Shines the Name Rodger Young: 

Discovering an American Hero in the Pages of a Robert Heinlein Novel

R. Andrew Newman

R. Andrew Newman is a writer whose work has appeared in Modern Age, Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity, and National Review.

Sometimes important dates slip by. That was the case this past summer. Sixty-one years ago, a young man from Ohio, Private Rodger Young, didn’t set out to be a hero, or earn a medal, but on a day in July of 1943, on an island in the South Pacific, he earned the distinction. It’s fitting, especially during a time of war, to wipe the dust from his name and remember.

In the decades to come, Americans who have forgotten or, more likely, never learned of the soldier-heroes whose blood nourished the tree of liberty and whose sacrifices ensured our survival, may come across one of those names the way I did: in the pages of Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers.

The main character, Johnny Rico, is a starship trooper aboard the Rodger Young. He’s a member, in Heinlein’s words, of

. . . the P.B.I., the Poor Bloody Infantry, the mudfoot who places his frail body between his loved home and war’s desolation, but is rarely appreciated.

At times the foot solider can be overlooked in the roar of fighter planes and exploding bombs, but boots on the ground were as vital in 1958 when Heinlein’s novel was published, and remain so today, as they were in World War II or more than two hundred years ago when a fledgling United States secured her independence.

Skip the movie of several years back based on Heinlein’s novel. Or treat it as a two-hour diversion, complete with servicemen and women in a co-ed shower scene. The later Heinlein, who became rather twisted sexually and culturally as he aged, or at least opened the curtain on that side of himself, would have thought the scene rather tame. Consider the championing of perversions such as group sex and so-called open marriage in his Stranger in a Strange Land, a novel that became an Age of Aquarius standard.

The earlier Heinlein work, however, is neither politically correct nor so fixated on sex, deviant or otherwise. Women do serve in combat in his novel, but only as pilots, not grunts on the ground, and they do so based not on any notion that men and women are interchangeable. Rather, Heinlein contended women have better reflexes and could better handle the Gs of space flight. And he appears to have recognized the realities of putting men and women together. Opportunities for them to fraternize in this future military are strictly controlled.

Spinning its wheels in the mud of irony, the movie makes light of what the novel takes seriously. The nobility and necessity of military service the movie cannot stomach, and instead paints this future Earth in the colors of a campy fascism. Starship Troopers the novel, however, unabashedly celebrates the military, especially the infantry, and explores the necessity of organized, applied violence. This civilization knows violence solves many things, and that not to study war anymore is to invite destruction. It’s a philosophical novel, as most of it focuses not on the battlefield, but on the military training, its effect on Rico, and the cohesiveness it builds among the men.

The novel’s most controversial point would have to be the restrictions on the franchise. Taxes are low, living standards are high, government is limited--and only those who have served in the military can exercise the right to vote and serve in political office. Something tells me John Kerry didn’t have Starship Troopers in mind exactly.

Troops from the Rodger Young know it’s time to be ferried from a planet’s surface when they hear the beacon sing, “To the everlasting glory of the infantry/Shines the name, shines the name of Rodger Young.”

Those lines come from an actual ballad written by Sgt. Frank Loesser, a songwriter turned soldier.

No, they’ve got no time for glory in the infantry,
No, they’ve got no use for praises loudly sung,

But in every soldier’s heart in all the Infantry  

Shines the name, shines the name of Rodger Young.

The ballad recalls July 31, 1943 on New Georgia in the Solomons when trapped in an

. . . ambush lay a company of riflemen—

Just grenades against machine guns in the gloom—

Caught in ambush till this one of twenty rifleman

Volunteered, volunteered to meet his doom . . .

It was he who drew the fire of the enemy

That a company of men might live to fight;

And before the deadly fire of the enemy

Stood the man, stood the man we hail tonight.

 

For Heinlein, the 25-year-old Ohioan demonstrated what was good and right about America. Several years before Starship Troopers, in 1952, he had praised Private Young in his contribution to This I Believe. “I believe in Rodger Young,” he said.

 

You and I are free today because of endless unnamed heroes from Valley Forge to the Yalu River. I believe in--I am proud to belong to--the United States. Despite its shortcomings from lynchings to bad faith in high places, our nation has had the most decent and kindly internal practices and foreign policies to be found anywhere in history.

Heinlein made sure readers of Starship Troopers knew why the troop transport had been named for Rodger Young. In an historical note, he recalled this young man of the 148th Infantry, 37th Infantry Division (the Buckeyes) and how, wounded in the first burst of machine gun fire, Private Young

. . . crawled toward the pillbox, was wounded a second time but continued to advance, firing his rifle as he did so. He closed on the pillbox, attacked and destroyed it with hand grenades, but in so doing he was wounded a third time and killed. His bold and gallant action in the face of overwhelming odds enabled his teammates to escape without loss; he was awarded the Medal of Honor.

Shines the name, shines the name of Rodger Young.     *

 

“A man who thinks of himself as belonging to a particular national group in America has not yet become an American.” --Woodrow Wilson