C6| Saturday/Sunday, April 4 - 5, 2020 **** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
I’d
happily
standsix
feet
apartto
hearmybreakfast
club
chatter
about
Tom
Brady
again.FOR THE PAST 20 YEARS—
well, probably only 12, but it
seems like 20—I have had break-
fast almost every morning with
a free-floating group of eight to
10 sports-minded men. Some are
self-employed, a couple work lo-
cally, several are retired. Every
morning we seize the last two
booths in our beloved village
restaurant—the owners become
apoplectic if we dare call it a
diner—and have the exact same
conversations we had yesterday.
Should Barry Bonds, a cheater
and scoundrel, be admitted to
the Hall of Fame? Who was
more dominant: Wilt Chamber-
lain or Michael Jordan? Would
you not agree that Jeff Van
Gundy and Mark Jackson are theBrady, a superlative athlete and
a truly magnificent human be-
ing. And because several mem-
bers are Yankees fans, no more
than 48 hours can go by without
a reminder not only that the
Bronx Bombers are history’s
most successful franchise, but
that every last one of them—
Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Mickey
Mantle—was infinitely more
gifted and more magnificent
than Tom Brady. So you can see
why someone from Philly might
occasionally skip breakfast.
But now that the deadly coro-
navirus has shut down our soci-
ety and none of us are allowed
to congregate in groups larger
than a marriage, I realize howMr. Crenshaw learned early on to
be stoic. Because of his father’s job
in the oil industry, he grew up in
places all over the world, from Scot-
land to Colombia to Katy, Texas.
When he was 5, his mother was di-
agnosed with breast cancer. She died
five years later. “She never com-
plained once,” he remembers.
Mr. Crenshaw decided he wanted
to be a Navy SEAL when he was 13,
after his father gave him a copy of
“Rogue Warrior” (1992), a memoir
by Richard Marcinko, the first com-
manding officer of SEAL Team Six.
Watching “Navy SEALs,” a 1990 ac-
tion movie starring Charlie Sheen,
solidified his interest in special oper-
ations, he writes. He enrolled in the
Navy while in college at Tufts Uni-Harvard’s Kennedy School of Gov-
ernment in 2017. A year later, with
prompting from his friend John Noo-
nan, a former defense writer for the
Weekly Standard, he ran for Con-
gress in the second district of Texas
and won. His platform included re-
forming immigration laws and tight-
ening border security, including
physical barriers at the border,
drones and sensors. He also supports
a merit-based immigration system,
including education and skill qualifi-
cations. While Mr. Crenshaw has
agreed with President Trump on is-
sues such as opposing abortion and
moving the U.S. embassy in Israel to
Jerusalem, he has opposed him on
other measures, including abruptly
withdrawing U.S. troops from Syria.WEEKEND CONFIDENTIAL|ALEXANDRA WOLFE
Dan Crenshaw
A wounded Navy SEAL turned politician offers lessons in resilience
versity and completed five tours of
duty, starting with SEAL Team 3 in
Fallujah, Iraq. After earning two
Bronze Star medals (one with valor)
and a Purple Heart, among others,he was forced to retire for medical
reasons in 2016.
Mr. Crenshaw earned a master’s
degree in public administration at‘You want to
be someone who
doesn’t panic,
and then you
don’t.’D
an Cren-
shaw re-
members
the mo-
ment the
IED hit him. On June 15,
2012, Mr. Crenshaw—then
a Navy SEAL, now a Re-
publican member of Con-
gress from Texas—was on
a mission in Afghanistan.
After flying into Helmand
province before daylight,
he and his team were
clearing an abandoned
compound when his inter-
preter stepped on an im-
provised explosive device
two feet away from him.
Mr. Crenshaw felt
something sharp in his
abdomen and heard ring-
ing in his ears. Then ev-
erything went dark. He
lay in pain for 45 minutes
waiting for a helicopter,
then stood up and headed
for its whirring nearby. He
woke up a few days later
in a hospital in Germany
with one eye missing and
one he couldn’t see out of.
After a series of risky
surgeries, Mr. Crenshaw,
now 36, finally regained
limited sight in his left
eye. He completed two
more tours in Bahrain and
South Korea, though not
in combat. His book “For-
titude: American Resil-
ience in the Era of Out-
rage” is scheduled to be
published Tuesday—part
memoir, part instruction
manual about his ability
to weather hardships in
life and in battle and his
advice on how others can
do the same. The book is
also a critique of what he
calls “outrage culture,” or
what he sees as an alarm-
ist tendency by some me-
dia outlets and much of
social media to provoke
unhelpful and overblown
emotional responses.
In the midst of the
Covid-19 pandemic, Mr.
Crenshaw thinks his
book’s lessons are particu-
larly useful, even if they are easier to
follow if you’re a Navy SEAL. Politi-
cians and epidemiologists have com-
pared the fight against the new cor-
onavirus to a war, and Mr. Crenshaw
agrees. “We’re acting more as if this
is a war than we ever did the war in
Iraq or Afghanistan,” he says. In
those conflicts, he says, only a frac-
tion of the U.S. population was in
harm’s way. The pandemic, on the
other hand, “is an all-hands-on-deck
kind of war.”
In his constituency in southeast-
ern Texas, Mr. Crenshaw is working
to save businesses hurt by the crisis.
