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Lynn D. “Buck” Compton was a first lieutenant in Easy Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment in the Army’s 101st Airborne Division, the group known these days as the “Band of Brothers.” He earned the Purple Heart and Silver Star. After the war, Compton became a prosecutor and judge in California.

If you want to learn more about Buck Compton’s life, I recommend checking out his biography, Call of Duty: My Life Before, During and After the Band of Brothers. It’s great window into a different time and a man of a different breed.

Read the obituary: “Lynn D. ‘Buck’ Compton Dies at 90; Judge Also Known for WWII Service” (LA Times)

Hat tip to Ronald S. for this link.

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The seriously funny and virile American Mustache Institute is lobbying Congress to extend a $250 tax refund for all mustached Americans. The Stimulus to Allow Critical Hair Expense Act, or ‘STACHE Act, was inspired by a white paper written by John Yeutter, an associate professor of accounting and tax policy at Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, Oklahoma.

In his paper, Yeutter links mustache growth and maintenance to social and environmental benefits and a boost in the grower’s incremental income. Because the costs of mustache maintenance contribute to the economy, Yeutter argues, those expenses should be tax deductible. The tax deduction will hopefully encourage men to grow mustaches.

AMI Chairman Aaron Perlut is petitioning Rep. Roscoe Bartlett of Maryland and Sen. John Hoeven of North Dakota (also the only Congressman to sport facial hair) to sponsor the bill.

To raise awareness of their efforts, AMI is organizing a Million Mustache March from the Capitol to the White House on April 1. For every Million Mustache March participant, AMI’s sponsorship partner, H&R Block, will make contributions to Millions From One–which delivers clean drinking water to those who cannot obtain it themselves. The march and bill are designed to raise-mustache awareness and money for charity, all with a good time in mind and with tongue partly in cheek, which is how AMI rolls.

You can find out more info about the STACHE Act and the Million Mustache March at the American Mustache Institute’s official website, and in this article from ABC News.

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My father-in-law recently sent along a link to this fascinating story from a few months back.

The famous Steve McQueen movie, The Great Escape, was based on the true story of the daring escape attempt made by prisoners of the Stalag Luft III POW camp during WWII. In real life, the men dug three tunnels–nicknamed Tom, Dick, and Harry, 30 feet under the camp in an attempt to break out. The tunnels were made with homemade tools and crafty ingeniousness. The men would put the excavated sand in bags they hung around their necks and under their trousers and then pull a string to open the bags and release the dirt nonchalantly when they played soccer.

It was the 100 ft long Harry tunnel that became the stuff of legend on the night of March 24, 1944, when 76 Allied prisoners escaped from the camp. But only 3 of the escapees made it to freedom. The rest were rounded up; 23 were brought back to camp, and 50 were executed by the Germans.

The Germans thought the mass execution would crush any further thoughts of escape, but instead, the men got right back to work on a fourth tunnel named George. The tunnel, which was just recently discovered nearly 70 years after it was built, was not an escape tunnel but instead led to a German stash of arms–the men planned to grab the guns and then fight their way out.

Frank Stone, camp survivor, 89

The team that uncovered the George tunnel was greatly impressed by its construction and what they found inside it:

Down a single step lay the tunnel itself, intricately shored with bed boards, wired for light and equipped with the trademark trolley system used to shift both sand and men quickly and silently through the tunnels. It looked like a miniature railway with trolleys running on tracks linked by rope and pulled along by men at either end.

‘George turned out to be an absolute gem,’ explained Dr Pollard. ‘We found the shaft and excavated the tunnel which ran the entire length of the theatre. It was incredibly well preserved, with timber-lined walls, electrical wiring and homemade junction boxes, and was tall enough to walk through at a stoop. The craftsmanship is phenomenal. You can even see the groove on the top of the manhole cover, where it would swivel and slot into the floorboard above.

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I thought this NYT article from awhile back was a good tie-in with yesterday’s article on roughhousing.

