MOBILE, Alabama — When the Navy held a keel authentication ceremony in nearby Pascagoula, Mississippi, today for the USS Jeremiah Denton, a new Navy destroyer, it recalled the days when almost the entire country’s population could recognize heroes in common.
Denton, the former admiral and U.S. senator whose hometown was here, was the epitome of a hero, not just for one justly famous incident but for his whole life of service. The highest-ranking American prisoner of war in Vietnam, the recipient of brutal treatment for eight years, known worldwide for blinking out the word “t-o-r-t-u-r-e” in Morse code while being “interviewed” by his captors, Denton’s courage and patriotism were unsurpassed.
Yet Denton’s career encompassed so much more than just his stalwart, morale-building leadership of fellow captives in the Hanoi Hilton. A leading military strategist and decorated graduate thesis author in the decade before the Vietnam War and a top armed forces educator afterward, Denton spent 34 years in military service.
Barely elected to the Senate in 1980, he was far more energetic and effective as a solidly conservative legislator than as a political glad-hander, with the latter deficiency helping cost him reelection by just 7,000 votes. Undaunted, he spent the next quarter-century doing good. As I wrote in tribute when he died in 2014, “He helped numerous Vietnamese children emigrate to the United States, and he established the ‘Denton program’ that provides for charities to send farm equipment and medical supplies overseas for free on U.S. military planes and ships that have unused cargo space.” Not only did it well serve impoverished foreigners without cost to U.S. taxpayers, but it also boosted U.S. popularity across the globe.
As Denton wrote in the closing paragraphs of his POW memoir, When Hell was in Session, “This nation is carrying the hopes of hundreds of millions of people throughout the world. … We must do what we can to spread among the deprived of the world the fruits of our labor, as any good neighbor would, and share with them our spiritual light.”
From personal experience, I can attest that Denton in retirement was a light to behold.
What should bother us all is that the United States has become so fractured that its people no longer seem able universally to recognize heroes such as Denton. With the so-called “common culture” more often being “common” in the sense of coarse and second-rate than in the sense of being communally unifying, there seems to be little agreement on what constitutes heroism in the first place. Mere celebrity, or excellence in fields of sports or entertainment, often offers a substitute for true heroism, but it’s usually a hollow celebrity divorced from any requirement for character or sacrifice.
Worse, in this age, when many American institutions seem intent on insisting that this nation is inherently abominable rather than admirable, large swaths of citizens scoff at the very idea that service for the country is a praiseworthy cause. Rare is the willingness to say unselfconsciously, as Denton’s daughter Madeleine said at the ceremony today, that “the country is so unique and special, and we need to defend it.”
If we don’t universally agree about what institutions and values are worth defending, courageously supporting, and sometimes sacrificing for, then we lose the ability to recognize heroes, much less inspire new generations by their examples.
Nonetheless, now, a ship charged with advancing the just interests of this good and special nation will go forth bearing the name of an undisputed hero. The ship is well-named. It would be better still if we all could value, and emulate, the character traits of its namesake.
