Three People Who Died In 2005 Who Merit Your Attention

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I'm shocked! The NYT magazine actually has a great section on 2005 about 27 individuals who died in 2005 who merit further attention. Of these worthy people, I selected three to share with everyone who just stuck out to me.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/25/magazine/25stockdale.html?pagewanted=print
December 25, 2005
James Stockdale | b. 1923
The Prisoner
By JONATHAN MAHLER
Cmdr. James Stockdale parachuted out of his nose-diving Skyhawk over the North Vietnamese jungle in September 1965, the war was still young. Little was known about the fate that awaited American prisoners of war. It didn't take Stockdale long to gain a clearer sense. After a few months in solitary confinement in Hoa Lo prison in Hanoi, he was introduced to "the ropes," a torture technique in which a prisoner was seated on the floor - legs extended, arms bound behind him - as a guard stood on his back and drove his face down until his nose was mashed into the brick floor between his legs. The North Vietnamese knew they were overmatched militarily, but they figured they could at least win the propaganda war by brutalizing American P.O.W.'s until they denounced their government and "confessed" that they had bombed schoolchildren and villagers.

For his part, Stockdale intended to return home with his honor intact. One afternoon, he was given a razor and led to the bathroom - a sure sign that he was being readied for a propaganda film. Instead of shaving, Stockdale gave himself a reverse Mohawk, tearing up his scalp in the process. More determined than ever now, his captors locked him in the interrogation room for a few minutes while they fetched a hat for him. Stockdale glanced around, looking for an appropriate weapon. He considered a rusty bucket and a windowpane before settling on a 50-pound stool, and proceeded to beat himself about the face. Then, realizing that his eyes were not yet swollen shut, he beat himself some more. By the time the guards had returned, blood was running down the front of his shirt. For the next several weeks, Stockdale kept himself unpresentable by surreptitiously bashing his face with his fists. The North Vietnamese never did manage to film him.

As Hoa Lo filled with American shootdowns - it would become known among prisoners as the Hanoi Hilton - Stockdale transformed a loose colony of destabilized P.O.W.'s into a tightly knit underground resistance movement with its own language (an alphabetical tap code) and laws. Stockdale was the highest-ranking Navy P.O.W., but his authority derived less from seniority than from that rare blend of virtues that enables a small minority of men to thrive in what the Prussian military philosopher Karl von Clausewitz called the province of danger.

Inside the interrogation room, the military's Code of Conduct, which presupposes adherence to the Geneva Conventions, was of little value. The torture was simply too intense to limit statements to name, rank, serial number and date of birth. So Stockdale created new rules designed both to protect America's war effort and to keep P.O.W.'s alive. Stockdale ordered his men to endure as much physical abuse as they could before acceding to any of their interrogators' demands - the key, in his view, to preserving a sense of dignity - and to always confess to fellow inmates everything they had been forced to divulge. To carry an unclean conscience was to risk descending into a spiral of guilt and shame that would make them only more vulnerable to themselves and their captors.

Desperate as he was to return to his wife and four boys in Southern California, Stockdale was so adept at living through privation and pain that he came to feel at home inside Hoa Lo. He recalled long-forgotten details from his childhood, calculated natural logarithms with a stick in the dust and pondered the physics of musical scales. As he saw it, he was still at war, only it wasn't the Navy that had prepared him for this sort of battle, it was two ancient Greek philosophers. From Aristotle, Stockdale had learned that free will can exist within a state of imprisonment. From Epictetus, the influential Stoic, he had learned about our ability to shape experience by perception: as months of solitary confinement in leg irons and brutal beatings turned to years, Stockdale would remind himself that "men are disturbed not by things but by the view that they take of them." Most of all, he became absorbed in his battles with his captors, whether that meant planting fake notes for guards to discover or gleefully "tapping" his tales of interrogation-room intransigence to his neighbors.

Not long after he was finally released in early 1973, Stockdale said he had no intention of becoming a professional ex-P.O.W., yet his 2,714 days in captivity powerfully shaped the rest of his life. Stockdale drifted professionally - not like the stereotypically disillusioned Vietnam vet, but in nevertheless unmistakable ways. He was given different peacetime commands, all of which felt like comedowns from his service in Vietnam, both as a commander and as an underground prison boss. "In those jobs under life-and-death pressure, what I said, what I did, what I thought, really had an effect on the state of affairs of my world," he would later reflect.

