Soccer Dad

Courage remembered

When Robert Dean Stethem was tortured, killed and finally dumped onto the tarmac by brutal hijackers from the terror group, Hezbollah, the Wall Street Journal commemorated him by framing its editorial in a black border.

Now, occasioned by the release from prison by German authorities of one of his killers, the Washington Post remembers Robert Dean Stethem movingly:

Afterward, a 16-year-old girl from Australia, Ruth Henderson, talked quietly with the sailor, seeking to comfort him. "He said how it may be better that he died," she testified later in a German court. "He believed that someone would die on the plane, someone from the Navy men [there were five other divers on the plane], and he said that because he was the only one who wasn't married, that he should be the one to die. He spoke with a clear mind. . . . He didn't believe that all of us could get out alive. He felt it was fair that he dies so that the rest of us could live." Mr. Stethem was killed not long afterward.

Stethem, of course, was killed. But the Post, without distracting from him, acknowledged two other heroes of that ordeal:

"Stethem was probably the bravest young man I have ever seen in my life," said John L. Testrake, captain of the hijacked TWA Flight 847. Mr. Testrake himself won praise for his coolness during the 17-day ordeal, in which the plane was directed back and forth across the Mediterranean a number of times. Another hero of the flight, one whose essential humanity and courage undoubtedly prevented additional bloodshed, was Ulrike Derickson, a flight attendant who tried to stop the abuse of Mr. Stethem and who intervened to prevent the killing of a second Navy diver. She sought to calm the hijackers when they became agitated and to protect the passengers in whatever ways she could.

Like Mr. Stethem, they are gone now. Mr. Testrake died in 1996 and Ms. Derickson just this year. In the season of life, names such as these should live.

Technorati Tags: Robert Dean Stethem, terror, Hezbollah.