The article details the way in which “dangerous” playground equipment–high monkey bars, tall jungle gyms, seesaws, merry-go-rounds, tire swings, etc have been removed from many of America’s playgrounds. They have disappeared because of parental fears of injury, and most of all, cities’ fear of litigation. But without this kind of equipment, kids miss out on risk-taking opportunities that help their cognitive and behavioral development:

“Children need to encounter risks and overcome fears on the playground,” said Ellen Sandseter, a professor of psychology at Queen Maud University in Norway. “I think monkey bars and tall slides are great. As playgrounds become more and more boring, these are some of the few features that still can give children thrilling experiences with heights and high speed.”

After observing children on playgrounds in Norway, England and Australia, Dr. Sandseter identified six categories of risky play: exploring heights, experiencing high speed, handling dangerous tools, being near dangerous elements (like water or fire), rough-and-tumble play (like wrestling), and wandering alone away from adult supervision. The most common is climbing heights.

“Climbing equipment needs to be high enough, or else it will be too boring in the long run,” Dr. Sandseter said. “Children approach thrills and risks in a progressive manner, and very few children would try to climb to the highest point for the first time they climb. The best thing is to let children encounter these challenges from an early age, and they will then progressively learn to master them through their play over the years.”

Sometimes, of course, their mastery fails, and falls are the common form of playground injury. But these rarely cause permanent damage, either physically or emotionally. While some psychologists — and many parents — have worried that a child who suffered a bad fall would develop a fear of heights, studies have shown the opposite pattern: A child who’s hurt in a fall before the age of 9 is less likely as a teenager to have a fear of heights.

By gradually exposing themselves to more and more dangers on the playground, children are using the same habituation techniques developed by therapists to help adults conquer phobias, according to Dr. Sandseter and a fellow psychologist, Leif Kennair, of the Norwegian University for Science and Technology.

“Risky play mirrors effective cognitive behavioral therapy of anxiety,” they write in the journal Evolutionary Psychology, concluding that this “anti-phobic effect” helps explain the evolution of children’s fondness for thrill-seeking. While a youthful zest for exploring heights might not seem adaptive — why would natural selection favor children who risk death before they have a chance to reproduce? — the dangers seemed to be outweighed by the benefits of conquering fear and developing a sense of mastery.

“Paradoxically,” the psychologists write, “we posit that our fear of children being harmed by mostly harmless injuries may result in more fearful children and increased levels of psychopathology.”

Read the whole article: “Can a Playground Be Too Safe?” (NYT)

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There’s been a lot of debate going on this week about the behavior of the men–both the crew and the passengers–of the shipwrecked Costa Concordia cruise ship.

Part of the controversy concerns the behavior of the ship’s captain, one Francesco Schettino. Schettino not only wrecked the ship by going too close to the island of Giglio in order to salute an old colleague on shore and show off his boat, he also abandoned his ship instead of being the last one off, as has traditionally been considered the duty of a captain. Amazingly, Schettino has excused his behavior by saying that he didn’t mean to abandon the ship, but that he tripped and fell into a lifeboat and couldn’t get out! Reportedly, when the Italian Coast Guard ordered him back to the ship, he refused to go.

Rich Lowry of The National Review contrasts Schettino’s behavior with that of the captain of the Titanic:

A century ago this spring, as the Titanic entered its death throes and all its lifeboats had been launched, Capt. Edward Smith told his crew: “Men, you have done your full duty. You can do no more. Now it’s every man for himself.” One witness recalled seeing him, probably washed overboard, clutching a child in the water as the Titanic disappeared. A member of the crew always believed it was Captain Smith’s voice he heard from the water after the Titanic was gone, urging him and others on: “Good boys! Good lads!”

But the main point of Lowry’s column is to criticize not just the captain, but all of the male passengers, who trampled over the practice of allowing women and children to get to safety first:

An Australian mother and her young daughter have described being pushed aside by hysterical men as they tried to board lifeboats. If the men of the Titanic had lived to read such a thing, they would have recoiled in shame. The Titanic’s crew surely would have thought the hysterics deserved to be shot on sight — and would have volunteered to perform the service.

