped on lousy, narrow dirt roads threading impassable defiles. The Chinese caught them like fish in a net. They were sliced and diced in isolated pockets all through the mountains, with no way to win and no way to get out. Air support was of little help in that type of fighting, with the Chinese often attacking at night and hiding by day. Of the roughly 54,000 US troops who ultimately died in Korea, about 44,000 died in the mountain surprise and the resulting protracted fighting of the next three years. The retreat from the mountains became the longest in US military history at over 150 miles to the 38th parallel, where the defensive lines finally stabilized. It was the first Chinese victory against a western army in over a century. It was a disaster for the US Army and Marines. It was arguably the worst defeat in US military history. It was certainly the loss for the US of the pivotal battle of the Korean War, primarily attributable to the disastrously poor judgment of the high-handed and prideful General MacArthur.

There was one bright exception. General Smith’s Marines, with their good road behind them and their supply depots in place, were able to execute exactly the type of well-ordered fighting retreat that he had envisioned, even though the Chinese forces were located as much as 80 miles to the rear of the US forces. Surrounded by the Chinese, they did not panic. They were able to fight forward in reverse, as it were, in desperately cold conditions all the way back to Hagaru-ri at the Changjin Reservoir and thence on to the coast at Hungnam, where they were evacuated by sea to fight another day. Of all US forces in northern Korea that terrible autumn, only Smith’s were able to get back in good order and with relatively low casualties to a location they could defend, with good air support available for bringing in supplies and evacuating the injured. Some 19,000 severely outnumbered Marines and GIs heroically managed to hold back the Chinese army for ten days in the mountains near Changjin. Their action under Smith’s leadership provided enough time to evacuate more wounded and allow for a more organized retreat for the rest of the force. The Marines and GIs not only saved themselves but also much of their equipment, including their artillery, and even in many cases the bodies of their dead. General Smith’s far-sightedness and good judgment in previously laying supply depots and building a good road saved thousands of lives and turned a potentially total disaster into a more manageable and partially mitigated disaster. I hope that I can exhibit the good judgment and leadership skills that he had.

(The fighting finally wound up back on nearly the same line between North Korea and South Korea, the 38th parallel, as where the fighting had started years before, and where the demilitarized zone is located today. If MacArthur had been less arrogant and if Washington had reined him in and had taken up the Chinese offer for a North Korean rump state, US and ROK forces would have occupied four-fifths instead of one-half of the Korean peninsula. Subsequent history would have evolved far differently in northeastern Asia between then and now.)

Zebulon Montgomery Pike. Young Captain Pike of the U.S. Army was detailed to lead a reconnaissance expedition into Spanish territory in 1806, as a prelude to a possible U.S. invasion of the Spanish domain in Mexico and New Mexico. I admire him not so much because he successfully led his group through totally unknown territory to Santa Fe, then down into Mexico and back to the U.S. through Texas (as impressive as that achievement was on its own merits), but because he did so in the teeth of desperate circumstances and, often, sheer bad luck. Anybody can succeed when everything is breaking their way, but it takes admirable strength and capability to persevere when everything is going wrong. Pike exhibited an exemplary degree and quality of perseverance and competence in the face of ongoing adversity.