With his square jaw, neat faded Afro and brooding gaze, he looks like a vintage Ebony magazine model. He’s wearing aviator shades, and his wiry, 5-foot-10, 150-pound frame is tightly wrapped by a brown leather jacket. Daisy Brown Thorneīrown stands on a Tennessee hillside on a radiant winter day a year before his deployment to North Korea. He was such a brilliant student that one of his instructors let him teach when she was busy with other work. What was it about Brown that inspired such loyalty?īrown's 1944 high school graduation photo. One was willing to crash-land onto a mountain for him, another defended him on a different proving ground. Two of Brown’s biggest allies were white men who had little or no exposure to black people. It’s also about the importance of being able to see yourself in someone who doesn’t look like you. “If they could do it in their time, why can’t we do it in 2016?”īrown’s story, though, goes deeper than racial inspiration. “They were men ahead of their time,” Makos says. The book’s author, Adam Makos, says Brown and Hudner were able to forge a friendship across racial lines in an America that was even more divided by race than today. A book entitled “Devotion” examines the unlikely relationship between Brown and Hudner, one the product of an affluent New England family, the other the son in a family of sharecroppers who lived in a shack with no electricity or central heating. And while many know of the Tuskegee Airmen, who broke the color barrier among Army aviators in World War II, few know of Brown, who broke the same barrier in the Navy – alone. Brown went from steering a mule in a cotton field to steering seven-ton fighter planes onto aircraft carriers. But he was more than a pilot, he was a racial pioneer: the U.S. Two American presidents – Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan – would publicly praise both.īrown’s name eventually faded from history, a forgotten man from a forgotten war. A Navy ship would be christened in honor of one man, a statue erected in honor of the other. military’s highest decoration, the Medal of Honor, the other the Distinguished Flying Cross. What would happen over the next 45 minutes would turn Brown and Hudner into unconventional heroes – honored as much for what they did off the battlefield as on it. Jesse Leory Brown in an F8F Bearcat a year before deploying to Korea. “I’m going in,” he said over the radio as his plane dived toward Brown’s smoking Corsair. Tom Hudner, who watched the scene unfold from above, decided to do something risky: He was going to crash land into the same mountain clearing to rescue Brown. The sun was setting, and swarms of Chinese troops were likely headed his way. He tried to climb out of the cockpit but he was pinned inside – and flames were starting to rise from the fuselage. The impact of the landing raised a cloud of snow and crumpled his Corsair. He spotted a small mountain clearing and took his plane in. “Losing power,” Brown calmly radioed to his squadron. He scanned the icy slopes for a place to crash land because he was too low to bail out. The Marines appeared so doomed that newspapers back home dubbed them the “Lost Legion.”īrown had been flying low over a remote hillside looking for targets when ground fire ruptured his fuel line. Marine division encircled by 100,000 Chinese troops at the Chosin Reservoir. Now he was in another conflict, part of a six-man squadron dispatched to defend a U.S. For years, his own people had tried to destroy him. It was the beginning of the Korean War, but Brown was already battle-tested. “Jesse, something’s wrong,” one of the men in his squadron radioed him. Jesse Leroy Brown was hurtling over the North Korean countryside in his Corsair fighter 17 miles behind enemy lines when he discovered that he was in trouble.
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