Word: valor
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Audie Murphy, who was one of only two men in the history of the nation to receive every decoration awarded for valor in combat. He entered World War II as a private, but emerged as a 1st Lieutenant, and was credited with killing, wounding, or capturing as many as 240 Germans throughout North Africa, Sicily, and Italy. He was persuaded to go to Hollywood, and starred in "To Hell and Back," the story of his own life and the only case of an actor portraying himself...
Director John Frankenheimer has exercised his film-making talents on such diverse subjects as The Manchurian Candidate, The Fixer and The Train. However the stories vary, Frankenheimer remains obsessed by the qualities of valor. Even his little-seen comedy, The Extraordinary Seaman, has a ghostly hero condemned to walk the decks of a rotting gunboat until he is able to execute a single act of military courage...
Still, there is more to valor than merely being first. For the Stoics, courage was every man's key to the province of the divine. From the Jewish defenders of Masada to the early Christian martyrs to the passive resisters Gandhi and Martin Luther King, the going was the goal-to be afraid was worse than death itself...
...unimportant to dwell on why the astronauts have taken their risk. Undoubtedly, glory has something to do with it. So does sheer ego, plus the simpler notions of patriotism and unwillingness to let the team down. What is important is that individual valor can be preserved in a collective age. Hemingway once defined courage as "grace under pressure." In their balloon-shaped, ungainly suits, the Apollo 11 astronauts have demonstrated that man, despite his murderous and chaotic past, can still achieve a state of grace...
...timeless. Kahn does not distrust the text. He simply looks into it with the sardonic eyes of a Brecht. The result is a play about war, heroism and patriotism colored in the mock-ironic hues of a generation that cannot believe in war, heroism and patriotism. In that light, valor may appear as cruelty and national honor as parochial vanity...