As he describes it, U.S. Navy Lt. John William Finn, now 94, was making love to his wife, Alice, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.
He rushed to his duty station, took over a .30 caliber and then a .50 caliber machine gun, waging a one-man battle against the low-flying Japanese air armada, damaging many “with telling effect.”
Though severely wounded by enemy strafing, he continued to fire, until ordered to get medical attention. Barely patched up, and in terrible pain, he returned immediately to action.
“I wasn’t being courageous,” he said in an interview half a century later. “I was just [angry].” Nevertheless, Finn was awarded the Medal of Honor.
At the end of next month, thousands upon thousands of World War II and other veterans are going to descend upon Washington for what is expected to be the largest military reunion in American history — occasioned by the dedication of the new World War II Memorial on the National Mall.
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But Finn and six other veterans, all recipients of the Medal of Honor, are already here, given voice and form by the splendid character actor Stephen Lang in a tour de force one-man performance of “Beyond Glory.” It’s Lang’s theatrical adaptation of an oral history of Medal of Honor winners with the same title, compiled by his friend Larry Smith, retired managing editor of Parade magazine.
`Beautifully unvarnished’
“I sat down and read it and it knocked me out, these interviews with 24 living recipients of the Medal of Honor,” said Lang, remembered as Lt. Col. Jessup in Broadway’s “A Few Good Men” and Gen. George Pickett in “Gettysburg.” “I didn’t feel like there was any space between the voices and the page. It didn’t feel like it was filtered through anything at all. It was beautifully unvarnished — absolutely honest.”
His play is onstage Wednesdays through Sundays at the theater of the Women in Military Service for America Memorial — a fitting venue as it’s located at the entrance to Arlington National Cemetery on the most sacred soil in the nation.
Smith’s book contains the stories of 24 medal recipients who served in WW II, Korea and Vietnam. Lang selected seven for his stage adaptation.
“They began to choose themselves,” he said. “As I’d do them, I’d take them down and read them to my wife, Tina, who has always been my strictest critic. She has very lean tastes in acting. With every one of them, she’d be weeping. That told me there was something here.”
The trifecta
Another recipient, Army Capt. Lewis Millett, now 84, won the medal for extraordinarily heroic action in Korea, but served in all three conflicts and, at one time or another, led three bayonet charges. He seemed to enjoy every one.
“We’d stick a bayonet up the . . . of the enemy,” he says. “It is war, you know.”
Spec. 5th Class Clarence Sasser, 57, a medic in Vietnam, tells of being heavily attacked in a landing zone and instantly hearing cries of “Medic, medic!, Doc, doc!” coming from all over the field. Though suffering multiple wounds himself, he treated under fire the wounds of 51 men before they were evacuated.
Rear Adm. James Stockdale, 80, one of America’s most famous Vietnam POWs, recounts with eerie, chilling calm what it was like to be tortured for 7 1/2 years and how he and his fellow residents of the Hanoi Hilton survived it.
He talks through Lang of coming home and receiving a most beautiful reward — having his son tell him, “I’m glad that you’re my father.”
Staff Sgt. Nicky Bacon, 58, in one Vietnam engagement, savagely attacked an enemy position, destroying a tank and killing many, while assuming command of two platoons and rescuing dozens of his own men.
“I enjoyed the combat,” he says. “I was good at it.”
Lt. Vernon Baker, now 84, an African-American officer in a segregated, all-black unit fighting in Italy during WW II, was caught with his men by an array of German machine guns but wiped out three of them and an enemy observation post, saving the day. His white captain, who Baker says was nowhere near the action, received the Silver Star. Baker received nothing — until in 1997, President Clinton bestowed the Medal of Honor on him in White House ceremonies.
The last to speak is 2nd Lt. (later U.S. Sen.) Daniel Inouye, 80, who volunteered to fight in Italy while 120,000 of his fellow Japanese-American U.S. citizens were locked up in Western internment camps. He lost an arm in the course of his medal-winning service. In a poignant passage, he tells of a friendly nurse who taught him how to light a cigarette with one hand — setting him on the road to self-reliance.
One thing that comes across strongly here is that, whatever the war, supporting the troops has little to do with supporting government policy.
“That’s hugely important to me,” Lang said. “I can’t remember in my lifetime our society being as fractured as it is — including Vietnam, because I think the fissures are much deeper now. It’s very troubling. There’s got to be dialogue. There’s got to be common ground. We’ve got to find places where we can all share the same American turf. I wanted to do something where we could all find our own America here.”
A traveling show
After its Washington run, Lang plans to take “Beyond Glory” around the country, much as Hal Holbrook has done with his Mark Twain shows for decades.
“If I play this show for the next 25 years,” said Lang, 51, “I’ll still be 15 years younger than most of the guys I play.”
Asked if the men’s deeply emotional stories still got to him as they had at first reading, he replied: “They will always get to me. If they’re not going to get to me, I should stop doing it.”
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