ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, September 27, 1996 TAG: 9609270051
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-10 EDITION: METRO
IS FRANK Hall an anachronism in an age of the antihero?
No. Many people would do - or think they would do, hope they would do - what Hall did as he drove down Interstate 581 in Roanoke Tuesday and saw a car wedged under the rear axle of a tractor-trailer. Both vehicles were on fire.
Hall could have minded his own business, and passed by. He could have stopped to walk around worriedly or just to watch, as others were doing. Instead, Hall pulled two teen-agers from their wrecked car just moments before the flames engulfed it.
A Marine staff sergeant, Hall told a reporter that he often had wondered, "when the rubber meets the road, how I would react." On Tuesday, he was a hero, in two respects.
First, he acted with courage and presence of mind, focusing on what urgently needed to be done, and risking his own safety to do it.
Surely his Marine training and conditioning helped, but neither is essential to act as he did. From time to time, inspirational stories are in the news - a mail carrier, a passing stranger, even a child, sets aside his or her fears and instincts for self-preservation and risks personal safety to save someone else.
Such heroes aren't trained for the job. But inside, they have that quality that Hall wondered if he'd find in himself, after all his training: heart.
A Marine might say "guts," but that doesn't quite cover it. Thrill-seekers eager to put themselves in dangerous situations can be said to have "guts." Bungee-jumpers have "guts."
Heroes put themselves at risk, when called upon, not for adventure but to help others, without benefit of safety features, with no assurance of what the outcome will be. They are their brothers' keepers.
In tapping that capacity for selfless valor, Hall became a hero in a second sense: He became a person to whom we can look as a model.
Police and firefighters had not yet arrived at the accident scene when the Marine happened upon it. Had Hall left the job to those who get paid to do it, a common rationale for those who don't want to get involved, two young people might well be dead.
We join those grateful people in saluting him.
LENGTH: Short : 45 linesby CNB