“Cannon to the right of them, Cannon to the left of them,
Cannon in front of them,
Volley’d and thunder’d;
Storm’d at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death
Into the mouth of Hell …”
These lines from “The Charge of the Light Brigade” describe the “noble six hundred” British cavalrymen who rode straight into encircling Russian guns in the battle of Balaclava, in 1854, during the Crimean War. The poem isn’t long, only six stanzas, yet it is one of the most stirring accounts of dauntlessness ever written.
And it equally well describes what took place two years ago in Afghanistan, when two gallant Americans — not 600, but two — rode into the mouth of a similar hell in the Ganjgal Valley.
Dakota Meyer was 21, a corporal in the Marine Corps, when over the radio he heard a forward team of some 50 men, Americans and Afghans, who had walked into a Taliban ambush, calling for artillery. Repeatedly he asked his superior officers to intervene; repeatedly he was denied. Shelling would endanger civilians, the higher-ups said.
So Cpl. Meyer acted. He enlisted a fellow Marine, Juan Rodriguez-Chavez, to drive, and the two of them rode alone into the jaws of death, into a U-shaped ambush — not once, but five times. This week when the young Kentuckian received the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest accolade, now-Sgt. Meyer was lauded for single-handedly turning the tide of battle, saving more than a dozen Marines and two dozen Afghan troops, recovering the bodies of his fallen brothers, and for “extraordinary heroism, presence of mind amidst chaos and death, and unselfish devotion to his comrades.”
There’s another similarity between what happened in the Crimea and in the Ganjgal Valley, apart from the three-sided fire and stunning heroism of the men who went into it. “Charging an army, While all the world wonder’d,” as Tennyson put it. In both cases, disgrace has attached to superior officers because of the orders they gave.
It was poorly worded orders, poorly understood, that caused the Light Brigade to dash into a valley packed with enemy troops. Incredibly, the cavalrymen broke through the Russian lines, “sabring the gunners there” but then they had to get back out. Less than a third of the men and horses emerged unscathed.
In Afghanistan, the shameful orders were not to go into the valley of death; but to wait, it seems, while their comrades were cut down unaided. Some three dozen men survived because two Marines disobeyed those orders.
The parallels between two battles, 155 years apart, are of course not exact. Yet both cases highlight the nobility of warriors adhering to the military’s highest values without regard for their own safety.
All across the country this week, people read newspaper accounts and saw on television as Meyer received his medal (Rodriguez-Chavez had already received the Navy Cross, the second-highest honor). Let us hope that at dinner tables everywhere, people were telling their children of the incredible acts of these brave men.
“When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wonder’d.”
And so it should.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