To handle the fear and stress, he
urges people to stop and think be-
fore reacting to the news. He also
suggests being grateful for time
spent with family and trying to look
at the crisis in context. “If you want
to make yourself feel better...look to
other countries that went through
this before us,” he says, such as
China and South Korea, where cases
have fallen dramatically. He has
publicly lauded efforts to create
faster testing, and on social media,
he has publicized the pleas of local
hospitals for donations of medical
supplies.
Switching from the
military to politics was an
adjustment. Mr. Crenshaw
finds people outside the
Navy to be much thinner-
skinned and thinks many
Americans make an effort
to take umbrage at even
small indiscretions. Be-
fore the coronavirus out-
break, he says, the U.S.
hadn’t been in “survival
mode” for some time,
tempting people to invent
reasons to fight.
Mr. Crenshaw argues
that taking pleasure in
anger and outrage has
permeated American cul-
ture. “Pop culture used to
be apolitical, but it’s just
not anymore,” he says.
“That is the fault of the
pop-culture icons entirely,
because they keep mouth-
ing off and choosing a
side, and in doing so,
they’re alienating half the
population.”
Mr. Crenshaw experi-
enced this phenomenon
firsthand when he be-
came the butt of a No-
vember 2018 joke by the
comedian Pete Davidson
on “Saturday Night Live”
in the days leading up to
the midterm elections.
Mr. Davidson ridiculed
several candidates, in-
cluding Mr. Crenshaw,
whom the comedian said
looked like “a hit man in
a porno.” Mr. Crenshaw
says he wasn’t offended,
but the jape caused an
uproar among veterans,
and Mr. Davidson later
apologized on the show.
Mr. Crenshaw appeared
as a guest with Mr. David-
son, laughing off the inci-
dent and calling for re-
spect for veterans. Later,
the congressman said on
“Fox & Friends” that the
publicity from Mr. David-
son’s joke “probably
helped” get him elected.
(Mr. Davidson recently re-
scinded his apology, say-
ing that his mother had
forced him to do it. Mr. Crenshaw’s
response: “The guy just can’t stop
thinking about me.”)
Now that the country is suddenly
facing disaster, the congressman is
focused less on cultural outrage.
He’s currently hunkered down at
home with his family, working on
ways to save jobs and lives in his
district.
Mr. Crenshaw is trying to model
the resilience he preaches. Overly
emotional reactions to crises, he
finds, are fruitless. But how can you
tell someone who isn’t already a Navy
SEAL to just stop panicking? “You
stop yourself,” he says. “You think
about who you want to be, and that
you want to be someone who doesn’t
panic, and then you don’t.”
It’s also a matter of perspective.
“You could tell the story of my life as
a succession of hard times and heavy
burdens,” he writes. “My mom
died...my eye got blown out, my ac-
tive commission got taken away.” In-
stead, he chooses to focus on what
he can control rather than what he
can’t. “I don’t have to wake up
nearly blind every morning,” he
writes. “I get to appreciate the gift
of sight—any sight at all.” STEPHEN VOSS FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNALREVIEW
How I
Miss My
Daily Dose
Of Sports
Talk
most annoying an-
nouncers in the his-
tory of professional
sports, or does How-
ard Cosell still hold
that dubious title?
I am not saying
that these are the
only topics we dis-
cuss—we sometimes
talk about our ru-
ined knees, our un-
grateful children and
our pitiful national
leaders—but mostly we talk
about sports for the simple rea-
son that sports are easy to talk
about. People do not get into
shouting matches about ice
hockey the way they do about
politics, and no one has ever
come to blows discussing ten-
nis. Not that any of us would
ever dream of discussing tennis.
All that said, there are certain
topics I find so maddening that I
sometimes give the restaurant a
wide berth for a few days. Be-
cause one semi-regular is from
Boston and another founding
member graduated from Michi-
gan, a day seldom has passed
when one fails to mention the
unparalleled genius of Tommuch I took our
daily gatherings for
granted. Just a few
weeks into this
nightmare, I really
miss the ornery
cusses that form
our matinal gather-
ing of worthies.
But it’s not just
that I miss them
personally. No, my
greatest shock is
that I really and
truly miss the metronome-like
predictability of our uncompro-
misingly identical conversations.
There is something nostalgic
and life-affirming about being
able to have the exact same
conversation day after day,
week after week, year after
year with a group of men who
share one’s passion for debat-
ing that which cannot be de-
bated and defending that which
need not be defended. (For in-
stance, there really is no point
in arguing whether Jeff Van
Gundy and Mark Jackson are
the most annoying announcers
in the history of our species.
The jury brought in that verdict
years ago.)It is wisely said: You don’t
miss your water till your well
runs dry. Put another way, you
don’t miss your rote, non-Ein-
steinian daybreak conversations
till your well runs dry. For too
long I took my friends and their
fiercely tautological chatter for
granted. For too long I under-
valued the ineffable joys of the
obvious.
So much so that the other
day, I suggested that we grab a
takeout breakfast and gather in
a circle by the river where,
while keeping a respectable dis-
tance, we will pick up where we
left off before the pandemic be-
gan. Chastened, wiser, I can’t
wait to once again hear what a
spectacularly talented quarter-
back Tom Brady is—even if his
defection to Tampa Bay raises
serious questions about his
moral character—and what a
spectacular addition to the hu-
man race Derek Jeter has been.
And if anyone wants to remind
me for the 9,978,657th time
that Pete Rose is a cheater, that
Sandy Koufax could really bring
the heat, and that college hoops
is far superior to the profes-
sional variety, hey, I’m all ears. NISHANT CHOKSIMOVING
TARGETSJOE
QUEENAN