Of the Lost and the Fallen: Ritual and the Religious Power of the American Soldier

Abstract

Charles White Whittlesey committed suicide. Francis Gary Powers did not. Charles Whittlesey, commander of the celebrated “Lost Battalion,” recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor, highly regarded by all who knew him, slipped away from family and friends shortly before Thanksgiving 1921. He thought himself a “misfit by nature and by training” and, less than a day into a journey aboard a fruit ship bound for Havana, threw himself into the Atlantic. Gary Powers chose to carry a needle tipped with the deadly poison curare but held back from using it when he found himself and the U-2 he was piloting over the Soviet Union tumbling earthward. Sixty-eight thousand feet later, a fully alive Gary Powers was taken into custody by Soviet police. It was May Day 1960. After three months of imprisonment and interrogation, not to mention US diplomatic damage control, Powers stood trial in Moscow for espionage. He was convicted and sentenced to ten years in Vladimir Prison. The men at the center of these stories have little in common. Charles White Whittlesey was a bookish Manhattan attorney, educated at Williams and Harvard, and resolute in his bachelorhood. Francis Gary Powers was born in Burdine, Kentucky, lived most of his early life in the mining country of western Virginia, and attended Milligan College