September 11, 2024 • 37 mins
Malcolm chats with Meredith Rollins, the writer behind the series, to talk about what they both learned from the Medal of Honor recipients featured this season. They also share moments that didn’t make the cut, what surprised them, what made them cry– and the surprising influence of Medal of Honor moms.
If you have questions or comments you would like Meredith to answer, you can email her at meredith.rollins@pushkin.fm or send us a message on any of our social media accounts @pushkinpods.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Bushkin this season on Medal of Honor Stories of Courage.
We brought you incredible stories from Medal of Honor recipients
who fought in conflicts from the Civil War to the
Iraq War. And I always said John Chapman was the
(00:35):
last episode of our season, but I lied. We're back
with a bonus. To wrap up our season, I invited
Meredith Rollins, the writer behind the series, to come in
for a little chat. Meredith is an old friend of mine.
Her dad was a second lieutenant in the United States
Marine Corps, and I wanted to talk with her about
what we both learned from all the stories we've told
(00:57):
this season about contagious courage, self sacrifice, and a secret
theme in nearly all these stories, the importance of strong moms.
We talked a little about moments that didn't make the cut,
what surprised us and what made us cry. If you've
got moments of your own to share, we want to
hear from you. You can find us on most social
(01:19):
media at Pushkin pods. All right, onto my conversation with Meredith. Hello, everyone,
this is Malcolm Glowell. I am here with Meredith Rollins.
Who is the power behind the Throne in the Medal
(01:40):
of Honor series. She's the one who wrote all the episodes,
did all the research. She's the genius who brought it
all together. Meredith, thank you for joining.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
Me, Thanks for having me. It's fun to be on
the microphone.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
It is. Yes, we thought we would be remiss in
our Medal of Honor series if we didn't talk to
the person who found all these incredible stories. You tell
me first, how much did you enjoy this?
Speaker 2 (02:05):
I have really loved it, and not for a few
to reasons. The first is when you and I first
started talking about this project. I remember I said to you,
I don't think that I am the right person for
this project because I don't know anything about military history
or the military or history. I mean, whatever I knew,
i'd sort of forgotten. And you, I think, very rightly
(02:28):
pointed out that this was going to make the whole
exploration and investigation of these stories more fun for me
and potentially more inclusive for an audience that doesn't necessarily
have a background where they know a ton about you know,
the Battle of Guadalcanal, for example. And my dad was
a marine.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
I know that, yeah, in what War Korea?
Speaker 2 (02:50):
No, he was actually in between Korea and Vietnam, so
he was deployed to Okinawa. He went through the Marine
Officer Training program. He went to Purdue on a scholarship
and spent four years in the service, and it was
a really defining thing for him. He absolutely loved it.
Being having been a marine was the first thing he
would really impressing. He would say, Yeah, I did not
(03:12):
know that.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
I knew you did just business should know. I've known
Meredith for many, many years, and I knew your dad.
I did not know that that was such a crucial
part of his life story. Yeah, And you know, it's
interesting my father in law also serve in the Marine Corps,
so I have this kind of military influence. But this.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
Project has been a really interesting way to dive into
what being in the service is all about. To learn
the stories of these people who have done these extraordinary things,
and also to really reintroduce myself to those different periods
of American history that are so compelling and really inform
where we are as a country today. And also just
(03:54):
looking into all these stories because you know, threey five
hundred and nineteen people have won the Medal of Honor,
so it's a vast resource of people to look through,
but kind of doing the detective work to find out
which stories are most compelling, to find a diverse and
interesting group who are all a little bit different, and
then just some of the battlefield drama has been really,
(04:17):
really exciting.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
I was surprised. I've been continually surprised through this series
at how how little I knew about these battles you're describing.
I mean, I'm actually, when I say that, as someone
who I probably have I have hundreds of books on
wars and military things in my library. I mean, I'm
(04:40):
someone who considers themselves well above average in their obsession
with the world, wars and other things. I didn't know
half the stuff, the Okinawa stuff from Bob Bush Bobus.
I mean, I knew the Pacific Theater was a nasty place.
I just had no idea the scale of the casualties there.
It's mind boggling, it is.
Speaker 2 (05:02):
And also, I mean for me that that piece of
the research really getting deep into the weeds of thesearious battlefields.
I mean, what it means is that I have now
become sort of boring when you have a conversation with
me about what I'm doing, because I'm like, oh, let
me tell can I tell you something about Okinawa's it.
Here's a hot tip Buguada canal. This is my cocktail
(05:25):
party conversation.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
Now you know you are that. Yes, you're the person
we all avoided, although I've been the person you should
avoided a party for most of my life. So I'm
Missy Love's company. I really the next time we'll hang
out together and we can trade. No, it's but that's
the kind of lovely thing about doing getting immersed in
a subject like this and the other thing I was
(05:47):
thinking about that. You know, every time you plunge into
one of these stories, you have a certainty that some
transcendent thing is at the end.
Speaker 2 (05:59):
Well, I feel as though the story is going well
if I am crying by the end, And of course
I'm just I'll put it out there. I'm the kind
of person who cries at lots of things.
Speaker 1 (06:11):
I'm you know, the person who cries. Give me some crime,
give me your top crying moments in the series.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
Well, but the Bob Bush story when he talks about
he's been through this terrible battle in Okinawa, and what's
his big takeaway? Not that he survived, not that he's
saved someone's life. It's that he was then able to
have children, and he talks about what a wonderful thing
that is, or hearing Jay Vargas choke up about when
he talks about his mom, and I don't know, hopefully
(06:38):
listeners will be able to tell this when he tells
the story about having his mother's name on the back
of his medal and he calls and he gets Richard
Nixon on the phone, which of course is hilarious, but
he's he kind of is is hesitant and coughing a
little bit in that original tape because he was trying
(07:00):
not to cry. And there's something about that that these
guys are incredibly tough. Obviously, they're battle hardened, They've been
in the worst possible scenarios, and yet you know, he
talks about his mom with a tear in his eye.
It's just the best.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
Yeah yeah to me. When I think back on what
the most moving moment I it's the guy who goes
to the grave.
Speaker 2 (07:26):
Of his Oh yeah, Doug Monroe.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
Doug Monroe, his.
Speaker 2 (07:30):
Best friend from childhood, who goes and raises and lowers
the flag at his grave for forty years or forty years,
it's wild.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
You know.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
The thing about that's part of that story is you
know that it really was every day. Oh yeah, like
it's not he wasn't speaking metaphorically. There's nothing metaphorical about
the devotion of these men to these memories. It's real.
It's like he went every day. It was like part
of like that. For some reason when I I had
a really really hard time keeping it together when I
(08:00):
got to that part of that story.
Speaker 2 (08:02):
Oh, it's so it's just so amazing. And then the
Tybar Rubens story, there are a million moments in that
when he learned that his mom has followed his little
sister into the gas chamber. That's a heartbreaking thing. When
the people that he saved to talk about how he
picked lice off of them, like all of that stuff
(08:23):
is just you cannot believe the devotion and the time
that he spent, which is just a different way of
looking at heroism, the fact that he and so many
of these guys just again and again and again we're
helping the people around them.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
Yeah. Yeah, Well, one of the interesting kind of psychological
insights I got from these stories is how much of
courage is just a or heroism is an offshoot simply
of devotion. Yeah, it's the same impulse. It just that thought,
(09:03):
as obvious as it seems, is not something that ever
occurred to me. I assumed that they were, you know,
opposite ends of some beneficial continuum. They're not. It's the
same impulse, just expressed in a different way. It's a
lot of these guys. It's a it's the high testostero
and twenty two year old man's way of saying I
love you, I mean glad. These guys are their high
(09:24):
disoster two year old guys.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
Yes, yes, for sure. But at the same time, there
is that there's this devotion to the people that they
are serving with and to the cause that they're serving
to the of course deeply patriotic. But one of the
things that we don't really include so much in this
series is that almost all of them say at some
point in an interview that they were just doing their job,
(09:46):
that what they were doing on that day was no
different from what they were doing the thirty days before that.
