News just reached us of the death of Glenn M. Shumway. He was one of the most remarkable figures we’d ever encountered. A conscientious objector — a religious Christian — he’d refused to carry a weapon in combat in Vietnam. The Army then made him a medic. We’d heard about him in Tay Ninh province, where in 1970 we were covering combat for the GI daily, Pacific Stars and Stripes, and he was being talked about.

We sought him out and eventually found him. We didn’t come to know him well. He did, though, in a soft-spoken interview, recount for us the story of how, when he was dropped into combat, he’d refused to take the M-16, though he’d been offered one. He was lowered unarmed from a helicopter to the jungle floor to link up with the crew of another chopper that had been downed by enemy fire.

Twenty years old at the time, he was lying alone on the jungle floor, 90 miles northwest of Saigon, surrounded by the enemy. Yet “not for a second,” Shumway told us, did he wish that he had a weapon. “Ants,” he told us, “were crawling over his hands, sweat was pouring off his brow and fogging his glasses, a helicopter was burning less than 10 yards away. Bamboo on fire was ‘going pop, pop, pop.’”

What was the Baptist medic doing? He was “praying that Jesus Christ’s will be done.” Shumway had gone out with a medevac unit from the 1st Air Cavalry Division on a “Mayday” call to rescue survivors of the downed chopper. His own helicopter had used a hoist to lower him into the jungle. It was ready to hoist him out, when the aircraft started taking enemy fire. Shumway heard the enemy fire from the ground. 

“Then came one of those split-second decisions,” he said. “You really can’t attribute it to goodness or anything,” he told us. He had already patched up the GIs from the downed helicopter, and helped them get lifted out. He either had to run for the hoist, delaying the escape of his own helicopter hovering overhead, or to wave his own ship away. He waved them out. Then he lay on the jungle floor, out of sight of the enemy, while his aircraft went to Landing Zone Loan to refuel.

Then it returned to the drama on the ground. This time it was accompanied by Cobra gunships. Shumway knew they were coming from his survival radio, but they couldn’t hear him. “I was glad I knew what was coming off when the Cobras came in to prepare the area,” he told us. It was his own medevac ship that hoisted him out to tell the tale, as we recounted in the story in Stripes. Shumway told us that there was never a moment’s hesitation in his religious scruples.

Shumway had, he said, already made “an extremely large decision” before coming into the Army, to put his faith in what he saw as the biblical injunction to turn the other cheek. “All it takes is faith,” Shumway said. “All it takes — wow.” The story, from which much of this editorial is drawn, was run out in Pacific Stars and Stripes under the headline: “Trapped Pacifist GI  Sticks to His ‘Guns.’”

Forty or so years or so after that, in remarks to a parley on religious freedom, we recounted the story of how the Army made an accommodation for the religious enlisted man in the middle of the war. To prepare the remarks we spent the better part of a day trying to track Shumway down. We finally found him with a phone call to Florida, where he worked for the Miami Beach fire department as a paramedic.

The news of Shumway’s passing — he was 75 — reached us in a wire from his daughter, Rebecca. She had tried to find a copy of “Trapped Pacifist GI Sticks to His ‘Guns.’” She said that she intends to frame it for his widow and the next generations. It’s a reminder of the fidelity our GIs maintained to one another and of their countless acts of heroism that need to be remembered as new wars gather. May his memory be for blessing.

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This editorial has been updated from the bulldog edition for clarity and added details.