Stockdale retired from the Navy in 1979 to become president of the Citadel, a civilian military college in South Carolina, but quit a year later when the board blocked his efforts to rein in the school's out-of-control culture of hazing. ("When you've been tortured by professionals, you do not have to put up with amateurs," he told a friend, explaining his abrupt decision to resign.)

Then came Stockdale's ill-fated foray into politics. His friend Ross Perot had assured him that he would be only a placeholder until he could find a suitable running mate for the 1992 presidential election - a couple of weeks, Perot told him. Stockdale had spent longer blindfolded, naked on the floor, with an untreated broken leg in his cell in Vietnam. He figured he could get through this fine.

He didn't. After delivering the unforgettable opening line in the vice presidential debate - "Who am I? Why am I here?" - Stockdale was reduced to a national laughingstock. Even then there was a whiff of tragedy, a sense that he deserved better, but he disappeared from the public stage before much more could be said about him. He was last seen by many Americans in the person of Phil Hartman on "Saturday Night Live."

The former fighter pilot found solace in the world of ideas. He was inevitably pulled back to Hoa Lo, and to a better understanding of the qualities that enable certain men to stand up and turn their world around - "the rising of the few," as he called it. For guidance, Stockdale turned to the writings of other ex-prisoners: Viktor Frankl, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Stockdale gradually came to see heroism not as a matter of consistent good judgment but as a single act, or series of acts, performed in a particular context. And he came to see heroes not as people who had carried out their duty with distinction but as individuals who had, like himself, done something no reasonable person would ever have felt justified asking them to do.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/25/magazine/25korematsu.html?pagewanted=print
Fred Korematsu | b. 1919
He Said No to Internment
By MATT BAI
In February 1942, a little more than two months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which effectively decreed that West Coast residents of Japanese ancestry - whether American citizens or not - were now "enemy aliens." More than 100,000 Japanese-Americans reported to government staging areas, where they were processed and taken off to 10 internment camps. Fred Korematsu, the son of Japanese immigrants, was at the time a 23-year-old welder at Bay Area shipyards. His parents left their home and reported to a racetrack south of San Francisco, but Korematsu chose not to follow them. He stayed behind in Oakland with his Italian-American girlfriend and then fled, even having plastic surgery on his eyes to avoid recognition. In May 1942, he was arrested and branded a spy in the newspapers.

In search of a test case, Ernest Besig, then the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union for Northern California, went to see Korematsu in jail and asked if he would be willing to challenge the internment policy in court. Korematsu said he would. Besig posted $5,000 bail, but instead of freeing him, federal authorities sent him to the internment camp at Topaz, Utah. He and Besig sued the government, appealing their case all the way to the Supreme Court, which, in a 6-to-3 decision that stands as one of the most ignoble in its history, rejected his argument and upheld the government's right to intern its citizens.

After the war, Korematsu married, returned to the Bay Area and found work as a draftsman. He might have been celebrated in his community, the Rosa Parks of Japanese-American life; in fact, he was shunned. Even during his time in Topaz, other prisoners refused to talk to him. "Allof them turned their backs on me at that time because they thought I was a troublemaker," he later recalled. His ostracism didn't end with the war. The overwhelming majority of Japanese-Americans had reacted to the internment by acquiescing to the government's order, hoping to prove their loyalty as Americans. To them, Korematsu's opposition was treacherous to both his country and his community.

In the years after the war, details of the internment were lost behind a wall of repression. It was common for Japanese-American families not to talk about the experience, or to talk about it only obliquely. Korematsu, too, remained silent, but for different reasons. "He felt responsible for the internment in a sort of backhanded way, because his case had been lost in the Supreme Court," Peter Irons, a legal historian, recalled in a PBS documentary. Korematsu's own daughter has said she didn't learn of his wartime role until she was a junior in high school.

Korematsu might have faded into obscurity had it not been for Irons, who in 1981 asked the Justice Department for the original documents in the Korematsu case. Irons found a memo in which a government lawyer had accused the solicitor general of lying to the Supreme Court about the danger posed by Japanese-Americans. Irons tracked down Korematsu and asked if he would be willing, once again, to go to court.