It just happened that they were doing their job in
this extraordinary circumstance. And I don't think I've listened to
an interview with any one of these people where they've
said I deserve this metal, I did this thing that
was above and beyond. That's how the military defines it.
(10:09):
But that's not how they define it. They define it
as I was doing something that anybody else would have
done in the same circumstance.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
Now, but of course that isn't true, right right, So
it's this really interesting. This is another interesting fact about
these that there is a kind of culture that says
this was an act that you know, anyone would be
capable of. I just did. At the same time, the
act itself is completely out of the ordinary, and when
(10:37):
we read about it, we're like, how on earth could
anyone do that? Now, I just want to talk a
little bit more. That's a really interesting tension or contradiction
or something in these stories which I never managed to resolve.
Are they Is it just that that's the way you're
expected to talk about it, or is it that they
truly do feel that this is something anyone could have done.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
If I were to venture a guess, I would say
that they sincerely feel that anybody in the same situation
would have And maybe the subtext is should have done
exactly what I chose to do. I mean there are
obvious things that are you know, people that don't fall
into that rule, like tib War. Part of what was
(11:22):
interesting about tiber Ruben was that he had this whole
set of experiences that nobody else in the camp had,
so they wouldn't necessarily have known to do the things
that he did. At the same time, he talks endlessly
about their shared humanity and how anybody he believed he
was taught by his parents that anybody should do these
wonderful things for other people. It's just what you are.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
But someone like all Win with Cash, all in Cash, Yeah,
it goes back into the burning vehicle. We don't need
seven times seven times to pull people out. So there's
our good case study. Now suppose Allwin Cash said, well,
anyone would have done that? Well, no, I can tell
you right now I'm not. I would never go back
(12:03):
seven times into a burning vehicle.
Speaker 2 (12:05):
Actually I think it was maybe it was five times anyway,
but yeah, Alan Cash goes back over and over again
because he's devoted. To go back to your idea of devotion,
he's devoted to his what he called his boys, He's
devoted to them. He's not going to leave any of
them behind. And as long as he can keep going
(12:25):
back for them, he's going to keep doing it. And
it's true because some of the eyewitnesses say, you know, yeah,
we got there and we wanted to help as well,
but he was doing it. He'd pulled everybody out. So
I do think maybe it's a mix between that mindset
that you can do it, and well, nobody else is
doing it, so I guess I have to do it,
and also this feeling of well, why wouldn't I do it.
(12:48):
I don't know that I'm being particular.
Speaker 1 (12:49):
I think what they're doing is they are almost unconsciously
confusing would and should. What they say anyone would do this,
What they really mean is anyone everyone should do this. Yeah,
that's what they're saying. They're saying, I did what I
would expect a human being to do in that situation,
and they're absolutely but that's not the same. Sadly though,
(13:12):
most human beings would not do what they should do
correct rights. That's what they're and what they're trying to
explain to us. I think again, maybe it is just
unconscious they're trying to explain to us that they think
the gap between wood and should is too is too.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
Great, Yes, And I think that part of it, of course,
is training, part of it is passion, part of it
is patriotism. Part of it is the heat and the
heat of the battle. There were certainly stories that we
didn't tell where these guys look back on the action
and say, I don't remember having done it. Yes, I
(13:53):
know that I threw myself on a grenade, but I
don't remember that moment. So I do think that part
of it is just this instant gut reaction that you
see something that needs to be done and you just
do it because you aren't even thinking about what the
content sequences are for yourself.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
Yeah. Yeah, we'll be back in a minute. Let's talk
(14:32):
a little bit about First of all, did you have
a favorite story, one that you loved doing more than
any other.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
Oh that's really hard. I you know now, I feel
like I love all of my children equally, Malcolm, So no,
I don't really have a favorite. I think the fun
thing for me has been finding the interesting angle to
sort of take a different look at a story that
perhaps you've heard before. Working on Mary Walker, the only
(15:02):
woman to win the Medal of Honor, was incredibly fun
and I think at a certain point I realized I
was having too much fun with it. I kept on
making pants jokes, which I eventually took out because I
was being too lighthearted about something that actually what she
did was was incredibly serious and extraordinary, but kind of
getting to know her as a person, and I think
(15:23):
that she probably was really tough to be around and
kind of ye I was going to say, kind of
intense and sort of a little nuts, but in the
best possible way. She was just a woman like way
beyond her time. That just she wasn't going to take
no for an answer, and it was delightful every time
I found out something new about her, you know, the
(15:43):
fact that she kind of moved into the home of
Ulysses Grant and stayed there until she got a job.
And then you know, because you and I have talked
about this a bit, and the other people who are
working on this podcast with me have heard me say
it now way too many times. My favorite thing about
all of these is when the mom shows up, Because
the moms show up over and over again. Yeah, well
(16:07):
I will say that. So I work on this podcast
with Constanza Gardo, Benette f. Haffrey, and Izzy Carter, who
are the three most brilliant people I've ever worked with,
other than you, of course, Malcolm, which but maybe even
a little bit more. And the joke that we have
constantly because I'm the only middle aged mom in the group,
(16:30):
is that I keep on picking these stories with big
mom energy.
Speaker 1 (16:36):
Only you would do would be drawn to a series
on war heroes because you were interested in the whole
mom side of the.
Speaker 2 (16:44):
Story, right, exactly, big mom energy. But I do think
it is part of it is that you listen to
these stories and you realize that they are so personal
and they are so emotional. And of course, obviously some
of our episodes focus on people who died in battle,
and some of them, like Henry Johnson, were never recorded
(17:06):
that we know of, but the ones who were always
have at a certain point that catch in their voice.
They all have a real emotional reaction to telling their
stories or something about their stories, and it just happens
to be that a lot. For a lot of them,
(17:26):
it's their moms.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
Yeah, it is mom's on parade. But who's the best
of all moms? Is it Jave Argus's mom.
Speaker 2 (17:33):
Jave Argus's mom was fantastic and my but my favorite
mom has to be Doug mon Ro's mom, who then
went on to join Right the Coast Guard at the
age of forty eight, and then they proceeded to refer
to her as the old Lady, which I thought was
hilarious and also depressing. But nevertheless, but.
Speaker 1 (17:56):
You wait, you're not forty eight yet, are you, merediths I.
Speaker 2 (17:59):
Don't feel like we need to have this discussion in
this particular book at this time, but anyway, I feel
like there was this kind of you know, Bob Bush's
mom is like, me, you should go to You're seventeen,
but maybe you should go ahead and join up. Jay Vargas'
mom is like, please, don't join the Marines, and then
he does.
Speaker 1 (18:18):
We're the dads.
Speaker 2 (18:20):
I don't, don't we don't. For whatever reason, I just
didn't stumble across a great dad story. But no, no, no, yes,
this is season two.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
This is no no, this is my theory of parental asymmetry.
I've ever heard this theory. No, it is at any
given time, it changes about our life. But at any
given time in our lives, we are only really able
to construct narratives about one of our parents. So there's
a moment when you can't it's for some reason that
(18:51):
I don't particularly understand. We cannot integrate the contributions of
our parents to who we are. So what we do
is we toggle. So there's a you know, you talk
to someone at fourteen and they just talk about how
my mom drives me crazier. You talk to them at
you know, thirty, and it's like, my dad played Little
League with me, and then at sixty it's like, my
(19:13):
mom is my ma, Ma, Ma Mom. And I just
think that's the pattern in it just goes back and
I look at my own life. I'm like, totally what
I did. Yeah, it just catch me. On a given day,
it's mom and then it's dad, And I think there's
something about And this goes to what we were saying
earlier about how what courage really is is devotion. Is
(19:34):
that they grasp that and they think of the person
in their life who embodied devotion, who embodied love, right,
and it's their mom. So their heroism, that's the mistake.
