One of the unspoken benefits of recalling the close of World War II, demonstrated by several outstanding documentaries this year, lies in our renewed opportunity to appreciate the mystery of human heroism. A worldwide conflagration imparts both a sense of scale as well as a specific context, often narrow and crushingly circumscribed, within which we can situate the heroic deed.

It has been said that the hero is no braver than the ordinary person, only that he or she is braver five minutes longer. Yet, knowing what we know or at least intuit: Is this true? Is staying power the crucial difference or are heroes more radically unlike us than we prefer to admit?

Fifty years ago, on March 19, 1945, a 27,000 ton aircraft carrier named the U.S.S. Franklin was dead in the water, 40 miles off the coast of Japan. The carrier had lost its power and was now naked to its enemies after a series of attacks from Japanese kamikaze planes. Within minutes of the initial bombardments and the strafings that followed, out of the original 3,000 men, 1,000 were dead, 1,000 more in the water, with the remaining thousand trapped or delirious with confusion.

The hero who emerged from the chaos and inspired bravery in so many others was an unlikely paladin.

He was Lieut. Comdr. Joseph T. O'Callahan, a scholarly Jesuit chaplain, age 40, who had spent the halcyon days before the war getting his doctorate and then teaching math, physics and philosophy at The College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass. He was born in Boston in 1905, had entered the Jesuits in 1922 and then shared the anonymity of "the long black line" until his ordination in 1934.

In 1940 he joined the Navy Chaplain Corps and, not long after, served on the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Ranger for almost three years during the North Africa invasion and the fighting in the Atlantic until his transfer to the U.S.S. Franklin and the Pacific in 1945.

Jay O'Callahan, the nephew of Father O'Callahan, is a professional storyteller, with an impressive list of outstanding performances at New York's Lincoln Center, Dublin's Abbey Theater and on countless campuses throughout our country.

Recently he recorded on cassette tape, a performance entitled "Father Joe: A Hero's Journey," in which he re-enacts the terrifying moments aboard the Franklin, while interweaving his narrative with personal reminiscences of his uncle during his own student days (1956-60) at Holy Cross.

Jay O'Callahan invites us to participate imaginatively in the horrors of that March day. Through deft images, he re-creates the bursting explosions, the bewilderment of the sailors, the flames scudding about as though alive, the sight of smoke and burning flesh, the intense battering and subsequent shaking on that "burning city," the Franklin.

Then his uncle emerges, a figure of extraordinary calm amid chaos, who snaps the men into sense, brings some order into disorder and again and again risks his own life to save others. His actions that day were extraordinary, but perhaps more extraordinary still were his actions afterwards (those five minutes more), when for three days he helped carry off on his shoulders the charred bodies of the dead before consigning them to the sea.

It was the self-described "non-religious" captain of the Franklin who recommended him for the Congressional Medal of Honor, our nation's highest award, and who later said of Father O'Callahan that "he is the bravest man I have ever seen."

Jay O'Callahan's subsequent story also reminds us of the less dramatic or public aspects proper to a hero's character. Shortly after war, upon his return to Holy Cross, Father O'Callahan suffered a disabling stroke, compounded by breathing difficulties effected by his ordeal on the Franklin. He was forced to stop teaching after 1950 and became (as he put it) a man "dead in the water," like his old ship.

Though just 45 years old, he embarked upon a torturous voyage lasting years and not hours, one that tested his spiritual courage. As his nephew recounts his uncle's struggles before his death in 1964, the listener cannot resist the thought that, if any ever did, this man deserved more than one medal for heroism.

April 8, 1995
Reprinted with permission of:
America Press, Inc.
106 West 56th Street
New York, NY 10019

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