"and the greatest of these is love"

Twin Towers Cross

(Image from Peace Chapel General Baptist Church)

My Uncle Leon Ferguson, who died about five years ago, fought in the Korean War. So did my scoutmaster, Mr. Holland, who still attends meetings of the "Chosin Few," unless he too has passed on. Mr. Holland spoke to me about the Americans having to remove their dead during retreat by using dynamite to blast them out of the frozen ground.

Once, after my scoutmaster had told me something about his experience in the Battle of Chosin Reservoir, I asked my Uncle Leon if he had fought there. He looked at me for a moment, then acknowledged that he had, and he spoke briefly about how horrible the war was and that a lot of young friends of his had lost their lives because of poor decisions by their commanding officers. But he didn't specify.

Later, my grandmother told me that what Leon had said to me that day was the most that he'd ever said to anyone about the war. His wife, my maternal aunt, told us that when Leon had returned from the war, he had told her never to ask him about it because he simply didn't want to talk about it.

For years, he practiced conservation by taking his baths in merely an inch or two of water because he hated to waste a resource that had been so hard to get during battle.

My 8th-grade science teacher, Coy Ferguson, told about getting so thirsty during a campaign in the Korean War that he finally forced himself to drink water from a spot in a creek downstream from where a dead mule lay rotting in the water. No other spot safe from sniper fire was available to him.

That war left a traumatic impression upon everyone, it seems, but those who tell the stories are the ones who survived, and such stories always leave us with the belief that we could also survive.

I'm currently reading Jacques Sandulescu's Donbas: A True Story of an Escape Across Russia, which tells the story of how he survived and escaped one of Stalin's slave-labor camps even though he was no more than 18 or 19.

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that I'd ordered the book, so anyone interested can read more about it there and also find some links to excerpts from that book and other fascinating tales from Sandulescu's life.

He's still alive and lovingly cared for by his wife, Annie Gottlieb, who calls herself "Amba" online and maintains her own blog -- in which, Sandulescu looms large even in the late winter of his long life.

Yesterday, I read Amba's words about those who do not survive -- and that, ultimately, includes all of us. She had just watched United 93 and was still moved from the experience. She notes several things about it that she liked, such as "the modesty of the movie[, which] didn't mythologize the characters," the "casual chatter of all the passengers and crew at the beginning[, which] was anchored by the unawakened assumption that their lives would go on," the anonymity of "Let's roll," which "was made a throwaway line," but most of all, I gather, she liked this:

I liked that while the terrorists' mantra was all Allah all the time, the passengers' was "I love you." That says so much more than I even want to comment on. That was the prayer we sent to the skies on September 11, and I say it speaks well of us.

Note how subtly Amba weaves in an allusion to the Muslim Shahadah in her words "all Allah all," which recall "la ilaha illa Allah" (لا إله إلاَّ الله, "no god but Allah"). While the terrorists were praying for their own souls and the courage to kill others by killing themselves, we were offering up prayers of love for those who were going to die.

I think of the words of Paul in 1 Corinthians 13, especially verse 13:

νυνι δε μενει πιστις ελπις αγαπη τα τρια ταυτα μειζων δε τουτων η αγαπη (Greek New Testament, Westcott-Hort edition of 1881)

But now abideth faith, hope, love, these three; and the greatest of these is love. (American Standard Version)

The terrorists may have had their faith and their hope, but on that day, we had love.