‘My son died with honor.”
These words struck this writer like a bolt from the blue. Captured by a television news crew, they were spoken with quiet dignity by Johnny Spann to reporters at the front gate of his home in Winfield, Alabama, upon learning of the death of his son, Johnny Mike Spann, the first American to die on a foreign field of battle in the War on Islamic Terror. Mike, as he was known to his friends and family, was killed on November 25, 2001, during a combined al-Qaeda–Taliban uprising at a temporary prison in Qala-i Jangi, not far from the town of Mazar-e Sharif in Northern Afghanistan. He was 32 years old. He is survived by his wife, Shannon, and three young children.
The words of Johnny Spann were so striking because they immediately recalled an earlier heroic age, one that apparently had been subsumed by the
zeitgeist of our own cynical, self-absorbed, postmodern era. But the American spirit had never been extinguished. It reemerged instantaneously on September 11, embodied by the raw courage of the firemen, police, and emergency workers in New York City, the men and women on Flight 93 in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, the rescuers at the Pentagon in northern Virginia, and the thousands of Americans in all three locations who looked death in the eye. On display for the world to witness was the valor woven into the very core of a free people. It was this moral code that inspired Mike Spann to do his duty on a remote desert plain thousands of miles from home.
“THE WAY HE LIVED”
In Mike Spann’s gallantry resides a lesson for us to consider as we commemorate Memorial Day. While he died with honor, what is now incumbent upon us is to live with honor. By so doing, we will venerate his sacrifice, as well as the memory of countless men and women extending back to the Revolutionary War who paid the ultimate price for our freedom. How to live with honor is a path we must blaze each in our own personal way. Fortunately, wellsprings exist that we may draw upon for guidance. One of them is the example set by Mike Spann himself. As his wife, Shannon, poignantly recalled at his funeral in
Arlington Cemetery, “Mike is a hero not because of the way he died, but because of the way he lived. Mike was prepared to give his life in Afghanistan because he already gave his life to us everyday at home.” In the soul of this one warrior we can discern the meaning of Memorial Day.
Spann grew up in Winfield, Alabama. He graduated from Auburn University in 1992 and immediately entered the Marine Corps, rising to the rank of captain. He then joined the Central Intelligence Agency’s Special Activities Division, and departed for Southwest Asia in the days following September 11. Soon after arriving in Mazar-e Sharif, he and a colleague were sent to Qala-i Jangi to interrogate newly captured prisoners on the morning of November 25. What transpired on that fateful day is recounted in the gripping new book,
Jawbreaker: The Attack on Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, by Gary Berntsen, a former member of the CIA whose team spearheaded the initial wave of American forces into Afghanistan. According to Berntsen, what Mike Spann and his partner, “Dawson,” a member of the Jawbreaker unit, found at Qala-i Jangi “looked like something out of the Middle Ages: a massive fortress made of mud surrounded by two sets of thick walls topped with ramparts and turrets.” Hastily turned into a prison under the control of the Northern Alliance, “it was crammed with five hundred Taliban and al-Qaeda prisoners who’d been trucked in the night before following the fall of Kunduz.” Alas, some of them, as it would turn out, carried “concealed weapons and grenades.”
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