America traditionally bestows the Medal of Honor on those who display uncommon valor on the battlefield. But sometimes heroism doesn’t use a weapon.
Which is why President Obama this week recognized the Rev. Emil Kapaun, a US Army chaplain who gave his life for his fellow prisoners in a Korean POW camp, with a Medal of Honor.
Kapaun’s is a story of self-sacrifice so noble that surviving vets still speak of him with awe — and the Vatican is considering making him a saint.
At the moment of capture, as one soldier lay helpless with a broken ankle at the point of a gun, Father Kapaun pushed the rifle aside and lifted the wounded American up, carrying him 80 miles through what became known as the Tiger Death March.
In captivity, he gave away his own rations and stole grain to feed others, picked lice off men too weak to do so themselves, traded his watch for a blanket — which he cut up to make socks for those whose feet were freezing — and defied his Communist captors by saying Mass on Easter. Even before capture, he’d been awarded a Bronze Star for running through enemy fire to drag wounded soldiers to safety. He succumbed to the effects of starvation and neglect in 1951 at age 35.
At the moment of their liberation, Father Kapaun’s fellow POWs carried a hand-carved wooden crucifix in his honor. They also began a campaign for this Medal of Honor, but his story was forgotten until some in Congress recently began pressing his case.
The president put it well at Thursday’s ceremony. Fr. Kapaun was “an American soldier who didn’t fire a gun” yet carried “the mightiest weapon of all: the love for his brothers so powerful that he was willing to die so that they might live.”