There Are Heroes and There Are Heroes

This past Tuesday afternoon (July 27, 2010), I boarded a 45-minute flight in Cincinnati, Ohio, bound for Columbus, Ohio. It was one of those wretched little Embraer jets with one seat on the left side and two on the right. I wound up sitting next to this old man on the two-seat side. After we were in the air he mentioned something about the tight quarters and said he had just had to turn down a trip to Korea because he didn’t think his legs would take the punishment. Said the trip would have been paid for, but he just had to turn it down this time; and, after all he’d been there something like twelve times already. I asked him what the trip was for, and learned it was to receive some kind of award or honor.

He said he had traveled all over the world, but now at 81 years old he was having to slow down. Somewhere along in here he mentioned that he had known every President since [Franklin] Roosevelt. Said he had been to 13 of the 14 last inaugural balls; seems he couldn’t make it to Eisenhower’s first one because he couldn’t afford to buy his wife a new dress at the time. He told me quietly that you couldn’t take your wife to an inaugural ball in a gingham dress. I asked him if he knew President Obama, and he said yes, that he had walked with him in a ceremony a year or so ago and placed a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Seems he knew General Petraeus and General Tommy Franks. Eventually, he showed me two photos in his wallet. One was him standing with President Truman, and the other was him standing with President Kennedy. He said Kennedy once invited him to a cocktail party, and that he had ridden with him on Air Force One.

I asked him what he was so famous and well known for, and he just leaned over and showed me his coat lapel, on which was sewn a patch saying he was a Medal of Honor recipient. After a little while, he told me an amazing story about a battle in Korea that he was in (apparently the one that got him the Medal of Honor). Once he mentioned vaguely that he supposed he was naturally good in combat (so it would seem!). He said he had been wounded several times (four Purple Hearts I think he said). He told me that there were plaques and portraits, etc., honoring him at various places around the country, naming a city or two as he talked. For example, there was something about him in the Ohio State House. He travels here and there, raising money for wounded war veterans and so on. Just as we were getting off the plane, I asked him his name, which was Ronald Rosser. When I got home, I searched for him on Google, and lo’ and behold, there he was in Wikipedia.

Subject: Ronald E. Rosser - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_E._Rosser

But I couldn’t really be sure that the man on the plane was, in fact, the same man as the Ronald Rosser who was written about in Wikipedia, because the photo there was of a relatively young soldier, and the man on the airplane was 81. However, the description of the battle in Wikipedia was remarkably close to the description he gave me on the plane, so I kept looking until I found a newspaper story containing a recent photo, and Bingo! It was definitely the same guy.

Subject: The Daily Nightly - Medal of Honor: Ronald E. Rosser

http://dailynightly.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2007/09/18/4373633-medal-of-honor-ronald-e-rosser

Nowadays, you might be called a hero if you rescued a cat from a tree, but not so much back in the 1950’s, and I knew I had been sitting next to a genuine American hero of the first water.