Their heroism does not remind them of the strong male
figure they had growing up. No, no, no, Their heroism reminds
(19:56):
them of the mom who nurtured them and who you know,
birthed them and who wipe their noses. I think that's
that's one of those things that is incredibly beautiful about.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
This It is and of course I feel like I
gravitate towards those stories naturally, as I am a mom
and I have to, you know what, I've got two boys,
and for me thinking about them, think about the Bob
Busch story. For example, he's seventeen when he enlists. I
have a seventeen year old.
Speaker 1 (20:25):
You was a seventeen year old. I was good, you know,
it's funny at that moment in that story, I thought
immediately view about how you have a seventeen year old,
and I thought, can you imagine if you had to
send your eldest off to war right now? Like right now?
Speaker 2 (20:39):
No, it's it's it's just it's really it's really unthinkable
thinkable it is. And then at the same time, and
this is World War two and he was watching every
other teenager go to war as quickly as they could.
They wanted to get out there, they wanted to serve.
I think it's a different mindset than it is than
(21:01):
how we think about combat now. Not everyone, obviously, but
I do think that there was just this feeling of
as soon as I get as soon as I can
get out there. I want to get out there, and
I want to do my part. And I don't want
to be I don't want to be trapped. I don't
want to be trapped at home with my mom not
(21:21):
being able to serve. So on the one hand, I
can understand his teenage hormonal get me out there. I
have no idea what I'm getting into. But the fact
that the mom was like, I think maybe this is
a good idea for you, that piece of it just
feels incredibly, incredibly foreign to me. Real. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:42):
And also it was going on the Bob Busch story
when he says it sixty seven people from his high
school died in the war in a town of ten
thousand people.
Speaker 2 (21:54):
Yeah, and they were only twenty five kids per grade
in high school.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
It's just it's just bananas. It is bananas, totally bananas,
It really is. The Henry Johnson story was another complete
surprise to me. But it's funny because it's something that
I have been thinking about and writing about a little bit,
which is this question of what do you do with
your anger? So he's of all the stories you tell,
(22:18):
he's the one who comes home angry. Yeah, it's such
a weird. First of all, that ideal is part of
the reason why this series is so fascinating is that
there are so many emotional dimensions to it. And here
we have this guy who comes home angry, and the
great question he faces is what he does with his anger?
Speaker 2 (22:37):
Right, and the fact that he I mean, of course,
he was coming home and he's lauded as this war hero,
and I think he, like the other men in the
Harlem Hell Fighters, thought we're being treated as war heroes.
The world has changed, America's changed. Here we are things
(22:58):
are going to be different now. And then, of course
Henry realizes very quickly that he's back in exactly the
same society that he left, and that question of what
to do with your anger? Do you retreat, do you
keep to yourself, or do you go out there and
give voice to it? The fact that he did give
voice to it then leads to him being essentially banished, well,
(23:21):
banished from the speaking circuit, but also he eventually dies
alone and penniless and generally forgotten. And I think that
feeling of I've done I've done this thing, and you
can actually see that in the Mary Walker episode as well.
You know, she has served her country and now she
(23:42):
wants to be allowed to wear pants and vote and
fight for all of these other things that are that
are important to her. And this idea that if you've served,
and if you've if you've put yourself in harm's way
for your country, then you should expect something in return.
And neither one of them necessarily expected the medal or
(24:03):
the honor. What they expected was to be treated like
a full citizen of the country they had served. And
that element is really interesting to me.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
From the idea that the rest of so they had
this notion that it's not that they are none of
them say that they're owed this. No, they just they
expect part of their definition of a kind of just
outcome to their service. You know that it is the
inability of the rest of society to make that same
leap that's so kind of fascinating, Like so that everyone
(24:36):
else looks at Henry Johnson and says, the implications of
your contribution, your bravery do not extend beyond the battlefield.
It's basically what they're saying to him is, sure, you
did this incredible thing. You said all these lives and
you've thought so bravely, and you surrendered your own health
and blah blah blah, you came home. That's it. The
(24:57):
story ends there. Right, you don't have a right. The
fight is not you get to keep fighting. You don't
need to. You don't need you don't get to kind
of perpetuate some chain of consequences from your actions over
in Europe. And that's his anguish is he doesn't understand
that right.
Speaker 2 (25:14):
Right, you know, they'll say, Okay, we're going to throw
you a bone, we're going to put some money together
to buy you a house, and we're going to name
a road after you. All of that's going to happen.
And then the moment that he tells the truth, and
he really did not do much more than just tell
the truth of what had happened in Europe to him,
all of that stuff goes away and he sees it.
(25:37):
He must have seen it for the sort of fiction
that it was. That he was only allowed to be
one thing. He was defined in one very specific way,
and that was all he was allowed to be.
Speaker 1 (25:51):
It's funny the Henry Johnson story is of all of
the stories, it is the most contemporary because the whole
time I was listening to. That was what I was
thinking about, was the fact that of some portion, a
significant portion of the homelessness problem in his country is veterans,
right right, often with some form of PTSD or who
(26:12):
come home unable to function and have effectively in many
communities been cast aside. Yes, And I didn't realize this
until I did a story of Revision's History episode once
and I went to Jacksonville, Florida, which is one of
these quite a progressive place when it comes to dealing
with homelessness. And like many towns, they do a census
(26:32):
of their homeless and they can tell you exactly who
they're homeless, are, where they come from, and and there
are certain they said, there was certain communities in the
country where the homelessness problem is a veteran problem, like
depending on your proximity to you know, military bases or
parts of the country where veterans and like that's this,
it's the Henry Johnson story. Yeah right. They came home
(26:57):
in pieces having done something on behalf of their country,
and the country said it's over right, right, we no
longer Yeah you did this great thing. We don't have
any ongoing obligation towards you. That's Henry Johnson. Is this weird.
It's a powerful story because it's we didn't learn from
it at all. What he was saying was, you still
(27:21):
have an obligation to me after I come home. We
still don't.
Speaker 2 (27:24):
Yeah, well, I mean that there's a difference, of course,
between the veteran services that you had after World War One,
which were incredibly minimal, and PTSD wasn't really recognized as
a thing and not dealt with. I mean even through
World War Two where we talk about, you know, tiber
comes home, he doesn't really want to talk about what
happened to him. You know, there's this feeling of like,
you know, the man in the gray flannel suit, you
(27:45):
come home, you just tamp it all down, you don't
deal with it. And I think what's interesting to me
about the Jay Vargas story in this regard is that
he went on he had this incredibly traumatic experience in
Vietnam where they were fighting, you know, hand to hand.
I mean, the descriptions of it are mind blowing. And
(28:07):
then he continues on as a marine for thirty years
and never talks about it. And then it's finally after
he retires from the core and he goes into Veterans
Services that he really comes face to face with how
important it is to deal with mental health of veterans.
He admits that he had PTSD, but he couldn't even
talk about his story for thirty six years. And here's
(28:30):
this is, of course, the other interesting thing about the
Medal of Honors that it does become this platform. And
jvarc is an example of somebody who took that platform
and said, we need to do more for our veterans
with PTSD. And one of the things that we need
to do is be talking about these stories and giving
them the mental health help that they need.
Speaker 1 (28:49):
Yeah, we'll be back.
