I’m Outa Here
Forget About Heroes
What happened to “don’t give up the ship,” “fight till the last man,” “never leave a wounded comrade” and all that honorable rubbish?
Too often, guts among leaders is a rare commodity. So if it’s mettle and spunk you want, don’t look to former Afgan President Ashraf Ghani.
While the Taliban was converging on the Afghan capital of Kabul, and many thousands of his people were facing imprisonment or even slaughter, Ghani was hightailing it out, ending up in the United Arab Emirates, one of the richest places on earth, where he was no doubt drowning his miseries on five-star cuisine. Russia said that Ghani fled with four vehicles and a helicopter full of cash but CNN reported that Ghani left with only the clothes on his back. I put my money on the Russians.
Ghani said he was not a coward but was just escaping to avoid bloodshed to prevent Afghanistan from becoming like Syria and Yemen, and avert “dreadful disaster” of “being hanged” had he remained in office. With a straight face, Ghani said, “Do not believe whoever tells you that your president sold you out and fled for his own advantage and to save his own life. These accusations are baseless,” as he no doubt, continued dining on five-star cuisine.
But compared to trump, Ghani was a downright lion of the jungle. Most recently, on Jan. 6, his re-election in cinders, trump was bellowing from the podium to urge thousands of his followers to march and ultimately invade the Capitol. It was one of those “what do you mean we, Tonto,” moments.
“We’re going to walk down. Anyone you want, but I think right here, we’re going to walk down to the Capitol,” trump told the crowd. “And we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them. Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong. We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated. Lawfully slated.”
While his zombies moved toward mayhem, trump was nowhere to be found, but probably he just had to go to the bathroom and forgot about the march or maybe, more likely, he preferred to watch the mayhem on TV, which is what he did, safe and sound.
On May 31, 2020, protesters were gathering and getting pretty rowdy outside the White House and trump did the honorable thing, he made a quick exit and fled like a frightened jack rabbit to an underground bunker in the White House, safe and secure from the rabble. But at least trump didn’t have to deal with the terrible loneliness of the bunker as his wife, Melania, and their son, Barron, were also there.
And then there is the military record or rather there was no military record because trump was deferred from the draft five times, including four times because of education and once for those nasty bone spurs on his heel.
Ghani and trump are more typical of world leaders who faced dangers and rather than suck it up they either split to some safe haven while others committed suicide rather than face the music with honor, including such infamous Nazis as Adolf Hitler, Hermann Goering, Odilo Globocnik, Josef Goebbels who did away with himself and his six young children, Richard Glucks, Hans-Georg von Friedeburg, Martin Bormann, Robert Ritter von Greim and Heinrich Himmler, brave heroes all.
And there were others who like Ghani, made like the wind and blew away from their countries, including Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista who fled to the relative safety of the Dominican Republic after his overthrow by Fidel Castro in 1959.
In 1979, the ruthless dictator of Iran, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, was toppled as the Islamic revolution brought Ayatolllah Rhollah Khomeini to power. Running for his life, the shah traveled to several countries before entering the United States in October 1979 for medical treatment of his cancer. Eventually, the shah died in exile in Egypt in July 1980.
And who can forget Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein who was courageously cowering in a six to eight foot deep hole nine miles from his hometown of Tikrit when he was captured by American Marines on Dec. 3, 2003. He didn’t resist and was later executed.
And Idi Amin, the third president of Uganda, who was responsible for about 250,000 deaths, was overthrown in 1979 and he did not waste much time in fleeing to Libya and then Saudi Arabia, where he died in 2003 in Faisal Specialist Hospital in Jeddah , Saudi Arabia, of multiple kidney failure. Poor Idi.
There were many others who found discretion to be much preferable to valor, like Haitian dictator Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier, who was responsible for the deaths of thousands before he self-exiled in France; and Ethiopian dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam, who led a violent campaign in which about 500,000 people were killed. He was overthrown, found guilty of genocide in absentia in 2006 and now lives in the relative calm of Zimbabwe.
There were, however, many who actually did go down with the ship and some were rescued and some died. The list of the courageous is very long but here are a few.
James F. Luce was in command of the Collins Line steamer SS Arctic on Sept. 27, 1854, when it collided with SS Vesta off the coast of Newfoundland. Luce went down with the ship but was able to escape and was rescued two days later.
William Lewis Herndon was at the helm of the commercial mail steamer Central America when it encountered a hurricane on Sept.12, 1857. Two ships came to the rescue, but could save only a fraction of the passengers, and Herndon chose to remain and die with the rest.
On March 27, 1904, Commander Takeo Hirose, in command of the blockship Fukui Maru at the Battle of Port Arthur, went down with the ship while searching for survivors, after the ship exploded from a direct strike from Russian coastal artillery.
One of the most famous moments of bravery came on April 15,1912, when Captain Edward Smith was in command of RMS Titanic when it sank in the North Atlantic Ocean after striking an iceberg. Smith was seen returning to the bridge just before the ship sank and it was never determined if the captain committed suicide or died on the bridge when the mighty Titanic it went under the sea.
There are heroes just not many in high places.