Perhaps Korematsu had been waiting all those years for a chance to clear his name. Or maybe he saw, in Irons's entreaty, an opportunity to vindicate himself with other Japanese-Americans. Whatever his thinking, not only did Korematsu agree to return to court but he also became an ardent public critic of the internment.

When government lawyers offered Korematsu a pardon, he refused. "As long as my record stands in federal court," Korematsu, then 64, said in an emotional courtroom oration, "any American citizen can be held in prison or concentration camps without a trial or a hearing." The judge agreed, ruling from the bench that Korematsu had been innocent. Just like that, the legality of the internment was struck down forever.

In the last decade of his life, Korematsu became, for some Americans, a symbol of principled resistance. President Clinton awarded Korematsu the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998. Six years later, outraged by the prolonged detention of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Korematsu filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court, warning that the mistakes of the internment were being repeated. Still, Korematsu's place among contemporaries in his own community remained obscured by lingering resentments and a reluctance to revisit the past. When he died from a respiratory illness in March, not a single public building or landmark bore his name. It wasn't until last month that officials in Davis, Calif., dedicated the Fred Korematsu Elementary School. It was an especially fitting tribute for Korematsu, whose legacy rested with a generation of Japanese-Americans who were beginning to remember, at long last, what their parents had labored to forget.

 

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and the third...

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/25/magazine/25celestine.html?pagewanted=print
Lawrence Celestine | b. 1971
What the Hurricane Wrought
By RANDALL PATERSON
When it became clear that the hurricane was coming, there was no question that Lawrence Celestine would have to face it. But first, he had his family to worry about. Early Saturday morning, Aug. 27, Celestine called his wife, Andrea, from work and told her to get up, because this "looks like it's going to be pretty bad."

He and Andrea had two young children, a 5-year-old son and 9-year-old daughter, and only two months before, they bought their first house, a "perfect" little ranch on the banks of Lake Pontchartrain. Celestine, who was 33 years old, considered it a "sanctuary," Andrea told me this fall. He shopped for groceries, cooked the meals and had changed his schedule so he could help the kids with their homework. Andrea remembers his "big, beautiful legs" and "beautiful brown eyes with long lashes that hit against his glasses." "Our protector," she called him, but Celestine, who collected superhero comic books, also longed to be "where the action is." For eight years, he had been a New Orleans cop, a "90 miles an hour," "first on the scene" sort, according to his captain, Bob Bardy. Andrea recalls that he "absolutely loved" his work. "That job was his calling. That was him."

Andrea packed for herself and the children. Celestine showed up to hug them before they left. "You all be safe," he said, but he was worried because they didn't know where they were going.

He and other officers of District 7 were told to report to the sixth floor of one of the few multistory buildings in the area, Methodist Hospital. It was full when he arrived on Sunday, Larry Graham, Methodist's C.E.O. told me. Methodist's patients had been joined by others from the intensive-care unit of a hospital nearby.

Other than his partner, Larenzo Carter, Celestine didn't have many close friends on the force. He had "that attitude that you get from being confident about your work," Captain Bardy said. He and Carter stayed up talking, and at around 2 a.m., the wind began to pick up and water started streaming in under the balcony door. They barely slept. By 7, everyone was awake, Carter remembers, because the windows began exploding and pieces of the roof were blowing off.

The hurricane spun onto land on Monday morning just to the east of them, 145-mile-an-hour winds pushing enormous waves up from the Gulf of Mexico, the force coming round to push waves down from Lake Pontchartrain. "I OK" is the feeble text message Celestine sent his wife that afternoon. Camped on the floor of a Baton Rouge school, Andrea said she thought, Oh, thank God, and was sure the worst was over. But then, for several days, she heard nothing. As the silence went on, she became convinced that something was "definitely wrong with him, or something is wrong with the situation he's in."

As the hurricane passed, the officers inside the hospital also believed the worst to be over and that they would soon be able, as Carter said, to "get back to our lives." No one was thinking that the levees would break. The noise and rain diminished, but the water kept rising. The people inside watched it wash over their cars and into the hospital. "It just kept coming," Graham said. When the rain cleared Monday afternoon, the police found themselves in the middle of a vast, placid lake - the radio system out, the first floor submerged, the lights on only because of a generator. Gradually, everyone became aware that they were trapped.

