The recent surge of patriotism that has prompted many of us to display American flags in front of our houses and makes us want to break into spontaneous renditions of “God Bless America” has left the strong, spirited and able-bodied young men who make up your favorite sports teams with feelings unfamiliar to their generation.
The Bears sat in their locker room last week watching the continuous coverage of the tragedies in New York, the Pentagon and a grassy field in western Pennsylvania. It wasn’t difficult to ascertain what they were feeling.
“If a bus had pulled up outside to bring people to war,” a young staff member observed, “I’d be on that bus in a second, and a lot of those guys would be too.”
Defensive end Phillip Daniels said: “This has angered everybody. I’m pretty sure a lot of our guys would jump on [the bus] and say: `Let’s go. We’ll do whatever you need.’ Now I think we understand what everyone fought for in previous wars.”
All they had to do was ask Earle Mosley.
More Top Picks Best Weighted Vests For Autism
Most of the Bears and perhaps even his colleagues probably know little of the background of their 54-year-old running backs coach.
It’s not mentioned in his media-guide biography that Mosley served in Vietnam, that he was a specialist in the 1st Air Cavalry, or that he was point flank in the infantry–a tunnel rat.
Unless Mosley takes off his shirt, they wouldn’t ask about scars from the chest wound he sustained shortly after arriving in ‘Nam.
It might have killed him had the bullet not first ripped through the face of his buddy, slowing its impact.
The “railroad tracks” on his knee are not an old football injury but a reminder of the second time Mosley was wounded in combat, the time another buddy stepped on the booby trap first and was killed. Mosley was blown off the mountain they were standing on and shattered his kneecap.
That wound got him shipped to a hospital in Japan for three months. The first time he was able to stroll the grounds, with a cast encasing his leg from groin to ankle, a car’s sudden backfire had him hitting the dirt, which in this case was a large mud puddle.
A hostile greeting from antiwar protesters turned his return to the States into another trauma.
“I was spit on. They threw bags of dog [manure] on me,” he recalled. “When I was discharged, that was probably the toughest thing.”
Mosley looks at the young men he teaches and a sport in which the military parallels are unavoidable . . . and he smiles.
“It’s amazing how many of them don’t know anything about [Vietnam], they really don’t,” he said. “I feel sorry for them. They’re going to have things that come up in their future and their kids’ future that they’re going to have to face. . . . That’s why it’s so important to stop this right now. It can cause us not to have a country as we know it.”
The events of the last week have been as upsetting to Mosley as they have been to every American. But for the first time, a new generation has to think seriously about the future in a way it never had to before, and about its role in it all.
“Thank God they’ve never had to experience anything like some of the people in my generation have experienced,” Mosley said of his players. “But there’s going to be a time when they’re going to have to step up.
“Young people in other generations, when they saw atrocities occur in other wars, they felt the same way. They don’t know until they get into the fray what it’s really like, but it makes your emotions run high. I think it’s good these guys feel that way.
“I’ve always been in favor of still having the draft. I think everyone, men and women, needs to experience going into the military and fighting for their country. I think they’d get more of an appreciation of the country we live in, the value of life.”
Mosley was 19 when he went to Vietnam in 1966. He went over with 35 replacements with whom he’d trained, but he was separated from his platoon early when a piece of debris lodged in his eye.
“They kept me in base camp overnight until my eye healed,” Mosley recalled. “Then they put me in another platoon. Two months later, all those guys were killed. They overran us in Cambodia and all 35 died. All but me.”
This country’s foremost current enemy has a face and a name if our government is right, but it is still one that is largely intangible. You wonder how sensitive human beings can conjure up the healthy hate normally required to compete in a sport like football against opponents who suddenly don’t seem as much like “enemies” as they did a week ago.
But coaches will continue to motivate with words that sound more like war than sport, and Mosley does not have a problem with it.
“There are a lot of parallels,” he said. “What we do here reminds me a lot of the training we did. What I went through, that’s how I know people can go beyond what they think they’re capable of.
“People are much stronger than they think. It is a teacher’s job, a coach’s job, to get them to push past those limits, get out of their comfort zone.”
Still, Mosley tells players, “I hope this is the closest you ever come to combat.”
He pauses when asked if he believes today’s player really would jump on that bus if it pulled up.
More Top Picks Tables Plants
“I think there would be a lot of thinking about the situation,” Mosley finally said. “But I believe in the younger generation, I really do. They lead a fast-paced, pressure-filled life that can be very tough. But I think they’ll step up to the plate. I have confidence because I know it’s in them.”