By Your Towns
Steve Pauwels
August 08, 2008 12:13 pm An autumn day five years ago — certainly among the worst of Brian Hart's life. On that early morning, military personnel knocked on the Tyngsboro, Mass., resident's door to relay the shattering news that his son John had been killed in an Iraqi ambush. One week previously, the 20-year-old soldier had phoned his father, exasperatedly deploring the inadequacy of their body and vehicular armor; worrying it would cost him his life; pleading with Dad to do what he could to help. The young PFC's concerns proved grievously prophetic: John Hart was cut down Oct. 18, 2003. Brian Hart avows the loss of his boy left him in "total devastation" — but that's not all it did. Unable to shake the memory of his son's long-distance, life-and-death plaint for more effective protection, Hart, formerly a wireless communications and pharmaceutical executive, decided to do something to solve the problem: he became a defense contractor. The result was Black-I Robotics Inc., and its first major offering: the "LandShark," a small, dune-buggy-like robotic vehicle, designed to disable car bombs and roadside explosives in danger zones like Iraq and Afghanistan; designed to spare other U.S. military families the impossible heartache that has ravaged Brian Hart and his loved ones. One month ago, his firm landed its first contract with the Pentagon: three robots to be delivered sometime this year. Out of death, life; out of pain, healing; out of loss, advancement. It's nothing new here in the United States. It used that be that Americans were widely celebrated for their "can-do" spirit, their "get it done" responses to fractious obstacles and seemingly insuperable perplexities. Yankee resourcefulness and ingenuity became proverbial. Rising out of his grief to do something, Brain Hart carries on an honored, American tradition. Some readers might be seasoned enough to remember — perhaps participated in — our country's reaction to the Nazi/Fascist menace two generations ago: every part of society was drafted into action. Recall "Victory Gardens," rubber and scrap-metal drives, kitchen fat collection, and the organization of the Civil Air Patrol; not to mention an insufficiently prepared American industrial infrastructure precipitously fired up to meet wartime demands. Having accomplished the Herculean task of landing their forces at Omaha Beach on D-Day of June 1944, U.S. forces were stymied at every step by what natural phenomenon? French foliage — that is the notorious bocage that blanketed the Normandy coast, those mind-numbing mazes of stubborn hedgerows that harassed and impeded progress wherever our troops turned. What to do? A collection of Army officers, non-coms, and "dogfaces" put their heads together and came up with, among other contraptions, "the rhinoceros": a standard issue Sherman tank customized with "teeth." These cutting tools were fashioned from scrap metal culled from German roadblocks and welded, tusk-like, to the tank fronts. Gen. l Omar Bradley remarked, satisfied, that the rhino-tanks roared through the hedgerows "as though they were pasteboard, throwing the bushes and brush into the air." In one jaw-dropping 10-day stretch alone, more than 500 hedgerow-thwarting devices were churned out. By mid-summer of that year, a full 60 percent of the First Army's Shermans were rigged-up with the bocage-munching accessories. Early in the 1940s, facing the unthinkable prospect of a Nazi regime hot on the trail of atomic weapons' development, the U.S. government, prodded by Albert Einstein, mustered some of the truly Olympian minds of the era and, within roughly a mere five years, realized and successfully tested the first atomic bomb. The whole enterprise was called "The Manhattan Project" and, over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, its grim final product effectively wrapped up the war in August 1945 — victory, Allies. Ghastly measures, indeed, but Washington concluded this world-raging conflict demanded them. "It was not an academic question," asserted theoretical chemist and project participant Joseph Hirschfelder, "our friends and relatives were being killed and we, ourselves, were desperately afraid." A fully functioning nuclear weapon from scratch in 60 months? Diligent, determined Americans once again recognized a call to action, stepped up and met a need in what was the tactical-military equivalent of zero to 60 in five seconds. Then there was NASA's fabled Apollo program. Startled by successful Soviet forays into outer space, in the maiden years of the 1960s President John F. Kennedy rallied the nation to land a man on the moon by 1970. A gargantuan venture, dizzyingly high-priced, it was launched in a decade that would be bedeviled by the president's nationally-traumatizing assassination, along with that of his brother and civil rights' luminary Martin Luther King Jr., an increasingly incendiary Vietnam War, and violent race/political riots. JFK challenged "every scientist, every engineer, every serviceman, every technician, contractor, and civil servant [to give] his personal pledge that this nation will move forward ... in the exciting adventure of space." "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things," he insisted, "not because they are easy; but because they are hard." American astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped off Apollo 11's lunar module, the first man to place his foot on the moon, July 16, 1969 — five and one-half months shy of the president's deadline. Currently no shortage of concerns press, compelling a solution: terror threats, an energy crisis, a health care morass, among others. There surely are other Brian Harts among us today, as well — there always have been — holding the keys to resolve these matters; not simply lamenting the grim straits we face but responding nobly, even redemptively, to meet them. We'd better hope these souls are ready and willing to act — we'll likely be needing them sometime tomorrow. nnn Steve Pauwels is a resident of Londonderry and pastor of Christ The King church in Londonderry. ><p>
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