Helmets from “Washington’s NFL team” as Slate refers to it, refusing to use the name “Redskins.”
As I may have mentioned once or twice before in the course of my periodical surveys of the media, I am something of a collector of military obituaries. Or perhaps I should say that I collect British military obituaries, since the British newspapers I read contain many more notices of Britain’s recently deceased and highly decorated veterans—nearly all of them with fascinating accounts of the actions for which they were awarded their medals—than the American ones do of American ones. Here, apart from local papers noticing local heroes, we tend to ignore the deaths of all but Medal of Honor winners or the most high-ranking veterans unless they are distinguished for something other than their military careers.
Where else, for instance, but in a Daily Telegraph obituary would the casual reader meet Flight Lt. Tony Snell who, after his Spitfire was shot down over Sicily, escaped first from a German firing squad and then, while badly wounded, from a POWtrain transferring him to Germany? Having subsequently made his way with the help of Italian partisans to Switzerland, he was one of a very few men to be awarded the Distinguished Service Order solely for his heroics in escaping from the enemy. With all that in his background, it even becomes interesting that, in his post-military career, the late Flight Lt. Snell ran a bar and restaurant (The Last Resort)
