Following the Spirit That Guides : A Vietnam War hero’s courage is most evident in his willingness to go to jail for his convictions.

You’re as unlikely to have heard of Charlie Liteky as not to have heard of Forrest Gump. That’s unfortunate. Forrest made us feel warm and happy, but Charlie would disturb you and make you think. But if we Americans don’t start thinking one day soon, our warm and happy moments will keep on dwindling.

Like Forrest, Charlie stood in the Rose Garden while Lyndon Johnson, who desperately wanted to be President of all the people, hung the Medal of Honor around his neck. Charlie’s heroics far outdid Forrest’s. If Winston Groom, Forrest’s creator, was inspired by Charlie’s citation, as I suspect he was, he must have felt compelled to tone it down for the sake of credibility.

In December, 1967, a platoon of the 199th Light Infantry Brigade blundered into the base camp of a large North Vietnamese army unit. With the platoon was the brigade’s Catholic chaplain, Father Charles Liteky, a lean 6-footer who had spent his boyhood on military bases as the son of a noncommissioned officer and had turned down a football scholarship to Florida State to enter the Trinitarian Order.

Fifteen men were cut down at once as they pursued what they thought was a handful of local guerrillas into a grove. While the company commander radioed frantically for assistance, Charlie began crawling into the grove and dragging out the wounded even as the helicopters came in and blasted the grove with rockets. He kept this up throughout a bitter battle that lasted until nightfall and took the lives of 25 young Americans and left 80 wounded.

Charlie’s method was to roll over on his back, pull the wounded man on top of him, and then inch his way out, pushing with his legs. This was the way he saved more than 20 men that afternoon.

Deciding to go into the grove was just an “ordinary reaction,” Charlie said. The citation disagrees. “At one point,” it reads, “Chaplain Liteky moved to within 15 meters of an enemy machine gun.” Further on it tells us: “In an incredible display of valor and leadership, Chaplain Liteky began moving upright through heavy fire.” And when Charlie came upon a man entangled in dense underbrush: “Once more intense fire was directed at him, but Chaplain Liteky stood his ground and calmly broke the vines and carried the man to the landing zone for evacuation.”

Charlie’s only souvenir of that day 28 years ago is a piece of metal in his foot, a rocket fragment. His Medal of Honor is gone. Charlie laid it down in front of the Vietnam War Memorial in September, 1986, as a protest against U.S. aid to the Nicaraguan Contras and embarked upon a 49-day, water-only fast. Then, on Nov. 16, 1990, the first anniversary of the murder of six Jesuits by American-trained Salvadoran soldiers, Charlie and two companions entered the headquarters of Ft. Benning’s School of the Americas, alma mater of priest-killers and peasant-killers, and threw blood on the photos and glass display cases of its hall of fame--a crime for which he spent six months in jail.

Charlie’s turnabout from unthinking patriot to severe critic of the government did not come overnight. Unlike Forrest Gump, whose sentiments on Vietnam the script kept from us lest somebody take offense, Charlie had been forthright in his defense of the Vietnam War, speaking on campuses and serving a second combat tour. His gradual awareness that the Vietnam War had not merely been a mistake-- pace Robert McNamara--but a sin was part of an odyssey that took him away from the priesthood and caused him to see his church as ruled by timorous men who lack the vision as well as the courage to do anything that might remind somebody of Jesus Christ.

If Charlie is severe in his indictments, he is severe on himself. If he has turned his back on one sort of vocation, he has responded to another, one far more demanding. As for courage, it is one thing to go down into the valley of the shadow of death again and again in the course of a long afternoon. It is another to turn your back on the comfort and security and ordinary aspirations we all hold dear in order to be free to follow the spirit wherever it leads.

Forrest Gump’s guiding spirit gained him one success after another and an ever-increasing bank account. Charlie Liteky’s spirit has led him to prison and ignominy and may do so again.

There’s a biblical parallel, of course. There’s no problem telling the false prophets from the true. It’s the former who are successful. Jesus, with his usual felicity of expression, described them well: “Men clad in soft garments” who “are found in the houses of kings.”