i feel it in my feet

Then the word came from below: the drill was through! Workers at Plan B were slow to grasp that the mission had been completed. Hart Joked, “I thought it was my heart exploding.” Golborne and Sougarret began hugging. Then a champagne cork popped. A truck horn wailed. And finally the Plan B platform was filled with hugging and jumping helmeted workers. The men embraced and locked arms around each other’s shoulders. They danced in circles. Throughout the valley, a cacophony of horns, bells and yells filled the air. After two months, the rescue tunnel had reached the men.

Hart immediately began to pack up. His job was done. Now it was time to let the Chileans take over. Wandering through Camp hope in his oil-stained work overalls, he gazed in wonder at the hole he had drilled to the trapped miner’s remote refuge. Hart seemed baffled by his instant celebrity status. Women hugged him; reporters shoved and grappled to record his every word. Yet Hart was unable to explain his talent. With eyes that said, “You will never understand,” he looked at the reporters and stated, “I am a driller. If you are not a driller you can’t understand me. It is a vibration that comes up from the ground. I feel it in my feet, and then I know where the drill is.” Had Hart’s drill slipped off course by 20 inches, he would have missed the tunnel. He had thrown a bull’s-eye. Like a long-distance sniper, he was perfect.


33 Men: Inside the Miraculous Survival and Dramatic Rescue of the Chilean Miners by Jonathan Franklin. Putnam 2011. p.227

forced to make it ugly

Then commenced the long period which Max Jacob has called the Heroic Age of Cubism, and it was an heroic age. All ages are heroic, that is to say there are heroes in all ages who do things because they cannot do otherwise and neither they nor the others understand how and why these things happen. One does not ever understand, before they are completely created, what is happening and one does not at all understand what one has done until the moment when it is all done. Picasso said once that he who created a thing is forced to make it ugly. In the effort to create the intensity and the struggle to create this intensity, the result always produces a certain ugliness, those who follow can make of this thing a beautiful thing because they know what they are doing, the thing having already been invented, but the inventor because he does not know what he is going to invent inevitably the thing he makes must have its ugliness.


Picasso by Gertrude Stein. Courier Dover Publications. 1984. p.9

It must have felt surreal to the boys. Heroes? They had just returned from the protracted horrors of one of the deadliest and most intense battles in history, where heroes around them had acted with unimaginable bravery, suffered, and died almost by the minute. And here was an American populace driving itself into a frenzy over... what? Over an accidental photograph of a forgotten moment, an insignificant gesture in a month filled with significant ones.

As Ira [Hayes] would write, in wonderment, in a letter to his parents: "It's funny what a picture can do."


James Bradley (c. February, 1954-) is an American author, specializing in historical nonfiction chronicling the Pacific theatre of World War II. Flags of Our Fathers by James Bradley with Ron Powers. May 2000. p. 275

We were like a machine. We didn't have anyone who leaped up and charged a machine-gun. We knocked it out or made it withdraw by maneuver and teamwork or mortar fire. We were smart; there weren't many flashy heroics. We had learned that heroics was the way to get killed without getting the job done, and getting the job done was more important.


Carwood Lipton. Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne - From Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest, by Stephen E. Ambrose p.79, 80 - Lipton, describing the efforts of Easy Company on D-Day

In thinking back on the days of Easy Company, I'm treasuring my remark to a grandson who asked, 'Grandpa, were you a hero in the war?'

'No,' I answered, 'but I served in a company of heroes.'


Sgt. Mike Ranney. Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne - From Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest, by Stephen E. Ambrose p.263