When my grandparents died, they left me a few things, including a book called the Great American Bathroom Book III. I mention this because the story I'm relating here comes from that book on page 490.
When an American soldier in France won the Croix de Guerre (France's highest military honor), he refused to wear it. When asked why he did not wear it proudly as he should, the soldier explained, "I was no good back home. I let my sister and my widowed mother support me. I was a deadbeat. And now they have given me the Croix de Gueerre for something I did at the front. I am not going to put it on. I am going to go back home first. I am going to win out there. I am going to show my mother that I can make good at hoome. Then I will put on the Croix de Guerre."
He is not the first to have discovered that being heroic in a crisis is sometimes even easier than being useful at home.
- Harry Emerson Fosdick
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