Amazing Tales for Making Men Out of Boys

380 Pages·2009·3.55 MB·English

by  Neil Oliver

For Teddy
Contents
Introduction vi
Holding out for a hero 1
The Penlee Lifeboatmen 11
A few good men 23
John Paul Jones and the Birth of the US Navy 29
How curiously the course of one’s life may be turned 45
The Demons of Camerone 51
The trouble with the truth 63
The Battle of Isandlwana 69
The heroic age 93
D-Day and the Beach Called Omaha 97
When Britannia ruled the waves 115
The Yangtze Incident 119
The loneliness of command 131
Josiah Harlan, the Man Who Would Be King 137
The luck of the Irish 153
Sir Ernest Shackleton and the Imperial Trans-Antarctic
Expedition 161
In search of a place in the world 181
The Flight of the Nez Perces 185
First, women and children 199
The Birkenhead Drill 203
For England’s sake and duty 215
The Thin Red Line and the Charge of the Light Brigade 219
We’re following the leader 237
The Battle of Trafalgar 241
A long way from home 259
Moonwalkers and Apollo 13 263
Enemy at the gates 277
Constantinople 281
Old age and guile beat youth and enthusiasm 297
Dien Bien Phu 301
The field of human conflict 313
The Siege of the Alamo 317
Their finest hour 329
Thermopylae 337
For the boy 353
Further Reading 358
Illustration Acknowledgments 362
Acknowledgments 363
Credits
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
Have you suffered, starved and triumphed, groveled down, yet
grasped at glory,
Grown bigger in the bigness of the whole?
“Done things” just for the doing, letting babblers tell the story,
Seeing through the nice veneer the naked soul?
Have you seen God in his splendors, heard the text that nature
renders?
(You’ll never hear it in the family pew.)
The simple things, the true things, the silent men who do things—
Then listen to the Wild—it’s calling you.
They have cradled you in custom, they have primed you with their
preaching,
They have soaked you in convention through and through,
They have put you in a showcase; you’re a credit to their
teaching,
But can’t you hear the Wild?—It’s calling you.
Let us probe the silent places, let us seek what luck betide us,
Let us journey to a lonely land I know,
There’s a whisper on the night-wind, there’s a star agleam to
guide us,
And the Wild is calling, calling . . . let us go.
From “The Call of the Wild,” by Robert Service
Introduction
There was a time not so very long ago when boys were taught to
be men. Efforts were made in those just-forgotten days to ensure
that certain skills were learned and that there was a clear under-
standing of what being a man was all about. It was straightforward,
unquestioned and it worked.
Men used to live by the skills of their hands. They made new
things and fi xed old. They maintained their houses, trucks and snow
machines. They knew how to grow food and how to hunt and fi sh.
They dressed like men, talked like men, walked and worked and
played like men.
Their jobs had names that are becoming as unfamiliar to us as
callused hands and ingrained dirt. They were fi tters, turners and
carpenters; blacksmiths and wheelwrights; plowmen and woods-
men; masons and glaziers; tailors and cobblers; riveters and welders.
They walked the line. Out of the ground beneath their feet they
mined coal and copper, tin and lead, gold and silver. They built
bridges and railways, ships and trains, and when they ran out of
room in their own back yards they shipped out and did it all over
again all over the world.
If you learned the lore of manhood and managed to pass your
Manliness Finals there were all sorts of manly futures to be looked
forward to:
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Introduction
Steam-engine driver
Engineer
Miner
Inventor
Cowboy
Explorer
Sheriff
Astronaut
All of these good, old-fashioned, manly jobs and dozens more
besides were there for the taking, provided you’d done your manly
homework.
Part of the education of boys came from reading tales of brave
and selfl ess deeds, or hearing from fathers and uncles and grand-
fathers about how other men had lived their lives, met their
challenges, reached their goals, lived their lives and faced their
deaths.
It was simple, honest stuff about standing up straight with your
shoulders back and eyes to the front like a soldier. It was about
making light of physical hardship and keeping going until the job was
done. Being a man was about comradeship and standing by your
friends whatever the circumstances. It meant understanding that
sometimes it was better to die a hero than live a coward.
Once upon a time, being an old-fashioned manly man had a lot