Women and children were given priority in theory, but not necessarily in practice. The Australian mother said of the scene, “We just couldn’t believe it — especially the men, they were worse than the women.” Another woman passenger agreed, “There were big men, crew members, pushing their way past us to get into the lifeboats.” Yet another, a grandmother, complained, “I was standing by the lifeboats and men, big men, were banging into me and knocking the girls.”

Guys aboard the Costa Concordia apparently made sure the age of chivalry was good and dead by pushing it over and trampling on it in their heedless rush for the exits. The grounded cruise ship has its heroes, of course, just as the Titanic had its cowards. But the discipline of the Titanic’s crew and the self-enforced chivalric ethic that prevailed among its men largely trumped the natural urge toward panicked self-preservation.

Because of this chivalrous ethic, more men from first class died on the Titanic than women from third class.

Lowry argues that the abandonment of this tradition signifies a degradation of manliness:

The Titanic went down, they say, to the strains of the hymn “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” as the band courageously played on. It lent a final grace note to the tragedy. Today, we don’t do grace notes. We’ve gone from “Women and children, first,” to “Dude, where’s my lifeboat?” As the women of the Costa Concordia can testify, that’s a long way down.

Meanwhile, over at Slate.com, Brian Palmer has given us a bit of history about the tradition of saving women and children first (a fuller history of this practice would make a good Man Knowledge article on AoM, methinks):

Read more:

“Dude, Where’s My Lifeboat?” (@National Review)

“Abandoning Ship: An Etiquette Guide” (@Slate)

Hat tip to Daniel K. and Mary R. for these links.

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Reading about last week’s accident in which the Costa Concordia ran aground near the island of Giglio really reminded me of why every man should be able to save his own life. In an article in the NYT, passengers of the cruise ship describe a Titanic-esque and “chaotic and terrifying scene in which some crawled through hallways to escape down perilous ladders to lifeboats, while others leapt overboard into the wintry Tyrrhenian Sea.” Crew members did not know how to lead the evacuation and those manning the lifeboats were un-trained waiters, not experienced helmsmen. They kept banging the boats into the sinking cruise ship and rowing in circles. On at least one boat, a passenger had to shove aside the poorly prepared helsman to take the lead himself. Many of the passengers made it to shore by swimming; the island was close in this case, but it could have easily been very far away or out of reach all together.

Creek Stewart, who runs Willow Haven Outdoor, has a good motto: “It’s not IF, but WHEN.” Sometime in your life you’re going to need the survival skills and the strength to make it out of a pinch (possibly a life threatening one). Every man should be prepared.

Read more:

Every Man Should Be Able to Save His Own Life

As Divers Search Cruise Ship, Reason for Crash Is Unclear (NYT)

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People can argue about whether or not manliness is on the decline, but one thing we can say for sure: the thing that makes men, men is shrinking.

The Y chromosome is shedding genetic material and getting smaller. Scientists are not sure why, or what will become of the Y chromosome. It is possible that it will disappear altogether, as it has in some species of rodents. This does not mean men will become extinct, however. DNA scientists believe the genes responsible for male development would be moved and replaced by “a switch that determines maleness.”

Read more: “Who Knows Y Chromosome Is Shrinking” (@The Age)

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Tomorrow (Dec. 20) is the last day before Christmas to order a signed copy of Manvotionals. I’ll be making my last trip to the post office on Wednesday. If you live in the U.S., you’ll get your book by Christmas Eve.

Books are $14. We can customize the inscription however you want. Just make a note of it in your order.

Shipping is done through U.S. Postal Service Priority Mail for $4.95. If you order more than two books, shipping gets bumped up to $10. Just click on the link below to complete the order. All major credit cards are accepted.

Buy a Signed Copy of Manvotionals!

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