As of Saturday, the world knows definitively how President Donald Trump reacts under real fire. With blood dripping down his face and a tattered ear, the former and maybe future president raised his defiant fist into the air and shouted, “Fight! Fight! Fight!”
The moment, memorialized in awe-inspiring photos, reminds me of a scene from 2007, when Marine Corps Gunnery Sgt. Mitchell Burghardt was called to the scene of a bombing that had killed four U.S. troops. As he tried to disarm another explosive device, a watching enemy fighter detonated it, blowing Burghardt high into the air before depositing him into the dirt. As he lay there, all he could think of was that he did not want to wind up like his father, who was a three-Purple Heart Vietnam veteran who was paralyzed from the waist down. He described what happened next:
They started to cut away my pants and I felt a real sharp pain and blood trickling down. Then I wiggled my toes and I thought, ‘Good, I’m in business.’ ‘As a stretcher was brought over, adrenaline and anger kicked in. ‘I decided to walk to the helicopter. I wasn’t going to let my team-mates see me being carried away on a stretcher.’ He stood and gave the insurgents who had blown him up a one-fingered salute. ‘I flipped them one. It was like, ‘OK, I lost that round, but I’ll be back next week’.
Now there is a man not to be messed with.
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