We do however share a town: Windsor Locks, a mill town with
a characteristic one-sided Main Street, a canal that flows parallel to the
Connecticut River, full of perch and snappers in the heat of July. Chapman’s mother says in the video her son was a little
Huck-Finnish growing up in Windsor Locks – nothing too serious, but
there was a playful and sometimes mischievous spirit in the recent Medal of
Honor recipient. When you live by a sun-spangled river and you are a boy in a
town in which all eyes lovingly spy you out, Huck lives and breathes in you.
It did not surprise me at all that Windsor Locks had
produced a hero, because I bear in my mind a lively remembrance of Dr. Ettore
Carniglia, when alive the best diagnostician Connecticut had ever produced. In 1952,
the peak year of the poliomyelitis epidemic, there were nearly 60,000 cases
throughout America; 3,000 were fatal, and 21,000 left their victims paralyzed.
In 1955, Jonas Salk had invented his polio vaccine. I was just entering my teens when,
looking out the window from Suffield Street, I saw a line of kids snaking up North
Main Street to Doc Carniglia’s house and office. The Doc was dispensing Salk’s
vaccine. Kids who cried when the needle pricked their arms were consoled with a
parting gift, candy stored in a large wicker basket by the door.
“Next!”
We all put on our bravest face. It was only much later I
discovered Doc always failed to charge the mothers of the poorer residents of
the town, and many of us – whose hard working fathers and mothers unstintingly gave
their time to the town they loved – were not that far in advance of the poorest residents.
But money meant nothing, honor everything.
Ella Grasso lived up the street from Carniglia, whose large
chestnut trees obligingly surrendered spiked and sheathed nuts we sometimes threw
at each other on our way to either St. Mary’s Catholic Grammar School or the
public school. Ella became the first woman governor in the nation who was elected in her own right
(what a mouthful!), and no one in Windsor Locks was surprised to hear that she sometimes whipped
her caucus into shape with a salty tongue. A lot of salt was dispensed in those
days, but never in front of the nuns or the eminences of the town or, it goes
without saying, our parents, who did not think it all alarming, or psychologically
crippling, to put the fear of God in us, a transaction that was handled
expertly and professionally by the nuns. Grasso was struck down by cancer. When
she came home to Windsor Locks to die, her heart was full of the fragrance of
honor.
When we die, everything falls away, but not the love of a mother or
father, not the love of a wife and children – and not honor, which is indestructible.
When presented with the medal honor by President Donald Trump, Chapman's widow Valerie Nessel triumphantly held it above
her head. The night before the presentation she had said, “I know John would be
extremely humbled. He always put his mission and his teammates above himself.”
Indeed. Ambushed by
machine gun fire and a rocket grenade on a mountain in Afghanistan, Chapman's helicopter,
carrying a special operations team, was forced to make an emergency crash
landing. A member of the team had fallen out of the copter and a rescue was in order. Chapman engaged the enemy and was, his team thought, mortally wounded.
But new technology and a later frame by frame examination of the video of the
battle showed that Chapman had regained consciousness and continued to engage
the enemy. Chapman’s commander and teammate Col. Ken Rodriguez said, “He
continued to fight for an hour, he sacrificed his life. We put it all together
and determined he clearly deserved a Medal of Honor.”
On Sunday, September
30th at 2:00 pm, at the Amphitheater adjacent to the Town Hall, our town, Windsor
Locks, will grace itself by paying tribute at a commemoration ceremony
for Master Sergeant John Chapman. It may be some consolation to his widow, his children
and his mother to know that courage and suffering and the grace of God has raised him to a higher glory.
He is coming like the glory
of the morning on the wave,
He is wisdom to the mighty
He is honor to the brave,
So the world shall be His footstool
and the soul of wrong His slave,
Our God is marching on.
of the morning on the wave,
He is wisdom to the mighty
He is honor to the brave,
So the world shall be His footstool
and the soul of wrong His slave,
Our God is marching on.
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