Thursday, August 1, 2013

Clearer View

I am reliably informed by most media outlets and many of the movies featuring them that the "millennial generation" born between 1980 and 2000 are spoiled and interested only in themselves, and that members of the different military services are either wild-eyed borderline sociopaths who slake their hunger to dominate, maim and kill by donning their country's uniform or ordinary folks whose exposure to same twists them irreversibly so that they can never fully return to or be at peace with everyday civilian society.

It seems that this picture may not be entirely correct. United States Marine Corps Lance Corporal Myles Kerr was running a race in his hometown on the eastern shores of Lake Michigan when he saw a nine-year-old boy struggling to finish. The boy had lost his group and asked Lance Corporal Kerr if he would run with him to help him finish. The Marine then sent the rest of his unit ahead and stayed behind to encourage the boy to finish the 5K run, and ran so that his own finish time was a full five seconds slower than his new partner.

Lc. Cpl. Kerr, the story notes, was bemused by the attention he has since received, and said, "I was just doing what any man would do."

Leave no one behind, indeed.

(One is advised to overlook the story's frequent references to "army fatigues" and "army friends" as mere errors born of misinformation.)

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