Gregory “Pappy” Boyington was a war hero’s hero.

The native of Coeur d’Alene and St. Maries earned a Navy Cross and a Medal of Honor as a World War II ace fighter pilot in command of the famous Black Sheep Squadron in the South Pacific. He shot down a record-tying number of enemy planes. He was starved and tortured for 20 months as a prisoner of war. And he later wrote a book about his war experience that became a television series for two years starring actor Robert Conrad: “Baa, Baa Black Sheep.”

He epitomized the self-deprecation, self-sacrifice and courage of Tom Brokaw’s “The Greatest Generation.”

He also earned a degree in aeronautical engineering as a 1934 graduate of the University of Washington. And here’s the rub. More than 70 years later, a handful of student body leaders at Boyington’s alma mater were able to turn back an attempt to memorialize him because, as student Senator Jill Edwards explained, they didn’t believe a Marine with a record for killing enemy fighters was the sort “of person UW wanted to produce.”

Obviously, the comments by Edwards and a few other senators don’t represent the university or the student body. But they do reflect an ignorance of American history and the vital role that brave combatants such as Boyington played in preserving freedom. UW student leaders have been besieged by angry e-mails and phone calls from veterans and citizens since talk radio and the Internet made public the minutes of the Senate meeting earlier this month. The students don’t like the commotion. But the uproar could be good sensitivity training for young adults who don’t understand the importance of our military.

Only tyrants, deranged fighters and naïve individuals relish war.

Unfortunately, war is occasionally forced upon peace-loving people, as it was when Germany invaded Poland and Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. At those times, a free society with everything at stake had better pray that its military is peopled with individuals like Boyington who are willing to risk all to drive the enemy back to its death bunker in Berlin or to its island stronghold. Memorial Day is a reminder of how many sacrificed all so UW Senator Ashley Miller could denounce with impunity the proposed memorial to Boyington as another UW monument to “commemorate rich white men.”

Boyington’s mother put her son through college working as a switchboard operator in Tacoma, according to UW history archives. Also, Boyington worked summers in a North Idaho gold mine to defray college expenses. He was hardly a “rich white man.” If Edwards had bothered to find out about Boyington, she would have learned about his humble beginnings and that he embodied characteristics most Americans prize: leadership under pressure, loyalty and patriotism. And that he might have agreed with her assessment somewhat. He once said: “Just name a hero and I’ll prove he’s a bum.”

Of such bums who respond with courage in America’s darkest hours are heroes made.