Congratulations to Master Sergeant Brendan O’Connor, who on Wednesday, April 30th will receive the Distinguished Service Cross for his valor as a medic with the Green Berets in Afghanistan. (This will be only the second DSC for Afghanistan duty.) CBS’s 60 Minutes told the remarkable story of his battlefield heroics on Sunday. Brendan and I grew up in the same town (Moorestown, NJ). One summer I was his boss at a local go-cart track owned by my classmate Mark Molz (I was the hired manager, paid in greasy $1 bills). Discipline, teamwork, and courage under fire – that’s what the go-cart track was all about, so I'm sure I can take some tiny credit for having had a formative influence on the young Brendan. Well, maybe.

HT: Mark Molz