One Life

He was already fading from the textbooks, even when I was a boy. I wonder if history teachers make mention, anymore, of Nathan Hale.

He was a teacher himself – 20 years old and barely out of college – when a close friend and classmate wrote, urging Hale to deepen his involvement in the Rebels’ cause.

"Was I in your condition, I think the more extensive service would be my choice,” his friend wrote. “Our holy Religion, the honor of our God, a glorious country, & a happy constitution is what we have to defend."

Hale was persuaded. He signed on with the Continental Army, quickly rising to the rank of First Lieutenant. He felt he could do more. He joined America’s first intelligence service, Knowlton’s Rangers. In the early fall of 1776, with New York City all but overrun by the British, General Washington asked the Rangers for a volunteer to slip into Manhattan and learn the enemy’s intentions.

Hale was the only one who stepped forward.

Within three weeks, he was captured – betrayed by someone he’d known before the war. The British made short work of his trial, found him guilty, sentenced him to hang the next day.

During the long night, he asked for a Bible, then a clergyman. Both requests were denied. He asked for paper to write a farewell to his family. Both his letters were torn up in front of him the next morning.

Everyone present agreed that he met death with grace. “He was calm,” one British officer wrote, “and bore himself with gentle dignity.” Another spoke of his “great composure and resolution.”

It was his duty as a soldier, Hale told the handful of people standing by, to obey the orders of his commander. And the duty of everyone, he said, to be ready for death, whenever it might come.

“I only wish I had more than one life to give for my country,” he reportedly said, before they fit the noose over his head.

New York fell to the British, who held it for the next seven years. Hale’s body was never found.

A friend of mine who works with college students tells me a great many of them, these days, are wary of commitment. Don’t like the responsibility. “Suppose I commit myself,” they say, “and then can’t follow through?” To them, it’s not a lack of courage – just a fear of hypocrisy.

A dread of failure.

One wonders, too, what the generation of Tik Tok and Instagram would make of a young man – however brave – who never even managed to get his portrait painted.

He was exceedingly handsome, people said at the time. A gifted student, a remarkable athlete, a devout Christian. And a patriot. Still, he can’t seem much of a hero, now. A fellow who failed, both to register as an image, and to accomplish what he set out to do.

Nathan Hale would be 269 years old next week, if people actually lived that long. They don’t, of course, but even allowing for that, Hale died so very young. Now, even his fame is fading away.

Today, great men don’t live on long in the collective memory. Their statues are torn down, as often as not, for sins real and imagined. Somehow, though, certain ideas persist, survive, endure.

Which is why it’s not just the soldiers and sailors and airmen we remember this weekend. The expendable ones – a few still famous, but so many so long forgotten.

Memorial Day reminds us, too, of something young Nathan Hale seems to have understood, instinctively, standing under a gallows that far-off September morning.

The hard, bright, enduring truth that some people … some ideals … some allegiances are worth our commitment. Worth our noble failure. Worth, even, dying for.