Speaker 3 (28:52):
In a minute.
Speaker 1 (29:09):
Whether there's a what's the equivalent outside the world of
is really equivalent in any other part of society to
the Medal of Honor, to the implications of it, to
the kind of platform it gives you. I mean, I
suppose you could the Nobel Yeah, I was going to
sort of the Nobel Prize for is that rarefied It
(29:30):
is the Fields Medal, which is that's the one they
give to brilliant mathematicians.
Speaker 2 (29:34):
Well, and it also is one of those things where
I did not understand until I started working on this,
how incredibly difficult it is, particularly these days, to get
a Medal of Honor. I mean, obviously you have to
have done something above and beyond. But that was what
the Alwan Cash episode was all about, was how incredibly
difficult it is to be approved for a Medal of Honor.
(29:57):
And the John Chapman episode is the same idea that
he's done this incredibly brave and courageous thing, and then
years later there's fight to elevate his award to the
Medal of Honor, and there was a huge fight to
get Henry Johnson the medal too. So it just it's
(30:17):
one of those things where you have to check all
these boxes because they want it, I mean, the military
wants and needs it to feel like it is only
given to a very select few. And then, of course
there are the people who get their medal taken away,
like Mary Walker in the Great Purge of nineteen seventy.
Speaker 1 (30:36):
Didn't you ever get it back?
Speaker 2 (30:37):
Yeah, she got it back in the nineteen seventies. Jimmy
Carter gave it back to her in the nineteen seventies
after sort of distant members of her family had pressed
the military to look at her records again, and so
the decision from nineteen seventeen was overturned, but they rescinded
nine hundred medals.
Speaker 1 (30:58):
These are I know that in each of these cases
the amount of material of in some cases it's hundreds
of pages, right, that goes into your Medal of honor file.
We tell stories at our thirty minutes. You must have
left an extraordinary amount on the cutting room floor. Tell
us a little bit about what you had to leave out.
Speaker 2 (31:19):
Well, my favorite things that I had to leave out.
There is a great Jay Vargus anecdote of running into
then Texas Governor George Bush at some veterans golf event
and George Bush says to Jave Vargas, I want you
to come and work for me, and Jay Vargas says,
(31:41):
I have no interest in going to Texas. Sorry, not
going to happen. And George Bush, who's i think at
this point not even really running for president yet, is like, no, no, no, no,
when I'm in the White House, you can come and
work for me there, and Jay Vargas sort of laughs
and he's like, just shows how he thought then and
now and then lo and behold George Bush takes office
(32:04):
and Jay Barcas gets a phone call and it's George
Bush saying, all right, I told you, I want you.
I want you to work with me in veterans affairs.
And the fact that Jay Vargas was continually on the
phone with some president or another was like my favorite
thing about him, other than the thing about his mother,
which of course I loved. And he's so sort of
goofy and charming about it.
Speaker 1 (32:23):
Yeah, and he did go oh.
Speaker 2 (32:26):
Yeah, yeah. I mean, he stayed on the West Coast,
but he was kind of the West Coast veterans affairs person.
Speaker 1 (32:32):
So anything else that you loved that you.
Speaker 2 (32:34):
Couldn't choose, well, I mean, there was a whole story
about the training of the Harlem Hell Fighters. They were
initially sent to South Carolina to train, and the community
at the time really didn't want black soldiers there, and
so just from the moment that they got into uniform
and started to train for war, they were treated totally
(32:54):
differently than the white soldiers were. And there was a
whole story about that that was incredibly moving and depressing,
and it just kind of got in the way of
the action moving the story forward, but very interesting and
Mary Walker did a million different things in between her
(33:15):
battlefield stints. She was like the busiest person on the planet.
She would go back to Washington, d C. When she
wasn't tending to soldiers on the battlefield and start little
charities and help people. And she set up a home
for wives and mothers who were in the capitol looking
for their wounded you know, brothers, sons, fathers, husbands. She
(33:36):
was just incredibly active. She had like the energy of
fifteen people. Yeah, if you could meet one of these people,
who would it be? Well, I would love to meet
Mary Walker. I wouldn't really want to be stuck in
an elevator with her because I think it would be
like a little bit too much. I would like to
meet her for a short period of time if I
had an exit at the end of it, because I
sort of feel like she was just and she was
(33:58):
a lot. There was a lot there.
Speaker 1 (34:02):
I know the answer you I know what name You're
going to say.
Speaker 2 (34:05):
What are you think I'm going to say, Oh, my god, yes,
Tedru one cutest man on the planet, which, of course,
you know. Here's the other thing is that these guys
and I can just gay guys because there are so
many of them are so adorable. You see their pictures
when they first join up in the service, and it's
just a parade of good looking guys. I mean, it's
(34:28):
somewhat ridiculous, but Tybar Ruben seems like the most charming
of gentlemen and hilarious, and I hope when you listen
to it you can sort of get past is incredibly
thick Hungarian accent, which of course he never lost, because
he's really funny and just as cute as he could
(34:49):
possibly be, which you know, for me is high praise.
Speaker 1 (34:54):
He's the one. I feel like, if if you had
to write a book about one of these stories, it
would be Tiba Rubin, wouldn't it.
Speaker 2 (35:03):
It would be or a movie. I think that, you know,
the Tybar Ruben story. Why Steven Spielberg has not made
this movie is completely bizarre to me, because it really is.
There is NonStop action, there's a real kind of molden
heart at the center of it. He was devastatingly good looking, so,
(35:23):
you know, fun to cast that role.
Speaker 1 (35:26):
Jake Jillenhall. I was watching Jake Jillenhall and presumed innocent.
My whole thing was like, he's he's too handsome, much
too much. Wait, what's he doing is working as a prosecutor.
He should be like a male model.
Speaker 2 (35:39):
Yeah there you go. Yeah, No, Tyvor or Tyler Rubin
was just he was. He was the whole package. But
then you know, got back from got back from Korea,
and Hollywood also saw how good looking he was, because
you know, there are these pictures of him on a
stretcher coming off the you know whatever, the ship that
brought him back from North Korea. I mean, he's just,
(36:03):
you know, looks like Marlon Brando, and so Hollywood, you know,
he lived in California, So Hollywood sees his picture and
he's starts swaning around while with these starlits and taking
them to premieres and stuff. And there's talk that they're
going to make a movie of his life. And he's like, nah,
I don't really want to talk about it. I'm fine, thanks,
and he goes he had this beloved brother, Emory, who
(36:24):
opened a liquor store, and he went worked for him
and had a family and got married and the whole thing.
But you know, he would have told you like, oh,
there's nothing that interesting about my life, which he says
in the tape.
Speaker 1 (36:34):
You know, he says, when did he died? You know,
it breaks my heart that we're doing this twenty fifteen.
He dies in twenty fifteen.
Speaker 2 (36:44):
Yeah, he died in twenty fifteen.
Speaker 1 (36:45):
We're looking him up right now. In case you're wondering
what's happening here, he is. In fact, I can confirm
incredibly handsome. Yeah, Meret. On that note, thank you so much,
Thank you so much for this series, which has been amazing,
and please, please please let's do season two and continue
(37:06):
the big mom energy for as long as we can.
Speaker 2 (37:09):
Wow, you know, big dad energy for even two.
Speaker 1 (37:11):
Big d Okay, thank you, Meredith.
Speaker 2 (37:14):
Thanks.
Speaker 1 (37:17):
Medal of Honor. Stories of Courage is written by Meredith
Rollins and produced by Meredith Rollins, Costanza Gallardo, and Izzy Carter.
Our editor is ben A d Alfh Haffrey. Sound design
and additional music by Jake Gorsky, Recording engineering by Nina Lawrence,
fact checking by Arthur Gombert's Original music by Eric Phillips.
