Navy SEALS tragedy in Afghanistan chronicled in new film, “Lone Survivors”

Mark Wahlberg in a scene from Lone Survivor.

Patrick Robinson knows about war.

Though born in England, Robinson’s family has deep roots in Ireland, and a great uncle of his even fought in the Easter Rising in 1916.

Nearly 100 years later, Robinson – who lived for over a decade in Ireland before recently moving –  helped Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell tell the unforgettable story that is at the heart of the film "Lone Survivor," which opens on December 27 and stars Mark Wahlberg.

Luttrell was one of four Navy SEALs on a June 2005 mission in Afghanistan’s Kunar province. The mission was compromised and the team came under heavy Taliban fire.

Luttrell’s team included Long Island native and Irish American Lieutenant Mike Murphy, who sacrificed his own life by exposing himself to enemy fire in an effort to radio for help. Murphy was indeed killed, and became the first serviceman in Afghanistan to be awarded the Medal of Honor.

Unfortunately the mission took an even darker turn. A missile struck the helicopter carrying servicemen hoping to save Murphy, Luttrell and the rest of the SEALs, killing all 16 men on board.

The release of "Lone Survivor" is sure to bring renewed attention to Lutrell, Murphy and the bravery and sacrifice of those who fell that day.

Robinson, though, is now out telling a new story of bravery involving Irish Americans. This story’s ending is not as tragic as the one that inspired "Lone Survivor," but the soldiers faced terrible adversity on and off the battlefield.

“It really is a shocking story,” Robinson told me in a phone interview last week.

Robinson explores the saga of Navy SEALs Matthew McCabe and Jonathan Keefe in his new book "Honor and Betrayal," which, according to its sub-title, tells the story “of the Navy SEALs who captured the Butcher of Fallujah – and the shameful ordeal they later endured.”

This story has gotten particularly strong coverage among conservatives, who view it as proof that military brass has become timid during the Obama administration. Maybe, maybe not. But you don’t have to be a Fox-News-loving, Obama-hating right winger to see that what McCabe and Keefe endured is terrible.

This whole saga began, horrifically, on March 31, 2004, in the battle-scarred Iraqi city of Fallujah. On that fateful day, Iraqi insurgents attacked a U.S.-led convoy and eventually killed four private contractors. Video of the attack showed Iraqis triumphantly dragging the victims’ corpses through the streets.

Intelligence suggested the mastermind of the contractors’ murders was Ahmad Hashim Abd al-Isawi, the so-called “Butcher of Fallujah.”

Five years went by before military officials believed they had a chance to apprehend the notorious butcher. Enter Navy SEALs McCabe (who grew up outside of Toledo, Ohio) and Keefe (from Virginia), members of a team charged with conducting a nighttime raid on a house believed to contain al-Isawi.

McCabe led the team into the house and while searching came upon a man matching al-Isawi’s description, who was also reaching for a gun when confronted by McCabe.

Initial reports suggest the apprehension of al-Isawi was “textbook.”  However, al-Isawi later claimed he was beaten and abused, and offered up the blood on his shirt as proof. McCabe and Keefe were eventually courtmartialed.

Robinson and others, however, note that al Qaeda leaders often encourage anyone captured by Americans to claim abuse at the hands of their captors.

A few years back, with the prisoner abuse of Abu Ghraib still fresh in international minds, military officials were apparently nervous about yet another scandal. So Keefe, McCabe and an additional SEAL were encouraged to confess to their own misdeeds.

They refused, arguing they had nothing to confess. Robinson believes the blood was the result of a sore on al-Isawi’s lip.

In the spring of 2010, Keefe and McCabe were found not guilty by a military jury.

As the war on terror drags on, it’s important to remember that the survivor in the Hollywood movie may indeed be “lone.”  However, he is far from alone when it comes to enduring the horrors of war.

(Contact “Sidewalks” at tdeignan.blogspot.net)

“Philomena’s” story is just one example of the forced adoption of Irish children (VIDEO)

Judi Dench and Steve Coogan in a scene from Philomena.

Critics and audiences are applauding "Philomena," the new film starring Judi Dench and Steve Coogan. It’s about an Irish mother who becomes pregnant and is more or less forced by local nuns to give up the child for adoption.

In the movie, the two main characters take a trip to America to track down Philomena’s long lost son. Such a trip never happened, though it does raise important questions.

The understandable focus on the pain of an Irish mother who never knew her son makes it easy to forget the pain of a son, in the U.S., who never met his mother.

Philomena’s son was born Anthony Lee. He was raised in the U.S. as Michael Hess. He became a mover and shaker in the national Republican Party, ultimately serving as top legal counsel to President George Bush Sr.

But Hess was hiding a secret from his Republican pals. He was gay.

He also longed to be reunited with his Irish mother. As The New York Times noted this week, “As he was dying of AIDS in 1995, he requested that his ashes be buried at the convent [in Ireland where he was put up for adoption], in case his mother should ever come looking for him.”

For a people so passionate about the past, an Irish American’s longing for roots he never knew might seem unusual. But over the course of Irish American history, there are unfortunately many stories of children separated at young ages from their parents and compelled to grow up in strange, sometimes abusive, new surroundings.

And even if they were relocated to loving homes (as Michael Hess seems to have been, raised by a Catholic family in St. Louis), these Irish children were forced to grow up detached from the faith and culture into which they were born.

Perhaps the most prominent and controversial symbol of this was the Children’s Aid Society, which ran so-called “orphan trains” for Irish and other immigrant children in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Supporters argued that large numbers of Irish kids were wandering big city streets homeless, and that relocating them to loving families in the mid-West was a blessing.

Critics, however, note that the children were often exploited for their ability to labor on farms.

“At its worst it was not much better than slavery,” author Christina Baker Kline said in a recent NPR interview.

Earlier this year, Kline did extensive research for her novel "Orphan Train," which features a young Irish girl named Niamh who loses her family in a tenement fire.

Orphan train children “were all between the ages of mostly two — but sometimes as young as babies, baby trains were called ‘mercy trains’ — and up to the age of 14. Those 14-year-old boys, 12- to 14-year-old boys, were the most in demand because obviously they were labor,” Kline said.

It also did not help that Children’s Aid Society founder Charles Loring Brace had an extensive record of anti-Catholic writing, and was open to the charge that he was taking Catholics off the dirty city streets in order to convert them into Protestants.

According to Kline, the extent of the era’s anti-Irish sentiment went to bizarre lengths.

“I came across a newspaper article from The New York Times about how the trains that were being sent were not allowing redheads,” she said.

During a heated exchange of letters in The New York Times back in 2001, Irish American novelist and historian Peter Quinn said the Children’s Aid Society “was not merely a compassionate agent of charitable relief...but an active partner with the courts and Protestant proselytizing societies in seeking to ‘redeem’ Irish Catholic children from a cultural-religious identity considered destructive of personal virtue and moral behavior.”

Of course, many Irish “orphan train” children grew up to live happy and productive lives. But the pervasive sense of dislocation and loss these children must have felt – especially after their own parents endured the trauma and uncertainty of emigration – is a rarely-discussed aspect of the Irish experience in America.

Perhaps the tragic story of Philomena Lee, and her son’s ultimately fruitless quest to reclaim a past he never knew, will help heal the wounds of the past.

(Contact “Sidewalks” at tdeignan.blogspot.com)