Honoring Heroes

09/01/2026

On the twenty-first of August in 2015, a high-speed Thalys train was carrying five hundred and fifty-four passengers from Amsterdam toward Paris when a man emerged from a bathroom shirtless and carrying an assault rifle, a pistol, a box cutter, and two hundred and seventy rounds of ammunition. The train was sealed and moving at nearly two hundred miles an hour. There was nowhere for anyone to go. A French passenger lunged for the rifle and was shot through the neck. Then a twenty-three-year-old American named Spencer Stone, half asleep in his seat a moment earlier, stood up and ran the length of the aisle straight at the gunman.

Stone was on vacation, but he was not a random tourist. He was a United States Air Force airman, trained as a medic, backpacking through Europe with his two closest childhood friends from Sacramento — Alek Skarlatos, an Oregon Army National Guardsman recently returned from a deployment in Afghanistan, and Anthony Sadler, a college student. The three had known each other since boyhood. None of them had any plan for what was about to happen.

The sequence was fast. A French passenger had tried first to tackle the gunman and been knocked down. Then Mark Moogalian, a fifty-one-year-old American-born French professor, wrested the rifle away — and as he turned to move his wife to safety, the attacker drew the pistol and shot him in the back, the bullet passing through his lung and out his neck. Moogalian went down and played dead.

That was the moment Stone got up. Without a word, he ran at the gunman. Skarlatos was right behind him. Sadler followed. So did Chris Norman, a sixty-two-year-old British businessman who was a complete stranger to all of them and owed them nothing. Every reflex the human body has in the presence of mortal danger pushes the other way. All four men went toward it.

Stone reached the attacker first, got him in a chokehold, and dragged him down. The next ninety seconds were a violent, close-quarters struggle on the floor of the aisle. The attacker pulled the box cutter and slashed at Stone — opening a deep gash across his neck, nearly severing his thumb. Stone did not let go. The four men held the gunman down, choked him unconscious, and bound him before he could reach the hundreds of people who had nowhere to run.

Then Stone, bleeding heavily, did the second thing.

A few feet away, Moogalian — the only person on the train who had actually been shot — was on the floor with his wife screaming beside him. Stone crawled to him. With one hand pressed to his own neck wound and the other working on Moogalian's, the trained medic kept the wounded man breathing and conscious until the train made an emergency stop and paramedics arrived. Surgeons later said Stone's own neck wound had come within millimeters of being fatal.

Both men lived. When Stone came out of surgery, his first question was not about his thumb or his neck. He asked whether anyone else had been hurt. They told him: no one had been killed.

Three days later, French President François Hollande awarded Stone, Skarlatos, Sadler, and Norman the Légion d'honneur, France's highest decoration. President Obama received them at the White House. Stone deflected the tributes with the same line every time: he just did what anyone would do.

That line is the one part of the story that isn't quite right — and it's worth correcting, because the correction is the point.

The research on how people behave in sudden violence is unambiguous: most freeze, flee, or shelter. Running unarmed at a man with a rifle is not what anyone would do. It is what almost no one does. The training Stone and Skarlatos had explains their competence — the threat assessment, the close-quarters grip, the medical work on the floor. It does not explain the decision to charge. That was courage, and courage is not standard issue.

But the cleanest way to see what Stone did is this: the man who ended the attack was also the man who repaired its only casualty. He stopped the killer, and then — bleeding from a wound that nearly killed him — he kept the one person who had been shot alive. The zero on the death toll runs through a single human being doing two jobs in succession on the floor of a train moving two hundred miles an hour.

Five hundred and fifty-four people went home that evening. Most of them never had to learn what the alternative looked like.

That was the gift. They got to not know.

08/31/2026

In 1943, an American pilot fell out of the sky and into one of the most dangerous jungles on Earth. He was alone, hunted, and starving.
He would spend the next thirty years trying to repay the strangers who saved his life...

His name was Fred Hargesheimer, and he was twenty-seven years old when his photo-reconnaissance plane, hit by a Japanese fighter, went down over the island of New Britain, in the Pacific, in the summer of 1943.

He parachuted into the rainforest of Japanese-occupied territory and found himself utterly alone. For about a month, Fred wandered the jungle, starving and half-delirious, surviving on roots and stream water, moving carefully to avoid the enemy patrols hunting the island. He was, by any reasonable measure, a dead man walking.

And then, one day, voices came out of the trees.

Fred was so far gone that he assumed it was the end — that the Japanese had finally found him. Instead, the people who stepped out of the jungle were villagers of the Nakanai. They looked at this ruined, skeletal stranger, and they did not turn away. They gathered him up and carried him back to their village.

And then they did something extraordinary. They hid him.

They knew exactly what it would cost them if they were caught. The occupying forces offered rewards for captured Allied airmen and executed anyone who helped them. Sheltering Fred put every man, woman, and child in that village in mortal danger. They did it anyway.

He was so sick — wracked with malaria and dysentery — that he could barely swallow. His body was shutting down, rejecting solid food. And it was then that a young nursing mother named Ida stepped in and did something Fred would remember, with wonder, for the rest of his life. She fed him from her own breast — her mother's milk the only thing his failing body could keep down — nursing this grown, dying stranger back from the edge, even as she nursed her own baby. As Fred himself would later put it, hers "was the only food my desperately ill body would accept."