(37:39):
Special thanks to series creator Dan McGinn to the Congressional
Medal of Honor Society and Adam Plumpton. I'm your host,
Malcolm Bappa
Bushkin this season on Medal of Honor Stories of Courage.
We brought you incredible stories from Medal of Honor recipients
who fought in conflicts from the Civil War to the
Iraq War. And I always said John Chapman was the
(00:35):
last episode of our season, but I lied. We're back
with a bonus. To wrap up our season, I invited
Meredith Rollins, the writer behind the series, to come in
for a little chat. Meredith is an old friend of mine.
Her dad was a second lieutenant in the United States
Marine Corps, and I wanted to talk with her about
what we both learned from all the stories we've told
(00:57):
this season about contagious courage, self sacrifice, and a secret
theme in nearly all these stories, the importance of strong moms.
We talked a little about moments that didn't make the cut,
what surprised us and what made us cry. If you've
got moments of your own to share, we want to
hear from you. You can find us on most social
(01:19):
media at Pushkin pods. All right, onto my conversation with Meredith. Hello, everyone,
this is Malcolm Glowell. I am here with Meredith Rollins.
Who is the power behind the Throne in the Medal
(01:40):
of Honor series. She's the one who wrote all the episodes,
did all the research. She's the genius who brought it
all together. Meredith, thank you for joining.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
Me, Thanks for having me. It's fun to be on
the microphone.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
It is. Yes, we thought we would be remiss in
our Medal of Honor series if we didn't talk to
the person who found all these incredible stories. You tell
me first, how much did you enjoy this?
Speaker 2 (02:05):
I have really loved it, and not for a few
to reasons. The first is when you and I first
started talking about this project. I remember I said to you,
I don't think that I am the right person for
this project because I don't know anything about military history
or the military or history. I mean, whatever I knew,
i'd sort of forgotten. And you, I think, very rightly
(02:28):
pointed out that this was going to make the whole
exploration and investigation of these stories more fun for me
and potentially more inclusive for an audience that doesn't necessarily
have a background where they know a ton about you know,
the Battle of Guadalcanal, for example. And my dad was
a marine.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
I know that, yeah, in what War Korea?
Speaker 2 (02:50):
No, he was actually in between Korea and Vietnam, so
he was deployed to Okinawa. He went through the Marine
Officer Training program. He went to Purdue on a scholarship
and spent four years in the service, and it was
a really defining thing for him. He absolutely loved it.
Being having been a marine was the first thing he
would really impressing. He would say, Yeah, I did not
(03:12):
know that.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
I knew you did just business should know. I've known
Meredith for many, many years, and I knew your dad.
I did not know that that was such a crucial
part of his life story. Yeah, And you know, it's
interesting my father in law also serve in the Marine Corps,
so I have this kind of military influence. But this.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
Project has been a really interesting way to dive into
what being in the service is all about. To learn
the stories of these people who have done these extraordinary things,
and also to really reintroduce myself to those different periods
of American history that are so compelling and really inform
where we are as a country today. And also just
(03:54):
looking into all these stories because you know, threey five
hundred and nineteen people have won the Medal of Honor,
so it's a vast resource of people to look through,
but kind of doing the detective work to find out
which stories are most compelling, to find a diverse and
interesting group who are all a little bit different, and
then just some of the battlefield drama has been really,
(04:17):
really exciting.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
I was surprised. I've been continually surprised through this series
at how how little I knew about these battles you're describing.
I mean, I'm actually, when I say that, as someone
who I probably have I have hundreds of books on
wars and military things in my library. I mean, I'm
(04:40):
someone who considers themselves well above average in their obsession
with the world, wars and other things. I didn't know
half the stuff, the Okinawa stuff from Bob Bush Bobus.
I mean, I knew the Pacific Theater was a nasty place.
I just had no idea the scale of the casualties there.
It's mind boggling, it is.
Speaker 2 (05:02):
And also, I mean for me that that piece of
the research really getting deep into the weeds of thesearious battlefields.
I mean, what it means is that I have now
become sort of boring when you have a conversation with
me about what I'm doing, because I'm like, oh, let
me tell can I tell you something about Okinawa's it.
Here's a hot tip Buguada canal. This is my cocktail
(05:25):
party conversation.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
Now you know you are that. Yes, you're the person
we all avoided, although I've been the person you should
avoided a party for most of my life. So I'm
Missy Love's company. I really the next time we'll hang
out together and we can trade. No, it's but that's
the kind of lovely thing about doing getting immersed in
a subject like this and the other thing I was
(05:47):
thinking about that. You know, every time you plunge into
one of these stories, you have a certainty that some
transcendent thing is at the end.
Speaker 2 (05:59):
Well, I feel as though the story is going well
if I am crying by the end, And of course
I'm just I'll put it out there. I'm the kind
of person who cries at lots of things.
Speaker 1 (06:11):
I'm you know, the person who cries. Give me some crime,
give me your top crying moments in the series.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
Well, but the Bob Bush story when he talks about
he's been through this terrible battle in Okinawa, and what's
his big takeaway? Not that he survived, not that he's
saved someone's life. It's that he was then able to
have children, and he talks about what a wonderful thing
that is, or hearing Jay Vargas choke up about when
he talks about his mom, and I don't know, hopefully
(06:38):
listeners will be able to tell this when he tells
the story about having his mother's name on the back
of his medal and he calls and he gets Richard
Nixon on the phone, which of course is hilarious, but
he's he kind of is is hesitant and coughing a
little bit in that original tape because he was trying
(07:00):
not to cry. And there's something about that that these
guys are incredibly tough. Obviously, they're battle hardened, They've been
in the worst possible scenarios, and yet you know, he
talks about his mom with a tear in his eye.
It's just the best.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
Yeah yeah to me. When I think back on what
the most moving moment I it's the guy who goes
to the grave.
Speaker 2 (07:26):
Of his Oh yeah, Doug Monroe.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
Doug Monroe, his.
Speaker 2 (07:30):
Best friend from childhood, who goes and raises and lowers
the flag at his grave for forty years or forty years,
it's wild.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
You know.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
The thing about that's part of that story is you
know that it really was every day. Oh yeah, like
it's not he wasn't speaking metaphorically. There's nothing metaphorical about
the devotion of these men to these memories. It's real.
It's like he went every day. It was like part
of like that. For some reason when I I had
a really really hard time keeping it together when I
(08:00):
got to that part of that story.
Speaker 2 (08:02):
Oh, it's so it's just so amazing. And then the
Tybar Rubens story, there are a million moments in that
when he learned that his mom has followed his little
sister into the gas chamber. That's a heartbreaking thing. When
the people that he saved to talk about how he
picked lice off of them, like all of that stuff
(08:23):
is just you cannot believe the devotion and the time
that he spent, which is just a different way of
looking at heroism, the fact that he and so many
of these guys just again and again and again we're
helping the people around them.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
Yeah. Yeah, Well, one of the interesting kind of psychological
insights I got from these stories is how much of
courage is just a or heroism is an offshoot simply
of devotion. Yeah, it's the same impulse. It just that thought,
(09:03):
as obvious as it seems, is not something that ever
occurred to me. I assumed that they were, you know,
opposite ends of some beneficial continuum. They're not. It's the
same impulse, just expressed in a different way. It's a
lot of these guys. It's a it's the high testostero
and twenty two year old man's way of saying I
love you, I mean glad. These guys are their high
(09:24):
disoster two year old guys.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
Yes, yes, for sure. But at the same time, there
is that there's this devotion to the people that they
are serving with and to the cause that they're serving
to the of course deeply patriotic. But one of the
things that we don't really include so much in this
series is that almost all of them say at some
point in an interview that they were just doing their job,
(09:46):
that what they were doing on that day was no
different from what they were doing the thirty days before that.
