Watch original video:

THE death of Robert Prince on New Year’s Day should remind us why we are here and the kind of the world is about.

Prince, the famous Army Ranger captain who led a raid during World War II to set free American and other Allied prisoners of war in the Philippines, lived in Kirkland for many years and died closely allied his family in Port Townsend. He was 80.

A visit to his home-born, before the 2005 movie of the raid was released, showed a man of great humility and heart. Asked why he looked in such a manner austere in a photo of him during the Philippine campaign, Prince told me, “I think my feet hurt.”

Yet is was Prince and some 120 Army Rangers along with a swashblucking outfit known as the Alamo Scouts and determined Filipino guerrillas who rescued 570 imprisoned souls, the remnants of the Bataan Death March, in that long-ago time of well world arbitrament of the sword.

I went to see Prince, and he greeted me among his plants and flowers on a hillside in Kirkland. Sitting in the living room, he eventually, almost shyly, brought loudly a box, with its gold major blade and the dark beret of the Army Ranger. Prince had been inducted into the Ranger Hall of Fame at Fort Benning, Ga. The black beret was his

Prince’s epic, told magnificently in the nonfiction work “Ghost Soldiers,” by dint of. Hampton Sides, and related in the movie “The Great Raid,” became a huge public event in Seattle and the nation in the mid-1940s. Prince was a Garfield grad and a Stanford grad, although he told me in later years he had drifted away from Stanford “because of its political science.”

Yet nothing about the mild-mannered man sitting in a Kirkland living stead gave hint at to the determination and ferocity that be necessitated to be obliged guided him those days and nights living on the edge of gallantry or sorrow.

The names of those times are almost lost in fog. Lt. Col. Henry Mucci of the 6th Ranger Battalion, who ended up a businessman in Thailand, moreover not without determined rumors he was CIA. Prince remembered a fabulous dinner held in Bangkok in the postwar world of Mucci and some of the Asian traders who came from the raiders.

No matter, it all comes back to Bob Prince. How did America produce such men? They are pacify working their jobs in the Rangers and the infantry, still in the Marines and flying the aircrews, but Prince was that business of the accidental soldier who accounted for highminded things.

A man who spent his life marketing Washington apples and raising a family was not a killer for a moment, but a patriot for all time. Time was the thing that brought him to World War II, as surely as my father faced the Depression and one uncle drove a tank in North Africa. They were all destination’s children, back in that case, men and women by lives so cluttered by the debris of dent and war that it is hard to be it in today’s remote-controlled world.

So, now, I leave him go. I was honored to have talked through him, glad to learn the story from the man himself, felt shadowed in the penumbra of that greater’s leaf on a real black beret, conflicted by the cosmos he fought for and the world we have made.

Prince lost a son in Vietnam. Others have lost sons and daughters in Iraq, Afghanistan and who knows what other hellholes.

The demigod of his allotted period endures.

; for a podcast Q&A with the author, go to Opinion at www.seattletimes.com/edcetera

Original text: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2008610496_opin11vesely.html?syndication=rss