Jeffrey Michael Towe

Stop and look closely at the young Marine officer climbing over the concrete seawall on that wooden ladder. He has less than two minutes left to live. His name is First Lieutenant Baldomero Lopez, twenty-five years old, the proud son of Spanish immigrants from Tampa, Florida, and a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy. On September 15, 1950, during the amphibious landing at Red Beach in Inchon, Lopez was the very first man in his platoon up the scaling ladder into enemy fire. A combat photographer snapped this frame as Lopez vaulted over the wall with his M1 carbine in his left hand, leading the 1st Battalion, 5th Marines forward. Moments after this shutter clicked, Lopez crawled up to a North Korean concrete pillbox that was pinning his Marines down on the beach. He pulled the pin on a hand grenade and cocked his right arm back to hurl it through the firing slit. At that exact split second, a burst of automatic fire tore straight through his right shoulder and chest. Lopez dropped into the trench, bleeding heavily, while his live, primed grenade rolled loose near the boots of his own Marines. His shattered right arm was paralyzed; try as he might, he could not lift it high enough to throw the grenade over the wall. With only seconds left on the fuse, Lopez refused to shout for someone else to grab it. Instead, he swung his broken right arm in a low arc across the dirt, swept the hissing grenade underneath his own chest, and pressed his body tight over the blast. Every single Marine around him walked away alive. Whenever someone asks what American leadership looks like, show them the young man at the top of that ladder.

Look at the posture of the two men in this photograph, taken in Tokyo on September 27, 1945. Twenty-five days earlier, World War II had ended. Across Allied capitals, politicians and newspapers were demanding that Emperor Hirohito be indicted as a war criminal and hanged. When the Emperor asked to visit the U.S. Embassy in person, General Douglas MacArthur stood in an unbuttoned khaki shirt with no tie, hands on his hips. As MacArthur later confessed in his memoirs, he braced himself for an awkward plea: throughout history, conquered rulers almost always blamed their advisors and begged to save their own necks. Everyone left the room except the Emperor's interpreter. MacArthur offered him an American cigarette and noticed the Emperor's hands trembling slightly as he lit it. Then came the words MacArthur never forgot. In his autobiography Reminiscences, MacArthur wrote that the Emperor told him he had come to offer himself to the judgment of the powers MacArthur represented, as the one to bear sole responsibility for every political and military decision made and action taken by his people in the conduct of the war. MacArthur wrote that a tremendous impression swept over him, chilling the marrow of his bones. Standing before him was a man willing to lay his own life on the chopping block so his starving, bombed-out nation would not be torn apart. In that single thirty-five-minute meeting, the Supreme Commander decided no trial would touch him. When their talk ended, breaking his own initial protocol, MacArthur personally escorted the Emperor out to his car. Two fierce enemies walked into that room in 1945. Eighty years of peace across the Pacific walked out.

Saburo Sakai was the greatest Japanese fighter ace to survive the war. Sixty-four confirmed kills. Flew the Zero against the P-40, the P-38, the Hellcat, and the Corsair. Over Java, in early 1942, he caught a lone American DC-3 transport plane in his gunsight. An easy kill. Standard target. He closed to point-blank range. Then he looked into the cockpit. The cockpit was full of women and children, Dutch civilian refugees trying to get out of the East Indies ahead of the Japanese advance. One of the women, holding a baby, looked out the side window straight into Sakai's canopy. Sakai did not fire. He broke off, saluted the woman, and let the DC-3 fly west into the sun. Years later, in American interviews, he explained himself plainly. "I am a samurai. My father's father was a samurai. We do not shoot women and babies. If my ancestors saw me fire into that cockpit, I would not be able to meet them when I died." Five months later, over Guadalcanal, Sakai took a .50 caliber round through the canopy of his Zero. The bullet went through his head. It blinded his right eye and tore open his skull. By every medical reasonable expectation he should have gone down. He flew his damaged Zero four hours and 650 miles over the Pacific, bleeding into his flight suit, half-blind, repeatedly losing consciousness. He landed it, intact, on Rabaul. He survived the war with one eye. After the war, Saburo Sakai did not hate Americans. He became a Buddhist. He said in interviews that he had killed too many men already and would not do it again, not even in his own thoughts. He corresponded for years with former American Navy pilots who had been his opponents. When American pilots began visiting Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo to pay respects to Japanese pilots they had shot down, it was Saburo Sakai who met them at the gate and walked them in. Enemy pilot. Enemy pilot. Both with white hair. Side by side, bowing at the memorial of men they had tried to kill. "We were warriors," Sakai told one American interviewer. "Now we are old. Only the young should hate. The old should remember." Japan had Zamperini forgiveness. Japan had Fuchida reconciliation. Japan also had Saburo Sakai, who refused to fire at women, took a bullet through the head, and spent his old age walking American pilots into Yasukuni. Warriors recognize warriors. Even after the war is gone.