by Craig Hovey
| See AP story here |
The 80th anniversary of this event was marked by a ceremony aboard the Missouri, which is now a museum at Pearl Harbor. It was reported that the ceremony included grandsons of the captain, the mayor of Honolulu, and a Japanese city where kamikaze pilots often flew from.
“This is one of the ship’s great stories and explains, in part, why the ship became an international symbol of peace and reconciliation within two years of its launching and rather than just an instrument of destruction,” said Michael Carr, CEO of the Battleship Missouri Memorial. “This is a remarkable story of compassion and humanity, even in the midst of one of the worst battles of World War II.”
The Japanese mayor described the kamikaze pilots as themselves victims of war, young men who didn’t want to die but had to go and kill and die anyway.
I’m struck by the care that the Missouri’s captain and crew took to honor the body and life of someone who had tried to kill them. The story is powerful example, in the midst of war, of doing something to remember the humanity of an enemy soldier and stands out as a symbol of improved American-Japanese relations.
War itself probably does little to encourage stories like this, which may be why it is so striking as well as being the only instance when a kamikaze pilot was treated this way. This doesn’t make the fact that this happened small; it makes it big. Even war did not entirely eliminate whatever beliefs of shared humanity and dignity motivated the military men involved. The shared experience of being at war, of being a soldier, sometimes has the effect of uniting soldiers on both sides of a conflict rather than only reinforcing the many ways that they’re at odds.
We can’t know whether the captain would have still honored the fallen pilot if any of his crew had been killed. It’s not hard to imagine that honors would flow with much more difficulty if at all.
Still, we might expand our ideas of what constitutes a war hero to include people and stories like this. There is surely a kind of heroism that falls outside of expected and typical war-behavior and witnesses to the dignity inherent in all people, including enemies. But then this isn’t just a war hero but a human hero.
Craig Hovey is executive director of the Ashland Center for Nonviolence.
I’m struck by the care that the Missouri’s captain and crew took to honor the body and life of someone who had tried to kill them. The story is powerful example, in the midst of war, of doing something to remember the humanity of an enemy soldier and stands out as a symbol of improved American-Japanese relations.
War itself probably does little to encourage stories like this, which may be why it is so striking as well as being the only instance when a kamikaze pilot was treated this way. This doesn’t make the fact that this happened small; it makes it big. Even war did not entirely eliminate whatever beliefs of shared humanity and dignity motivated the military men involved. The shared experience of being at war, of being a soldier, sometimes has the effect of uniting soldiers on both sides of a conflict rather than only reinforcing the many ways that they’re at odds.
We can’t know whether the captain would have still honored the fallen pilot if any of his crew had been killed. It’s not hard to imagine that honors would flow with much more difficulty if at all.
Still, we might expand our ideas of what constitutes a war hero to include people and stories like this. There is surely a kind of heroism that falls outside of expected and typical war-behavior and witnesses to the dignity inherent in all people, including enemies. But then this isn’t just a war hero but a human hero.
Craig Hovey is executive director of the Ashland Center for Nonviolence.
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