March 2000

This is a story about David Chethlahe Paladin. I never knew him personally but his story touches and inspires me deeply. By telling it, I hope that you will remember it too. When the time is right, perhaps you will tell it to someone else.

David was born in 1926, on a Navajo reservation in Arizona, a southwestern state in the U.S. Because the authorities wouldn't accept his clan name, Bitter Water, they gave him the name of the nearest landmark, the Paladin Mesa. His mother was a Navajo and his father a Caucasian Roman Catholic priest. At birth, he mother left him in the care of his extended family at the reservation and went off to become a nursing nun. Thus he was raised by tribal people who still talked to spirits and walked in their dreams.

In his early teens, he stole away on a merchant ship and was carried off to Australia. On the ship he met another young boy, a German named Ted with whom he became friends. At the outbreak of World War II, he was recruited by the OSS, Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner of the CIA. The Navajo language was a difficult one and the Americans used it to pass secret information behind enemy lines. The Germans did not know it was a language, they never cracked the code.

He was 15 years old when he was captured and sent to the Furstenburg Internment Center. He was tried and sentenced to death as a spy. On the platform to board a train destined for the death chambers, David felt a rifle butt behind his back to hurry him along. He turned to see Ted, the young boy he met on the merchant ship, now a German officer. Ted managed to get him rerouted to Dachau, and so David escaped death.

At Dachau, for helping a fellow prisoner, his feet were nailed to the floor for three days. The wound developed into gangrene. He was later to recount that as he drifted in and out of consciousness, a German soldier would come in to put maggots on his open sores and forced raw chicken entrails down his throat.

The Allies found him in a train car loaded with dead bodies in Dachau. He weighed 62 pounds. They shipped off to a Veteran's Hospital in the States where he stayed in a coma for 2 years. When he finally recovered consciousness, he had lost the use of his legs. He wallowed in his hate. Resigned to spend the rest of his life at the Veteran's Hospital, he decided to go back to the reservation one last time to say good-bye.

The elders at the reservation heard his story and held council. They told him, “you have given away your spirit to hate and without your spirit, you cannot heal.” They then tied a rope around his waist, took the braces off his legs, and threw him into the Little Colorado River at high flood. The moments he spent thrashing in the water for his life, he was to say later, were the hardest in his life – harder than being nailed to the floor. For it was there, fighting for breath, that all the hurtful images of his life came back to him. He had to release each one by forgiving it. The last image was that of the German soldier who put maggots on his flesh. This too he had to forgive. He decided to see this act as one that actually saved his leg from further disease, and the entails helped keep him alive. He retrieved his spirit.

He became a shaman, a healer, a teacher and an artist. He eventually regained use of both legs and was able to walk without crutches. He died in 1984 at 58 years old.

His story inspires not for the hardship of his childhood, and not even for the tortures he endured. It inspires for its rebirth, for a life rebuilt after the damage.

I know another man. He was not captured by any enemy, and his feet were not nailed to any floor. But in his spirit, he might have suffered a torture just as painful. He was displaced, at 50 years old, from the country where grew up and worked as a professional, to another where he didn't know the language and had to work as a waiter. The wound to his self-esteem was more stubborn than gangrene because it couldn't be diagnosed. There was no rebirth. Although he lived for almost another 50 years, he never learned the language of the adopted country. He lived without spirit.

His story touches too, for it's bitterness and for the tragedy of a life squandered.

I recently saw Christopher Reeve on TV, speaking from his wheelchair. His first fame is that of the actor who played Superman in the movie series of the 80s. In 1995, he became better known for being thrown head-first in a horse racing accident that shattered his vertebra. This spinal cord injury left him paralyzed from his head down. Instead of resigning himself to the life of a paraplegic, he is actively speaking out for spinal cord research. He has directed a movie (In the Gloaming, HBO 1996), and starred in the remake of Hitchcock's Rear Window (ABC, 1998), and most recently, completed a book (“Still Me” published by Arrow Books, 1999). Along the way, he has taken the script that life assigned him to become a real Superman.

Like the mystery grab bags at Christmas, life offers us grand prizes along with the duds. How we gracefully accept the gifts or resolutely transform the duds depends on our choice. For Christopher Reeve, he has chosen to use it as an opportunity to play a super hero in real life. While there will be no Oscar at the end of this show, I for one, am one fan who has learned more from seeing him in a wheelchair than seeing him fly.

You can see the paintings of David Chethlahe Paladin by ordering “Painting the Dream: The Visionary Art of Navajo Painter David Chethlahe Paladin” by Lynda Paladin, published by Park Street Press, 1992 on Amazon.com (US $20.00)

Read Christopher Reeve's own story in “Still Me.” It can be purchased in Hong Kong or on Amazon.