Every once in a while, you’ll meet someone and, on leaving him, think, “Whoa.” That’s the way I felt about Ivan Castro — a captain in the U.S. Special Forces. He was badly, badly wounded in Iraq. Blinded. And he insisted on staying in the Special Forces, being useful, setting an example: a positive example.
I met him at Fort Bragg in 2009. We published an article called “Captain Extraordinary.” That article is on the homepage today, as it is in a new book, Digging In: Further Collected Writings of Jay Nordlinger, and we are publishing an article from each of that book’s six chapters. This one is extracted from “People.”
Let me quote the final paragraph:
A visit with Ivan Castro will teach you, or remind you, not to complain. It will remind you what a free people owes its warriors. And it will remind you to be in awe of those who do the awe-inspiring.