That night, the generator went down, and the hospital was plunged into darkness. The medical staff soon had more than it could handle. Celestine, Carter and others began sitting with the dozen patients who had been on life support, squeezing rubber bags attached to masks that the patients were wearing, forcing air into their lungs.

The cops worked continuously, and when they weren't pumping air, they carried food and water to patients and waded back and forth outside, siphoning diesel fuel from a storage tank and hefting barrels up seven flights to the generator on the roof to try to get it going again. An alligator cruised the parking lot; snakes swam on the first floor. The hospital no longer had working plumbing, and temperatures inside rose to above 90 degrees. No one slept much. When they went to the roof, they could see fires in the distance and hear gunshots.

The generator was down for 18 hours. Celestine - who would "do anything to help people," his wife said - must have begun waking to the limits of his power. The life-support patients began dying. "We had to make a decision about where to dispose of the bodies," Carter said. Without refrigeration, they zipped the dead into body bags and carried them away from everyone else, to a second-floor operating room. "It wasn't good" is about all Carter will say. "We had to make a decision to get away from there." (He and the Police Department cooperated only haltingly with this article.) Celestine had to leave the living patients where they lay.

From the cramped horror of the hospital, he and Carter waded out on Wednesday into chest-high, toxic water and bright, limitless ruin. Celestine saw that the city he had devoted his life to protecting had been transformed into a swamp of mangled trees, power lines drooping like vines and block after block of wrecked, half-submerged homes.

Through the backyards, he and Carter went searching for a boat and finally found one. There were desperate people everywhere. Huddled on the interstate ramps, shouting out from attics, waving from rooftops and second-floor balconies, they were all begging to be saved. Celestine and Carter - who were uncertain where their own families were or when they would eat next - began trying to rescue and survive simultaneously. "The job is ordinarily pressure and stress," Carter said, "but something like this is a whole new level." Patrolling the city in their commandeered boat, careful not to wreck it on the cars and telephone poles and steel trash cans just below the surface, they brought the people down from their perches and to a dry crossroads for transfer to buses out of town. Then they would go out again, sucking gas from any dry gas tank, eating whatever they could find.

On Thursday, Celestine finally called Andrea to ask if she was O.K.; she said she was. Meanwhile, the rescues went on and on. There seemed no end to it, no refuge from the need. Andrea would later be told that her husband had provided food for someone's mother. A woman would say she would be dead if Celestine hadn't pulled her into the boat. Another would thank Andrea for Celestine's having saved the lives of both her daughter and granddaughter. "Anything you needed him to do," Captain Bardy said, "he would get in there and make it happen."

By Friday, though, Celestine was losing strength. He and other officers had begun taking shelter at a Catholic nursing home, where at night Celestine heard talk only of destruction. Most officers had lost their homes; his new house was completely submerged. Celestine wasn't sleeping, Carter said. He was talking to everyone about his financial situation, but no one had time then for anyone else's emotional distress, Lt. Kim Williams explained. Captain Bardy finally told him to take a day off to go visit his family. With that news, and Carter beside him, Celestine trudged up to the fourth-floor balcony, where cellphone reception was best, to call his wife.

"Aw, baby, I miss you so much," he said to her. "Things are really bad here. Everything is destroyed. It's getting too bad for us to even stay here."

Andrea, overjoyed to hear from him, said they could start over, but Celestine seems to have had trouble believing. He wanted to see her.

"Don't leave," he said. "Stay where you are and wait for me. Now that I have a physical address for you all, I'm coming."

"How are you going to be able to come?" she asked.

"Don't worry," he said. "Just stay there and know that I'm coming."

Those words still ring in Andrea's ears, and she hasn't made sense of what happened next. They hung up, and Celestine handed the phone to Carter to make his own call. The view from the balcony was of broken trees and a school with pieces of the roof torn off. The hurricane had changed everything forever. Celestine may have intended to go to Andrea, but disconnected from her voice, perhaps he lost faith that he had anything more to offer her.

"Tell my family I love them," he called out, and Carter, turning, saw his partner sitting with two guns to his head. Carter leapt but was too late. Celestine pulled the triggers.