A COWARD OR DEAD
My dad is a WWII Vet, turning 89 in May. I am one of those rare persons with a WWII veteran father because he married late and I was a surprise even later. Like a typical boy, I grew up eager to hear him talk about his time in the Navy. He served for six years as a radio operator on various vessels, but most of his service was done on Navy blimps patrolling the southern U.S. Atlantic coast and the Caribbean as a first line defense against Nazi U-Boats. The Naval blimps would patrol in a long line of blimps stretching over hundreds of miles spaced several miles apart. From hundreds of feet in the air, they could easily spot the long, dark outline of a U-boat.
I often asked, “Did you ever spot a U-boat?” Yes, in fact, he did, once. He often told me the story. But I didn’t learn the rest of it until just a year or two ago. One day on a routine patrol somewhere over the Atlantic, the blimp crew spotted the dark shape of a U-boat. The normal procedure required my father to radio the base with general coordinates for bombers. But they would also have to stay and circle the boat since it would continue to move, even though this risked the Germans surfacing and shooting down the blimp.
With the U-boat in the blue water below, the captain came to my father and said in a quiet voice, “Don’t radio the base. I would rather be a coward than dead.” Then the captain pointed the slow-moving blimp away from the submarine. As my dad retold the story, he said, “I always felt bad about that, because after we left, the U-boat shot down another blimp. I had a buddy on that one, and he was killed.”
What if the captain had chosen differently and my dad’s blimp had been shot down instead? I wouldn’t be here, but maybe his friend would have had a son who became a better man than I. Who knows, and it’s all just speculation. But sometimes I wonder, when faced with the choices of doing what’s right or self-preservation, how often do we want to just quietly duck out saying, “I would rather be a coward than dead?”
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