"The Bard's Breath" is a daily weekday feature that brings you art, quotes and verse related to our times. We all need a bit more than just news to make it through what's coming next: Spirit. Perspective. Faith. Reminders of humanity, and horror, and the shape of true victory. My insight from yesterday: sometimes, the best and most stirring words are the ones that are true - and it's the bard's duty to bring them to life, too.

My colleague Armed Liberal has started a great series about risk. His friend Bill Whittle writes about courage, and love. So pull up a chair. Let's talk about risk. And courage. and love.

This is the story of the Navy's first Black aviator, Jesse Brown (Air Medal, Distinguished Flying Cross), and his wingman Thomas Hudner (Medal of Honor). Jesse was a sharecropper's son. Thomas had attended the best Massachusetts prep schools. December 4, 1950 was another bitterly cold day in a hot Korean war, and both of their lives were about to change.

"I knew what I had to do," said Hudner in an interview by Frank Geary, for Jax Air News, the Naval Air Station Jacksonville, Fla., base newspaper. "I was not going to leave him down there for the Chinese. Besides, it was 30 degrees below zero on that slope, and he was a fellow aviator. My association with the Marines had rubbed off on me. They don't leave wounded Marines behind." Hudner tightened his harness and, with his wheels up, set his Corsair down onto the snow and rocks some 100 yards from Brown's smoking aircraft."

They were 6,000 feet above sea level on a Korean mountain slope close to the Choisin Reservoir. Chinese army troops would be along soon, in numbers...

For the rest of the story, and its aftermath, you'll just have to follow a link Acepilots | Home of Heroes.