Devotion

There are moments in military history when a decision is made so quickly and with such instinctive devotion that it feels almost otherworldly, as if a crack opened in the ordinary fabric of events and revealed what human beings can be at their very best. In the frozen chaos of the Chosin Reservoir, on a December afternoon in 1950, an unassuming pilot from Massachusetts made one of those decisions. The United States Navy had seen courage before. The world had, too. Yet what Tom Hudner chose to do defied not only common sense but every hard edged rule of survival that experienced pilots learn to follow.