It just happened that they were doing their job in
this extraordinary circumstance. And I don't think I've listened to
an interview with any one of these people where they've
said I deserve this metal, I did this thing that
was above and beyond. That's how the military defines it.
(10:09):
But that's not how they define it. They define it
as I was doing something that anybody else would have
done in the same circumstance.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
Now, but of course that isn't true, right right, So
it's this really interesting. This is another interesting fact about
these that there is a kind of culture that says
this was an act that you know, anyone would be
capable of. I just did. At the same time, the
act itself is completely out of the ordinary, and when
(10:37):
we read about it, we're like, how on earth could
anyone do that? Now, I just want to talk a
little bit more. That's a really interesting tension or contradiction
or something in these stories which I never managed to resolve.
Are they Is it just that that's the way you're
expected to talk about it, or is it that they
truly do feel that this is something anyone could have done.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
If I were to venture a guess, I would say
that they sincerely feel that anybody in the same situation
would have And maybe the subtext is should have done
exactly what I chose to do. I mean there are
obvious things that are you know, people that don't fall
into that rule, like tib War. Part of what was
(11:22):
interesting about tiber Ruben was that he had this whole
set of experiences that nobody else in the camp had,
so they wouldn't necessarily have known to do the things
that he did. At the same time, he talks endlessly
about their shared humanity and how anybody he believed he
was taught by his parents that anybody should do these
wonderful things for other people. It's just what you are.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
But someone like all Win with Cash, all in Cash, Yeah,
it goes back into the burning vehicle. We don't need
seven times seven times to pull people out. So there's
our good case study. Now suppose Allwin Cash said, well,
anyone would have done that? Well, no, I can tell
you right now I'm not. I would never go back
(12:03):
seven times into a burning vehicle.
Speaker 2 (12:05):
Actually I think it was maybe it was five times anyway,
but yeah, Alan Cash goes back over and over again
because he's devoted. To go back to your idea of devotion,
he's devoted to his what he called his boys, He's
devoted to them. He's not going to leave any of
them behind. And as long as he can keep going
(12:25):
back for them, he's going to keep doing it. And
it's true because some of the eyewitnesses say, you know, yeah,
we got there and we wanted to help as well,
but he was doing it. He'd pulled everybody out. So
I do think maybe it's a mix between that mindset
that you can do it, and well, nobody else is
doing it, so I guess I have to do it,
and also this feeling of well, why wouldn't I do it.
(12:48):
I don't know that I'm being particular.
Speaker 1 (12:49):
I think what they're doing is they are almost unconsciously
confusing would and should. What they say anyone would do this,
What they really mean is anyone everyone should do this. Yeah,
that's what they're saying. They're saying, I did what I
would expect a human being to do in that situation,
and they're absolutely but that's not the same. Sadly though,
(13:12):
most human beings would not do what they should do
correct rights. That's what they're and what they're trying to
explain to us. I think again, maybe it is just
unconscious they're trying to explain to us that they think
the gap between wood and should is too is too.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
Great, Yes, And I think that part of it, of course,
is training, part of it is passion, part of it
is patriotism. Part of it is the heat and the
heat of the battle. There were certainly stories that we
didn't tell where these guys look back on the action
and say, I don't remember having done it. Yes, I
(13:53):
know that I threw myself on a grenade, but I
don't remember that moment. So I do think that part
of it is just this instant gut reaction that you
see something that needs to be done and you just
do it because you aren't even thinking about what the
content sequences are for yourself.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
Yeah. Yeah, we'll be back in a minute. Let's talk
(14:32):
a little bit about First of all, did you have
a favorite story, one that you loved doing more than
any other.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
Oh that's really hard. I you know now, I feel
like I love all of my children equally, Malcolm, So no,
I don't really have a favorite. I think the fun
thing for me has been finding the interesting angle to
sort of take a different look at a story that
perhaps you've heard before. Working on Mary Walker, the only
(15:02):
woman to win the Medal of Honor, was incredibly fun
and I think at a certain point I realized I
was having too much fun with it. I kept on
making pants jokes, which I eventually took out because I
was being too lighthearted about something that actually what she
did was was incredibly serious and extraordinary, but kind of
getting to know her as a person, and I think
(15:23):
that she probably was really tough to be around and
kind of ye I was going to say, kind of
intense and sort of a little nuts, but in the
best possible way. She was just a woman like way
beyond her time. That just she wasn't going to take
no for an answer, and it was delightful every time
I found out something new about her, you know, the
(15:43):
fact that she kind of moved into the home of
Ulysses Grant and stayed there until she got a job.
And then you know, because you and I have talked
about this a bit, and the other people who are
working on this podcast with me have heard me say
it now way too many times. My favorite thing about
all of these is when the mom shows up, Because
the moms show up over and over again. Yeah, well
(16:07):
I will say that. So I work on this podcast
with Constanza Gardo, Benette f. Haffrey, and Izzy Carter, who
are the three most brilliant people I've ever worked with,
other than you, of course, Malcolm, which but maybe even
a little bit more. And the joke that we have
constantly because I'm the only middle aged mom in the group,
(16:30):
is that I keep on picking these stories with big
mom energy.
Speaker 1 (16:36):
Only you would do would be drawn to a series
on war heroes because you were interested in the whole
mom side of the.
Speaker 2 (16:44):
Story, right, exactly, big mom energy. But I do think
it is part of it is that you listen to
these stories and you realize that they are so personal
and they are so emotional. And of course, obviously some
of our episodes focus on people who died in battle,
and some of them, like Henry Johnson, were never recorded
(17:06):
that we know of, but the ones who were always
have at a certain point that catch in their voice.
They all have a real emotional reaction to telling their
stories or something about their stories, and it just happens
to be that a lot. For a lot of them,
(17:26):
it's their moms.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
Yeah, it is mom's on parade. But who's the best
of all moms? Is it Jave Argus's mom.
Speaker 2 (17:33):
Jave Argus's mom was fantastic and my but my favorite
mom has to be Doug mon Ro's mom, who then
went on to join Right the Coast Guard at the
age of forty eight, and then they proceeded to refer
to her as the old Lady, which I thought was
hilarious and also depressing. But nevertheless, but.
Speaker 1 (17:56):
You wait, you're not forty eight yet, are you, merediths I.
Speaker 2 (17:59):
Don't feel like we need to have this discussion in
this particular book at this time, but anyway, I feel
like there was this kind of you know, Bob Bush's
mom is like, me, you should go to You're seventeen,
but maybe you should go ahead and join up. Jay Vargas'
mom is like, please, don't join the Marines, and then
he does.
Speaker 1 (18:18):
We're the dads.
Speaker 2 (18:20):
I don't, don't we don't. For whatever reason, I just
didn't stumble across a great dad story. But no, no, no, yes,
this is season two.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
This is no no, this is my theory of parental asymmetry.
I've ever heard this theory. No, it is at any
given time, it changes about our life. But at any
given time in our lives, we are only really able
to construct narratives about one of our parents. So there's
a moment when you can't it's for some reason that
(18:51):
I don't particularly understand. We cannot integrate the contributions of
our parents to who we are. So what we do
is we toggle. So there's a you know, you talk
to someone at fourteen and they just talk about how
my mom drives me crazier. You talk to them at
you know, thirty, and it's like, my dad played Little
League with me, and then at sixty it's like, my
(19:13):
mom is my ma, Ma, Ma Mom. And I just
think that's the pattern in it just goes back and
I look at my own life. I'm like, totally what
I did. Yeah, it just catch me. On a given day,
it's mom and then it's dad, And I think there's
something about And this goes to what we were saying
earlier about how what courage really is is devotion. Is
(19:34):
that they grasp that and they think of the person
in their life who embodied devotion, who embodied love, right,
and it's their mom. So their heroism, that's the mistake.
