The Lionheads Revisited

By Hugh Sidey

The Presidency

Private First Class Paul Compella's parents still live in Torrington, Conn., and when they go past the school gym named for their son who was killed in Kien Hoa province, Viet Nam, March 14, 1968, they are burdened each time with a prideful sorrow. Paul's bronze star was melted into the plaque underneath the press box. The parents think about the world. "This is not Viet Nam," says Carmine Compella. "You see the hardware the Russians put into Afghanistan? They are after that oil. We'd have a reason if we fought this war."

Colonel George Robertson, who commanded the Infantry Brigade of the Riverine Force on the Giao Thong the night of Compella's death, is retired at Sea Island, Ga., living gently off his pension and his wife's inheritance. His mind is free to pursue W.H. Auden and Thomas Love Peacock, but his soul, forged at West Point, still hears distant thunder. "Leadership is never good when it is self-conscious," he says. "The President should respond instinctively to events --but the instinct is really educated intellection, and it has to be harnessed to a natural appetite for decision."

Lieut. General George Simpson Lemming (ret.) ponders his proud military history in La Jolla, Calif. He commanded the 12th Infantry Division ("the Lionheads"), of which Robertson's Riverines were a part the night Compella died. The enemy body count for the operation was 158. Says Lemming: "The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan is a gift. The terrain would be very good, especially for armor. And there would not be any beatniks raising hell with Washington. Resupply would be difficult, but of course we could do it with the petroleum from Iran. Might as well take them over while we are at it and just say to the Russians, 'No monkey business, you understand.' "

Such is the range of sentiment these days of those who really fought the last U.S. war, or so it seems in the creative mind of Novelist Josiah Bunting. The Compellas, Robertson and Lemming are fictional characters from Bunting's superb story of that sad war, The Lionheads, written in 1971. Last week, on the campus of Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, where he is president, Bunting updated his characters and their concerns. In these odd times the novelist's eye may tell us more about our emotions than the purveyors of polls.

Bunting is an extraordinary man. He was a Marine who went to Virginia Military Institute, became first captain, then a Rhodes scholar, fought with the Mobile Riverine Force of the 9th Infantry Division in Viet Nam, and as a major taught at West Point. He left the Army with feelings of sympathetic frustration over watching good men fight a useless war in the wrong way. He became president of Briarcliff College, wrote another novel (The Advent of Frederick Giles), and moved to Hampden-Sydney in 1977. His time is spent now with his students, and with Brahms, Carlyle, and a strong spirit still to be savored among those Virginia hills, Stonewall Jackson.

"For the first time in years there exists in the world a power stronger than we are and deeply hostile to us," Bunting says. "But failure of our will, the failure to act quickly and decisively, is evidence of the values in our society. We have become a nation of spectators--football, basketball and now the world."

Bunting is not calling for a careless military adventure. He had that. His is a call for strength, for purpose, for meaning. Why not some kind of national service to bolster our military and give young people some sense of obligation to their country? Why not calculated boldness in dangerous times? Why not energy conservation and a rejuvenated military machine?

The American spirit is flaccid, Bunting says. But it still breathes. The Compellas, Robertson, Lemming and, yes. Bunting yearn to be stirred.

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