Cloud of Witnesses: George Charles Lang

By providence, George Charles Lang was named for the patron of soldiers in Flushing, New York, 1947, and soon his family moved to Hicksville out on Long Island where he began the battle that man­kind, for want of a larger vocabulary, calls life. In Tremendous Trifles, Chester­ton says that a baby’s acquaintance with the dragon is not taught by fairy­tales. It is intuitive of something that slithered in and shook Eden. “What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.”

George was seven years old when his father died, and as soon as he was able he helped to support his mother by working long days in a luncheon­ette. After high school he enlisted in the army at Brooklyn, laden with the benisons of his parish, and soon was in search-and-destroy missions along the Mekong River. In 1969, after six months’ duty as a specialist fourth class, he was made a squad leader in Company A, 4th Battalion, 47th In­fantry, 9th Infantry Division. His of­ficer forgot to put in his date for rest and recreation, and on the birthday of another George (Washington), he was leading men through the mud in the spit-shined new shoes he got for his leave. On his first foray he single- handedly destroyed two enemy bun­ker complexes with grenades and rifle fire, hurling the last of the grenades he had found in an enemy cache. As he jumped across a canal to within a few feet of the enemy, his troops suffered six casualties in an ensuing onslaught of rockets and automatic-weapon fire from a third bunker. One rocket sev­ered his spinal chord, but he continued to shout maneuvers in blinding pain. By the time he was evacuated—against his protests—he had secured the safe­ty of his squad. In all, his tour of duty in Vietnam was less than a year.

For 35 years, George was a para­plegic. Two years after that fiery day, in the name of Congress, President Nix­on awarded him the Medal of Honor. More sustained than his valor in Kien Hoa was the courage of his ensuing peace. Dryden said that peace itself is war in masquerade. In George’s mas­querade there were outward emolu­ments and honors, but the struggle of faith was interior, evidence of St. Ambrose’s commentary on Psalm 118 that “faith means battles.” In 1973 he married Jacqueline and reared a step­daughter. Modestly did he do book­keeping for a brother-in-law’s com­pany, which made strings for guitars, trying to fathom how he had been, to paraphrase his words, a hero who was not a hero, while painstakingly dictating much of a two-volume his­tory of Medal of Honor recipients. At Mass, he regularly received the Host on the tongue as he had as a boy, all the while aware of God’s heroes called saints who are an exceedingly great army. Shredded as he had been by en­emy fire, irony killed him in 2005 with cancer and not bullets or rockets.

A few months before, he ap­peared at a benefit dinner in natty for­mal dress with the light blue ribbon of the Congressional Medal, which gives me pause like nothing save the Blessed Sacrament. When I spoke with him of Rev. Vincent Capodanno, Maryknoll priest and Marine chaplain, who was awarded the Medal of Honor after dying in 1967 while giving last rites, George was so animated I thought he might rise from his wheelchair, so keen was he on efforts to promote Fa­ther Capodanno’s cause for sainthood. Flags filled the streets for George Lang’s funeral Mass. The Medal of Honor was displayed, and there was a medal of St. George. The last fu­neral he had watched was President Reagan’s, and he had been moved by a new hymn sung on that day:

To fallen soldiers let us sing,
Where no rockets fly nor bullets wing,
Our broken brothers let us bring
To the Mansions of the Lord.