Their heroism does not remind them of the strong male
figure they had growing up. No, no, no, Their heroism reminds
(19:56):
them of the mom who nurtured them and who you know,
birthed them and who wipe their noses. I think that's
that's one of those things that is incredibly beautiful about.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
This It is and of course I feel like I
gravitate towards those stories naturally, as I am a mom
and I have to, you know what, I've got two boys,
and for me thinking about them, think about the Bob
Busch story. For example, he's seventeen when he enlists. I
have a seventeen year old.
Speaker 1 (20:25):
You was a seventeen year old. I was good, you know,
it's funny at that moment in that story, I thought
immediately view about how you have a seventeen year old,
and I thought, can you imagine if you had to
send your eldest off to war right now? Like right now?
Speaker 2 (20:39):
No, it's it's it's just it's really it's really unthinkable
thinkable it is. And then at the same time, and
this is World War two and he was watching every
other teenager go to war as quickly as they could.
They wanted to get out there, they wanted to serve.
I think it's a different mindset than it is than
(21:01):
how we think about combat now. Not everyone, obviously, but
I do think that there was just this feeling of
as soon as I get as soon as I can
get out there. I want to get out there, and
I want to do my part. And I don't want
to be I don't want to be trapped. I don't
want to be trapped at home with my mom not
(21:21):
being able to serve. So on the one hand, I
can understand his teenage hormonal get me out there. I
have no idea what I'm getting into. But the fact
that the mom was like, I think maybe this is
a good idea for you, that piece of it just
feels incredibly, incredibly foreign to me. Real. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:42):
And also it was going on the Bob Busch story
when he says it sixty seven people from his high
school died in the war in a town of ten
thousand people.
Speaker 2 (21:54):
Yeah, and they were only twenty five kids per grade
in high school.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
It's just it's just bananas. It is bananas, totally bananas,
It really is. The Henry Johnson story was another complete
surprise to me. But it's funny because it's something that
I have been thinking about and writing about a little bit,
which is this question of what do you do with
your anger? So he's of all the stories you tell,
(22:18):
he's the one who comes home angry. Yeah, it's such
a weird. First of all, that ideal is part of
the reason why this series is so fascinating is that
there are so many emotional dimensions to it. And here
we have this guy who comes home angry, and the
great question he faces is what he does with his anger?
Speaker 2 (22:37):
Right, and the fact that he I mean, of course,
he was coming home and he's lauded as this war hero,
and I think he, like the other men in the
Harlem Hell Fighters, thought we're being treated as war heroes.
The world has changed, America's changed. Here we are things
(22:58):
are going to be different now. And then, of course
Henry realizes very quickly that he's back in exactly the
same society that he left, and that question of what
to do with your anger? Do you retreat, do you
keep to yourself, or do you go out there and
give voice to it? The fact that he did give
voice to it then leads to him being essentially banished, well,
(23:21):
banished from the speaking circuit, but also he eventually dies
alone and penniless and generally forgotten. And I think that
feeling of I've done I've done this thing, and you
can actually see that in the Mary Walker episode as well.
You know, she has served her country and now she
(23:42):
wants to be allowed to wear pants and vote and
fight for all of these other things that are that
are important to her. And this idea that if you've served,
and if you've if you've put yourself in harm's way
for your country, then you should expect something in return.
And neither one of them necessarily expected the medal or
(24:03):
the honor. What they expected was to be treated like
a full citizen of the country they had served. And
that element is really interesting to me.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
From the idea that the rest of so they had
this notion that it's not that they are none of
them say that they're owed this. No, they just they
expect part of their definition of a kind of just
outcome to their service. You know that it is the
inability of the rest of society to make that same
leap that's so kind of fascinating, Like so that everyone
(24:36):
else looks at Henry Johnson and says, the implications of
your contribution, your bravery do not extend beyond the battlefield.
It's basically what they're saying to him is, sure, you
did this incredible thing. You said all these lives and
you've thought so bravely, and you surrendered your own health
and blah blah blah, you came home. That's it. The
(24:57):
story ends there. Right, you don't have a right. The
fight is not you get to keep fighting. You don't
need to. You don't need you don't get to kind
of perpetuate some chain of consequences from your actions over
in Europe. And that's his anguish is he doesn't understand
that right.
Speaker 2 (25:14):
Right, you know, they'll say, Okay, we're going to throw
you a bone, we're going to put some money together
to buy you a house, and we're going to name
a road after you. All of that's going to happen.
And then the moment that he tells the truth, and
he really did not do much more than just tell
the truth of what had happened in Europe to him,
all of that stuff goes away and he sees it.
(25:37):
He must have seen it for the sort of fiction
that it was. That he was only allowed to be
one thing. He was defined in one very specific way,
and that was all he was allowed to be.
Speaker 1 (25:51):
It's funny the Henry Johnson story is of all of
the stories, it is the most contemporary because the whole
time I was listening to. That was what I was
thinking about, was the fact that of some portion, a
significant portion of the homelessness problem in his country is veterans,
right right, often with some form of PTSD or who
(26:12):
come home unable to function and have effectively in many
communities been cast aside. Yes, And I didn't realize this
until I did a story of Revision's History episode once
and I went to Jacksonville, Florida, which is one of
these quite a progressive place when it comes to dealing
with homelessness. And like many towns, they do a census
(26:32):
of their homeless and they can tell you exactly who
they're homeless, are, where they come from, and and there
are certain they said, there was certain communities in the
country where the homelessness problem is a veteran problem, like
depending on your proximity to you know, military bases or
parts of the country where veterans and like that's this,
it's the Henry Johnson story. Yeah right. They came home
(26:57):
in pieces having done something on behalf of their country,
and the country said it's over right, right, we no
longer Yeah you did this great thing. We don't have
any ongoing obligation towards you. That's Henry Johnson. Is this weird.
It's a powerful story because it's we didn't learn from
it at all. What he was saying was, you still
(27:21):
have an obligation to me after I come home. We
still don't.
Speaker 2 (27:24):
Yeah, well, I mean that there's a difference, of course,
between the veteran services that you had after World War One,
which were incredibly minimal, and PTSD wasn't really recognized as
a thing and not dealt with. I mean even through
World War Two where we talk about, you know, tiber
comes home, he doesn't really want to talk about what
happened to him. You know, there's this feeling of like,
you know, the man in the gray flannel suit, you
(27:45):
come home, you just tamp it all down, you don't
deal with it. And I think what's interesting to me
about the Jay Vargas story in this regard is that
he went on he had this incredibly traumatic experience in
Vietnam where they were fighting, you know, hand to hand.
I mean, the descriptions of it are mind blowing. And
(28:07):
then he continues on as a marine for thirty years
and never talks about it. And then it's finally after
he retires from the core and he goes into Veterans
Services that he really comes face to face with how
important it is to deal with mental health of veterans.
He admits that he had PTSD, but he couldn't even
talk about his story for thirty six years. And here's
(28:30):
this is, of course, the other interesting thing about the
Medal of Honors that it does become this platform. And
jvarc is an example of somebody who took that platform
and said, we need to do more for our veterans
with PTSD. And one of the things that we need
to do is be talking about these stories and giving
them the mental health help that they need.
Speaker 1 (28:49):
Yeah, we'll be back.
Speaker 3 (28:52):
In a minute.
Speaker 1 (29:09):
Whether there's a what's the equivalent outside the world of
is really equivalent in any other part of society to
the Medal of Honor, to the implications of it, to
the kind of platform it gives you. I mean, I
suppose you could the Nobel Yeah, I was going to
sort of the Nobel Prize for is that rarefied It
(29:30):
is the Fields Medal, which is that's the one they
give to brilliant mathematicians.
