A king dies, a hero lives

A crowd gathered to remember a man, and among the memories arose one of the fallen, life pulsing through him, brought to his feet by the sound of a band playing to dance as only he could. Some 600 people listened Monday to Paul Bradshaw recounting the story about his 2-year-old son. They broke the somber silence inside St. John Bosco Catholic Church in Lakewood, Wash., with sweet, soft laughter. Some men die kings, of pop and other things. A rare few die as men for a cause beyond them and one they know to be right.

Lt. Brian N. Bradshaw, 24, of Steilacoom, Wash., was such a one. He was killed far from the calm of Puget Sound, in the shadows of mountains in Kheyl, Afghanistan, where a homemade bomb splintered the vehicle in which he was riding as part of a patrol. It happened June 25. America scarcely noticed. Another kind of man died that day, and thousands streamed into a basketball arena to mourn him Tuesday. Pray something else has not passed: a spirit that once throbbed in this country’s breast and lives still in memories of Brian Bradshaw.

“Service is the foundation of life,” the boy who would become a soldier once wrote, according to The News Tribune in Tacoma, Wash. “Without service our lives have the same impact and meaning as a stick lying on the ground. No one remembers the sticks stepped on in the woods, but everyone remembers the flowers ... If we serve and work throughout our lives, we will be the flowers that everyone remembers.”

America remembered Michael Jackson on Tuesday but hazards a thing far more melancholy: forgetting what the Rev. Lee Hightower called “the soul of a real American hero,” which dwelled in Bradshaw. Jackson assuredly was an extraordinary figure, but nothing about him was quite so extraordinary as some people musing over his death as an event memorable in the same vein as the assassination of President Kennedy and the 9/11 attacks. Such hyperbole extends mostly from the 24-7 cable news crowd, and so isn’t representative of sensible people. Mud puddles are deeper than many TV anchors.

Forgive them, then, for failing to notice the distinction, which is a chasm, between the master of the moonwalk and the president who dreamed of men walking on the moon. But beware nonetheless their capacity to obfuscate amid celebrity haze, this time over Michael, another time over Anna Nicole, still another over Britney.

Serious business at the moment is unfolding in Afghanistan. Insurgents have retreated there from Iraq and to the hills of neighboring Pakistan. President Barack Obama, no hawk in the fashion of his predecessor, considers victory an imperative. But the going is increasingly tougher, with the American death toll mounting and another superpower’s failure arising from history’s ashes like a ghost. The Soviet Union tumbled over the economic brink while waging war in the Afghan mountains. Circumstances there for the United States are increasingly familiar to those whose gaze is cast east of Hollywood.

Obama is confident that America can succeed where the Soviets crumbled, discovering in the process their superior technology to be of no avail in Afghanistan’s cruel, equalizing terrain. We agree with Obama, not because we’ve bought the lie for which the Soviets paid so dearly, that sheer might is sufficient. Rather we believe there yet remains among our soldiers a rich sense of purpose like that felt by Brian Bradshaw. This ensures nothing but provides hope. That’s why we think him far more worth remembering today than a pop icon whose passing symbolized narcissism and excess rather than selflessness and sacrifice.

Adieu, Lt. Bradshaw. Your flower yet blooms.

Tip o’ the cap

In Tuesday’s editorial, we said it had “been written elsewhere” that Republican Bob McDonnell’s camp had accused a GOP foe of “grandstanding” in requesting 10 debates in advance of the 2005 attorney general election. Chris Graham, editor of the Augusta Free Press, points out that his Web site was the “elsewhere” in question. So here, credit and attribution is given where due.