to do with simple, old-fashioned values. It was about caring whether
the streets were clear of refuse; that the walls of our homes and
businesses—and of our neighbors’ homes and businesses—were
free of graffi ti and other needless damage; it was about keeping the
yard tidy and the woodwork and railings freshly painted; it was
about fi rm handshakes, stiff upper lips and never, ever crying in
public. It meant looking out for friends and neighbors; coming
together to lend a hand when it was needed—without needing to
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Introduction
be asked. Sometimes it was as simple as making sure to always have
a clean handkerchief in case a lady needed to wipe her nose. It was
about keeping on swinging the bat, no matter the score; it was about
cheering on the underdog. And when there was nothing else for it,
it was about “fi x bayonets, boys, and die like good soldiers do.”
It defi nitely wasn’t about wanting to be noticed. It was about
doing the right thing because manly behavior was its own reward.
Middlemarch, written by George Eliot in 1871, ends with these
lines:
. . . for the growing good of the world is partly dependent
upon unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you
and me as they might have been is half owing to the number
who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
Hidden lives and unvisited tombs: that’s a big lesson to learn as
well. A manly man doesn’t expect recognition—he does what he
does because it’s the right thing to do. And that’s enough.
The men and boys of the 29th Infantry Division who fought
their way onto the beach at Omaha on July 6, 1944, didn’t go in
search of medals or glory; instead they were citizen soldiers from
a democracy determined to see good prevail for its own sake. Their
victory began and ended with their clear-eyed willingness to step
off their landing crafts and face whatever might be waiting for
them . . .
. . . when a handful of men chose to stay behind at the Alamo,
and give their lives for the greater good of all Texans, they knew they
wouldn’t be taking part in any victory parades. Not for them the glory
of being carried shoulder high through the streets of their home-
towns, basking in the warm glow of a grateful nation. They readied
themselves to fi ght and die because it was right, as they saw it . . .
. . . when John Paul Jones, father of the United States Navy, cared
not in the least whether his actions would cost him his life. He set
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Introduction
himself on a path and he followed it, unblinking, to the bitter end.
He turned and faced every foe and stared down every challenge
because he cared more about his honor and his dignity than his
life . . .
. . . when the Wild cried out—but only to those with ears to hear.
Josiah Harlan, a Pennsylvania Quaker who left behind all the
comforts of home to seek his fortune beyond the Hindu Kush in
the middle years of the 19th century, made and followed his own
rules. Finding his old world too small to give space to his dreams,
he turned his back on all he had known and let adventure take him
where it would. Here then was a man who would be king . . .
Nowadays we’re in danger of forgetting—or just plain discard-
ing—the value and importance of men like these. Somehow that
whole way of being has been ridiculed, eroded and discouraged.
Being an old-fashioned man in the time-honored way is becoming
outdated, outmoded and forgotten.
Manly men—of the sort who traveled to these shores and carved
out a nation from the wilderness—have been hunted to near-
extinction. They’re all but gone now, along with all the other wild
creatures that once roamed the quiet places of the land—the bear,
the boar, the wolf. There’s always talk of bringing back the Wild—
reintroducing the beasts we’ve lost. No one talks about bringing
back the sort of men who once roamed the world, who lived defi ant
lives and damn the consequences.
But the urge to be a man like men once were is a primal thing
and lives still in the unformed hearts of boys.
Some of what’s required to get back on track is to know once
more what manhood is about, to hear the old tales and to learn
what men are for and what men can do. Whenever I hear these
stories I imagine a scene I’ve only ever witnessed in the movies: it’s
the one where a grand old gent, white of hair and stout of girth,
is holding court after an ample dinner. With fat cigar clamped
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