Speaker 2 (29:34):
Well, and it also is one of those things where
I did not understand until I started working on this,
how incredibly difficult it is, particularly these days, to get
a Medal of Honor. I mean, obviously you have to
have done something above and beyond. But that was what
the Alwan Cash episode was all about, was how incredibly
difficult it is to be approved for a Medal of Honor.
(29:57):
And the John Chapman episode is the same idea that
he's done this incredibly brave and courageous thing, and then
years later there's fight to elevate his award to the
Medal of Honor, and there was a huge fight to
get Henry Johnson the medal too. So it just it's
(30:17):
one of those things where you have to check all
these boxes because they want it, I mean, the military
wants and needs it to feel like it is only
given to a very select few. And then, of course
there are the people who get their medal taken away,
like Mary Walker in the Great Purge of nineteen seventy.
Speaker 1 (30:36):
Didn't you ever get it back?
Speaker 2 (30:37):
Yeah, she got it back in the nineteen seventies. Jimmy
Carter gave it back to her in the nineteen seventies
after sort of distant members of her family had pressed
the military to look at her records again, and so
the decision from nineteen seventeen was overturned, but they rescinded
nine hundred medals.
Speaker 1 (30:58):
These are I know that in each of these cases
the amount of material of in some cases it's hundreds
of pages, right, that goes into your Medal of honor file.
We tell stories at our thirty minutes. You must have
left an extraordinary amount on the cutting room floor. Tell
us a little bit about what you had to leave out.
Speaker 2 (31:19):
Well, my favorite things that I had to leave out.
There is a great Jay Vargus anecdote of running into
then Texas Governor George Bush at some veterans golf event
and George Bush says to Jave Vargas, I want you
to come and work for me, and Jay Vargas says,
(31:41):
I have no interest in going to Texas. Sorry, not
going to happen. And George Bush, who's i think at
this point not even really running for president yet, is like, no, no, no, no,
when I'm in the White House, you can come and
work for me there, and Jay Vargas sort of laughs
and he's like, just shows how he thought then and
now and then lo and behold George Bush takes office
(32:04):
and Jay Barcas gets a phone call and it's George
Bush saying, all right, I told you, I want you.
I want you to work with me in veterans affairs.
And the fact that Jay Vargas was continually on the
phone with some president or another was like my favorite
thing about him, other than the thing about his mother,
which of course I loved. And he's so sort of
goofy and charming about it.
Speaker 1 (32:23):
Yeah, and he did go oh.
Speaker 2 (32:26):
Yeah, yeah. I mean, he stayed on the West Coast,
but he was kind of the West Coast veterans affairs person.
Speaker 1 (32:32):
So anything else that you loved that you.
Speaker 2 (32:34):
Couldn't choose, well, I mean, there was a whole story
about the training of the Harlem Hell Fighters. They were
initially sent to South Carolina to train, and the community
at the time really didn't want black soldiers there, and
so just from the moment that they got into uniform
and started to train for war, they were treated totally
(32:54):
differently than the white soldiers were. And there was a
whole story about that that was incredibly moving and depressing,
and it just kind of got in the way of
the action moving the story forward, but very interesting and
Mary Walker did a million different things in between her
(33:15):
battlefield stints. She was like the busiest person on the planet.
She would go back to Washington, d C. When she
wasn't tending to soldiers on the battlefield and start little
charities and help people. And she set up a home
for wives and mothers who were in the capitol looking
for their wounded you know, brothers, sons, fathers, husbands. She
(33:36):
was just incredibly active. She had like the energy of
fifteen people. Yeah, if you could meet one of these people,
who would it be? Well, I would love to meet
Mary Walker. I wouldn't really want to be stuck in
an elevator with her because I think it would be
like a little bit too much. I would like to
meet her for a short period of time if I
had an exit at the end of it, because I
sort of feel like she was just and she was
(33:58):
a lot. There was a lot there.
Speaker 1 (34:02):
I know the answer you I know what name You're
going to say.
Speaker 2 (34:05):
What are you think I'm going to say, Oh, my god, yes,
Tedru one cutest man on the planet, which, of course,
you know. Here's the other thing is that these guys
and I can just gay guys because there are so
many of them are so adorable. You see their pictures
when they first join up in the service, and it's
just a parade of good looking guys. I mean, it's
(34:28):
somewhat ridiculous, but Tybar Ruben seems like the most charming
of gentlemen and hilarious, and I hope when you listen
to it you can sort of get past is incredibly
thick Hungarian accent, which of course he never lost, because
he's really funny and just as cute as he could
(34:49):
possibly be, which you know, for me is high praise.
Speaker 1 (34:54):
He's the one. I feel like, if if you had
to write a book about one of these stories, it
would be Tiba Rubin, wouldn't it.
Speaker 2 (35:03):
It would be or a movie. I think that, you know,
the Tybar Ruben story. Why Steven Spielberg has not made
this movie is completely bizarre to me, because it really is.
There is NonStop action, there's a real kind of molden
heart at the center of it. He was devastatingly good looking, so,
(35:23):
you know, fun to cast that role.
Speaker 1 (35:26):
Jake Jillenhall. I was watching Jake Jillenhall and presumed innocent.
My whole thing was like, he's he's too handsome, much
too much. Wait, what's he doing is working as a prosecutor.
He should be like a male model.
Speaker 2 (35:39):
Yeah there you go. Yeah, No, Tyvor or Tyler Rubin
was just he was. He was the whole package. But
then you know, got back from got back from Korea,
and Hollywood also saw how good looking he was, because
you know, there are these pictures of him on a
stretcher coming off the you know whatever, the ship that
brought him back from North Korea. I mean, he's just,
(36:03):
you know, looks like Marlon Brando, and so Hollywood, you know,
he lived in California, So Hollywood sees his picture and
he's starts swaning around while with these starlits and taking
them to premieres and stuff. And there's talk that they're
going to make a movie of his life. And he's like, nah,
I don't really want to talk about it. I'm fine, thanks,
and he goes he had this beloved brother, Emory, who
(36:24):
opened a liquor store, and he went worked for him
and had a family and got married and the whole thing.
But you know, he would have told you like, oh,
there's nothing that interesting about my life, which he says
in the tape.
Speaker 1 (36:34):
You know, he says, when did he died? You know,
it breaks my heart that we're doing this twenty fifteen.
He dies in twenty fifteen.
Speaker 2 (36:44):
Yeah, he died in twenty fifteen.
Speaker 1 (36:45):
We're looking him up right now. In case you're wondering
what's happening here, he is. In fact, I can confirm
incredibly handsome. Yeah, Meret. On that note, thank you so much,
Thank you so much for this series, which has been amazing,
and please, please please let's do season two and continue
(37:06):
the big mom energy for as long as we can.
Speaker 2 (37:09):
Wow, you know, big dad energy for even two.
Speaker 1 (37:11):
Big d Okay, thank you, Meredith.
Speaker 2 (37:14):
Thanks.
Speaker 1 (37:17):
Medal of Honor. Stories of Courage is written by Meredith
Rollins and produced by Meredith Rollins, Costanza Gallardo, and Izzy Carter.
Our editor is ben A d Alfh Haffrey. Sound design
and additional music by Jake Gorsky, Recording engineering by Nina Lawrence,
fact checking by Arthur Gombert's Original music by Eric Phillips.
(37:39):
Special thanks to series creator Dan McGinn to the Congressional
Medal of Honor Society and Adam Plumpton. I'm your host,
Malcolm Bappa
Host
Malcolm Gladwell
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