A FEW FINAL WORDS

          What makes a hero?
          This is a question that has confronted authors, poets, and the military for centuries. Courage has
        been analysed, and divided into categories. There is fortitude, physical courage, moral courage, heroism--the labels abound, and the categories are indistinct, and blend into each other like watercolors.
          Frequently, through the media, we are made aware of some brilliant heroic act--a firefighter pulls
        children from a burning building, a pilot guides his crashing airplane away from an airshow audience, a soldier boldly faces death to carry out a mission or save the lives of others.
          Heroes come from all walks of life. Frequently they go undecorated, and even unnoticed. Less
        spectacular acts of heroism--the father who works two jobs to make a better life for his children, a passerby who assists at an auto accident and then fades away when all is well, even the child who scoops a drowning butterfly from a puddle to dry and fly again--are around us every day.
          When I first contacted Tom Barker, I was simply praising his World War II memoirs, which I had
        read at Bob Cull's World War 2 website, and asking if he could answer a couple of questions for me. It was the sort of letter that Tom could have responded to formally, answering the questions briefly and then having no further contact.
          Instead, he replied with a warm letter laced with humor, where he answered my questions and
        offered further assistance in any way he could. And he has, corresponding daily, answering my voluminous questions, getting to know me and my family and acquainting us with his. Tom has a wife and five grown children, as well as grandchildren, but his motto seems to be "room for one more". He has written what he calls "yarns" to help me with my WWII research, even when they are about subjects I am sure he finds painful to recall. He has also sent photographs, his own paintings, and a lot of concern and love over the telephone lines, from his computer to ours.
          To me, it is this "going the extra" mile that makes the everyday hero. Tom enlisted in the military as a
        very young man, and probably didn't expect the life that it led him into. He might have whined and felt sorry for himself, but instead he went ahead in businesslike manner, and set about to do the job well and honorably. After becoming a prisoner of war, he faced the rigors and deprivations of a number of German stalags with fortitude, humor and grace. He used his mechanical and artistic abilities to make items for his fellow prisoners, and he risked his life to sabotage enemy trains. Even now, he is matter of fact and staunch in his references to the nightmares and wakefulness that are the legacy of many soldiers, and he never lets the soldiers who did not have the privilege of returning home go forgotten.
          As you read through Tom's stories, you will see many examples of his quiet heroism--his humor, his
        inventiveness, his sensitivity, and most of all, his compassion for others. He is the very young soldier who stopped under enemy fire to aid a comrade with a mortal wound. He is also the still young, but much more seasoned soldier and prisoner of war, who could not leave a grieving Russian POW crouching over his dead companion in the snow--so Tom gave him what he could, a packet of biscuits, which had to be a precious commodity to a prisoner of war who was also still very much a youth. And of course he risked punishment, or even death, for extending this comfort.
          That is how I see him, now that I've come to know him--as that young British soldier in a German
        stalag, standing in the snow, cold, gaunt, throwing a treasured packet of sweets to another prisoner whom he could comfort in no other way. Proud, honorable, upright, caring--a hero.