- Captain
Al Haynes of United 232, the DC-10 that crashed
in Sioux City, (and Captain Denny Fitch, the check
captain who ran the throttles for him)
- They saved 184 passengers in an aircraft that was
essentially uncontrollable.
- An interview
with Captain Haynes
- Lenny Skutnik (and Roger Olian, and Arland D.
Williams, Jr., the survivor who gave up his chance for
rescue to save another )
- They jumped into an ice-filled Potomac to save
survivors of AF Flight 90
- Charles Houston The lawyer who organized the
campaign to overturn the "separate but equal"
laws of the United States.
- The
Little Rock Nine The first nine students to
integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas in
1957
- They put up with abuse, threats, and physical
violence for years, not days.
- Rosa Parks
- She had the courage to defy a universally
accepted system that was simply wrong.
- Her refusal to give up her seat on a bus to a
white man in Montgomery, Alabama, resulted in a
city-wide boycott of the bus company and stirred
the civil rights movement across the nation.
- The Heroes of My Lai
- Thirty years after one of the darkest moments in
U.S. military history, three soldiers who
happened upon the My Lai massacre and risked
their lives to save Vietnamese civilians by
aiming their weapons at fellow Americans were
proclaimed heroes by the Army.
- They are Hugh Thompson, Lawrence Colburn and
their comrade, Glenn Andreotta, who was killed in
battle three weeks after My Lai.
- My Lai Heroism Honored
They landed [their] helicopter in the
line of fire between American troops and fleeing
Vietnamese civilians and pointed their own guns
at the U.S. soldiers to prevent more murders.
- Iqbal Masih
- He fought to end child labor in Pakistan
- He was murdered in 1995 at the age of twelve.
- The
Soviet fire-fighters at Chernobyl (and the
"rectifiers")
- They knowingly exposed themselves to intense (and
ultimately fatal) radiation in an attempt to stop
the raging nuclear fires at Chernobyl
- Two named heroes, S.T. Milgevsky and N.E.
Fedorenko, were bus drivers who ferried firemen
and workers to and from the reactor area after
the explosion.
- Leonidas, son of Anaxandridas
- With 300 Spartans and 1000 other Greeks , he died
heroically defending the pass of Thermopylae
against the huge invading army of Xerxes.
- "Go, stranger, and to Lacedaemon tell
That here, obeying her behests, we fell."
- "Here did four thousand men from Pelops'
land
Against three hundred myriads bravely
stand."
- Inscriptions at the pass in the time of
Herodotus. (Book VII, Ch. 228) Herodotus
- Anwar Sadat
- His was the first step toward Middle-East Peace
- Sadat joined (1978) with Israeli premier Menachem
Begin in negotiating the Camp David Accords. He
and Begin shared the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize.
Anwar Sadat was assassinated by Muslim zealots.
- Raoul
Wallenberg
- Raoul Wallenberg, whose courageous acts saved
tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews from Nazi
death camps, was honored by a US postage stamp on
April 24, 1997.
- With disregard for his safety, Wallenberg went to
Hungary and proceeded to save tens of thousands
of Jews from Nazi death camps by issuing them a
Schutz-Pass, or safe pass, and setting up safe
houses. Wallenberg is credited with saving over
70,000 lives.
- After the war, Wallenberg disappeared into the
Soviet Gulag.
- Captain Werner Hartenstein
- On September 12, 1942, the German U-Boat U-156,
commanded by Captain Werner Hartenstein, sank the
British liner Laconia 800 miles off the coast of
South Africa.
- Upon surfacing, Captain Hartenstein
discovered that the Laconia had been
carrying 2000 Italian POWs, as well as
100 Polish cadets and 800 British
civilians, including women and children.
Two thirds of the Italians and most of
the civilians had survived the sinking.
- On his own authority, Captain Hartenstein
decided that a rescue effort was needed.
He radioed for assistance, in English, in
the clear. He then notified the Commander
of U-Boat forces, Admiral Karl Doenitz,
who dispatched an additional two U-Boats,
U-506 and U-507, and the Italian
submarine Capalini, to assist.
- US Captain (later Brigadier General) Robert C.
Richardson, based on Ascension island, was
notified of the sinking by the British
Admirality.
- Captain Richardson dispatched a B-24
Liberator bomber flown by Lt. James
Harden to the scene.
- Lt. Harden found three U-Boats on the
surface, guns unmanned, flying red
crosses, each towing a string of
lifeboats.
- Lt. Harden dropped such supplies as he
had to the survivors, and then radioed
Ascension for instructions.
- Captain Richardson sent a terse
order: "Sink sub at once!"
- During the subsequent attack, U-156
suffered slight damage, but two of the
lifeboats were destroyed, killing more
than 100 civilians.
- U-156 was forced to withdraw, but despite
the attack, U-506 and U-507, later joined
by the Italian submarine Capalini,
continued until they were met by Vichy
French rescue vessels.
- As a result, Adolf Hitler ordered Admiral Karl
Doenitz to sink all survivors of future U-Boat
attacks.
- Doenitz refused, saying that such an
order would destroy morale. Hitler
agreed, and the order was modified to
prohibit future rescue attempts (the
"Laconia Order")
- After the war, Admiral Doenitz was tried
by the Nuremburg Tribunal for war crimes,
based in part on the "Laconia
Order", despite evidence presented
that US submarines in the Pacific had
exactly the same orders.
- Source: The History Channel The
Laconia Incident September 6, 1998
- Yitzhak
Rabin
- All we were saying, was give Peace a chance
- With Peres and PLO leader Yasir Arafat, Rabin was
awarded the 1994 Nobel Prize for peace for the
1993 accord. Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by a
Jewish religious zealot.Man
of Israel
- Mikhail Gorbachev
- He single-handedly ended the cold war
- Gorbachev
introduced policies whose guiding principles
glasnost [openness] and perestroika
[restructuring] were intended to liberalize and
revitalize Soviet socialism and society. In
foreign affairs he vastly improved relations with
the U.S. and ended Soviet interference in Eastern
European nations, most of which subsequently
elected non-Communist governments. In 1990 he was
awarded the Nobel
Peace Prize.
- F. W. de Klerk
- He ended apartheid in South Africa
- de Klerk, despite his conservative reputation,
began the process of ending apartheid, lifting
the ban on antiapartheid parties and releasing
Nelson Mandela from prison in 1990. In 1991 he
obtained the repeal of all remaining apartheid
laws and called for the drafting of a new
constitution, a process that led to the approval
of a multiracial transitional government in 1993.
De Klerk and Mandela jointly were awarded the
Nobel Prize for peace in 1993.
- J.
Robert Oppenheimer
- He was simply more intelligent than his
detractors. They couldn't abide that.
- Robert Oppenheimer "We do not believe
any group of men adequate enough or wise enough
to operate without scrutiny or without criticism.
We know that the only way to avoid error is to
detect it, that the only way to detect it is to
be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error
undetected will flourish and subvert."
- Director (1942-45) of the laboratory at Los
Alamos, N.Mex., that designed and built the first
atomic bombs, Oppenheimer later became a main
proponent of the civilian and international
control of atomic energy. He was chairman
(1946-52) of the general advisory committee of
the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, but in 1953
the AEC suspended him as an alleged
security risk.
- Robert Oppenheimer at Trinity: "I am
reminded of the passage in the Hindu Scripture,
the Bhagavad Gita, where Vishnu is trying to
convince the prince to do his duty and assumes
his many-armed form and says "Now I am
become Death, the destroyer of Worlds""
- An 18 year old Wang Wei-lin defies an armored column
