Paul Fussell, soldier, scholar, and curmudgeon of Baltimorean scale, entitled his autobiography Doing Battle.

Fussell was the Regan Professor of English Literature at Penn. He taught poetry, though he writes and has written about many other things: the Great War and Modern Memory, the transcendent values of certain editions of the Boy Scout Handbook, the idea of Class, a controversial essay in praise of the Atomic Bomb, and memoirs of his own experience of combat during the Second World War.

A man of my father's all-too-stoic generation, he once wrote that in his final years in the classroom there were some poems he simply could not read, some music he could not hear in public, and some people and places of which he could no longer speak, because they inevitably moved him to tears.

The poetry and music were not always the predictable: A Song to David . . . The Scholar Gypsy . . . Eliot's "New Hampshire" . . . Emerson's "Concord Hymn" . . . "To Daffodils" . . . "Amazing Grace" . . . "O Canada" . . . "Abide with Me." In words that almost blush on the page, he writes "It's hope ritualized that gets to me or evanescent beauty and youth in any form."

Like many, if not most cynics, Fussell is of course a hopeless romantic. Despite a life devoted to criticism, much of it directed at the United States of America itself, he wrote that, "The very idea of the Constitution moves me for there's an implication in it of the essential decency of ordinary people . . ."

For southerners of my generation . . . old men now . . . and still, disproportionately, and hopelessly romantic . . . there are moments in time which have similar power.

For most of us they seem to occur when events seem most overwhelming and severe consequences most inescapable . . . those horrifying moments in which a person's resolve or courage or character is inescapably and all too often publicly defined, often in spite of any effort by those who find themselves in peril or at risk.

One such moment I share with Fussell. The image of Dwight Eisenhower, in the darkness and rain of June 5, 1944, drafting a speech taking full and personal responsibility if the D-Day landings should fail never fails to move me.

There are many others, some particular to Southern boys of the late '50s and early '60s who grew up reading Faulkner and Foote.

There's Lee riding out to meet Pickett's defeated division, telling them they'd done all that men could do and that the disaster was all his fault. There's Jackie Kennedy in Dallas and Anthony McAuliffe at Bastogne. There's Martin Luther King in the Birmingham jail and Willy Brandt falling to his knees in Poland. Lenny Skutnik leaping into the frozen Potomac. Teenagers passively resisting nightsticks in Selma. Firemen dragging hoses up the stairways of the doomed Twin Towers.

Perhaps, with age, one is touched more deeply by such behavior because one knows, from personal experience, how difficult it is to do the right thing in such circumstances, even when the consequences are less profound, and the behavior less visible, than that of those heroes whose determination, modesty and raw courage we were taught to admire.

Which brings us to September 11, a classroom in Florida, and President Bush. How difficult it must have been, with the second tower in flames, knowing that his country was at war and that he, as Commander in Chief, must act.

What could he have been thinking?

We know what he did. As the children around him read passages from My Pet Goat he listened . . . for seven minutes . . . and once fetched, retired to an anteroom and decided to proceed at once to Air Force One.

But what was he thinking? And what must he think now? I wish that, as soon as he'd heard, he'd stood up, patted one of the children on the cheek, and said nothing more than, "I have to go to work now."

Instead he sat, and thought, for seven minutes . . . all of it captured for posterity.

On the one hand one might argue that nothing in all of American History was analogous to the situation he faced in that classroom. Perhaps, indeed, his was a conscious decision to appear calm and unafraid for the sake of the country.

On the other hand, one might argue that this was his Bastogne, or Dallas, or Gettysburg.

Under fire in Vietnam, John Kerry faced a similar decision. Arguably the situation was by no means of similar global import. Those at risk should he have made a foolish decision or no decision at all, would have been little noted nor long remembered. They were just simple soldiers and sailors, brave men risking their lives for each other and in service to what even their commanders would later admit, was an unworthy cause.

Kerry's decision was to turn his Swift Boat into a firefight for the sake of a Green Beret, a man he'd never met. It was not the last time he would make such a decision, quite literally, under fire.

"Any wounded veteran will assure you that for him the war has never ended," Fussell wrote in Doing Battle. There are times when we need such men in the White House. This, I believe, is one of them.