The whole village kept him alive and kept him hidden. Whenever enemy patrols drew near, the people had ways of signaling, giving Fred precious seconds to vanish into the bush. The children, who couldn't quite wrap their mouths around "Freddie," took to calling him "Mastah Preddi" — Master Freddie. For roughly seven months, an entire village risked annihilation to protect one downed American they had owed nothing to at all.

Finally, in early 1944, Australian scouts reached the village and got word out. On a dark night, Fred slipped down to the water and paddled out in a canoe to a waiting American submarine, as the villagers watched him go from the shore.

He survived the war. He went home to Minnesota, married, raised a family, and built an ordinary, comfortable American life. But he could not forget them — not the village, not the children, and above all not Ida. For sixteen years, one question gnawed at him and would not let go: how could he ever possibly repay a debt like that?

Finally, in 1960, he went back.

When Fred returned to that village, the people who had saved him — many of them still there — lined up to welcome him home, celebrating the return of their "Mastah Preddi." Fred stepped onto the shore and wept. He found Ida again. And he met the healthy, grown son she had been nursing at her breast during the very days she was keeping him alive.

Seeing the village again, Fred knew that a thank-you would never be enough. He learned that what the community needed most was a school. So this middle-aged Minnesota businessman went home and started knocking on doors — raising money through church groups and small donations, dollar by dollar. In 1963, he returned to New Britain and helped build the village its first real school. It came to be called the Airmen's Memorial School — though everyone knew it, fittingly, as "the school that fell from the sky."

And Fred still wasn't finished. He and his wife, Dorothy, eventually pulled up their lives in America and moved to the village for four years — teaching children at the foot of a volcano, some twelve thousand miles from home. Over the decades that followed, Fred went back again and again, helping build more schools, a library, and a medical clinic for the people who had once carried him out of the jungle.

In the year 2000, the Nakanai bestowed on Fred the highest honor they had. They made him a chief, giving him the title "Suara Auru" — Chief Warrior.

In 2006, at ninety years old, Fred made his final journey back to the island one last time, to the people and the place that had given him the rest of his life.

Fred Hargesheimer died in 2010, at the age of ninety-four. The schools and the clinic he built still serve that community today, generations of children learning to read because of a friendship forged in the worst circumstances imaginable. Whenever people asked him why he had spent so much of his life repaying a village he could so easily have left behind in the past, Fred always gave the same simple answer.

"These people were responsible for saving my life," he would say. "How could I ever repay it?"

He spent the rest of his life trying.

08/30/2026

🇺🇸 Another Great Day with the Willamette Valley Street Rods! 🚗

We had another fantastic time setting up at the Willamette Valley Street Rods' annual car show in Salem yesterday!

We met so many great and fun people and really enjoyed the opportunity to share the mission of Honoring Heroes and the work we're doing to support our Veteran community.

We're also proud to have the honor of selecting the “Veterans Choice” Award each year.

After plenty of looking, discussing, and admiring some incredible vehicles, our judges selected this fantastic Corvair as this year's Veterans Choice!

Congratulations to the owner, and thank you to everyone who stopped by to visit, support us, and learn more about Honoring Heroes.

08/30/2026

A true hero, both serving as a Marine and a HOF baseball player

Today, on his birthday, we remember Major League Baseball Hall of Famer and Marine Veteran, Ted Williams who was born on August 30, 1918, in San Diego, California.

After completing advanced flight training at NAS Pensacola, Williams received a commission as a 2nd Lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps on May 2, 1944. Williams would serve as a flight instructor for the F4U Corsair at Pearl Harbor for the remainder of World War II.

Williams would be called back to active duty during the Korean War where he would serve with VMF-311, Marine Aircraft Group 33, based in Pohang, Korea. It was in Korea that Captain Williams would serve as wingman for Major John Glenn on missions over Pyongyang. John Glenn has called Williams one of the best pilots he ever flew with.

Williams would play his entire baseball career with the Boston Red Sox along with two periods of active-duty service as a Marine Aviator in two different wars.

Ted Williams passed away on July 5, 2002, at the age of 83.

Semper Fi, Devil Dog! 🦅🌎⚓

Korean War Memorial Korean War Veterans Memorial Foundation National Museum of World War II Aviation Friends of the National World War II Memorial Pearl Harbor Aviation Museum National Naval Aviation Museum Marine Corps Aviation Association

08/27/2026

FYI. Honoring Heroes will have a table at this event. We'll be handing out hygiene kits and more to unhoused Vets

The Salem Veterans Stand Down on Sept. 2 will connect veterans with free health care, benefits help, employment resources and other services.

08/27/2026

What kind of depraved, POS would do such a thing?

The markers are made of bronze, and police believe that's likely the reason they were stolen. Anyone with information is asked to call Hopkinsville Public Works at 270-890-0600.

08/27/2026

RIP Marine

Roy Drinkard was a model citizen: a World War II vet, Marine, businessman, philanthropist, donor, trustee, and participant in all things local. https://trib.al/7pupBQX

08/27/2026

We will be there

08/26/2026

Today, America lost an icon. RIP Dolly, you’ll never be forgotten.