Thursday, March 11, 2004 | 8:56 a.m.
By Timothy C. Brown
Timothy C. Brown, a widely published author and graduate of the University of Nevada, Reno and Sparks High School, is a former Marine and professional diplomat. A Research Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, Brown is also chair of the nascent Diplomatic Academy at Tahoe of Sierra Nevada College, Incline Village. Brown lives in northern Nevada with his wife and family.
There we were, "Mike" O'Callaghan and I, standing in a pouring tropical deluge, knee deep in gumbo clay on a jungle hillside deep inside a triple-canopy Central American rain forest. We were just yards from where Nicaragua's Contra War was winding down, when Mike suddenly lurched forward, artificial leg and all, to save a woman from dropping a tiny baby she was cradling in the mud.
The age-worn Sumu Indian grandmother Mike rescued, along with her infant grandchild, was being carried with her entire village from her people's lands to a "refugee" camp by the United Nations. Within a week many died, but I never learned if she and the baby were among them. But at least for an instant Mike had shown her human compassion that had made her smile and say to him in her native tongue, "thank you."
The day before, Mike and I had visited a Nicaraguan Contra rehabilitation hospital overflowing with combatants who had lost arms, or legs or eyes. It was a place he always visited and where he had made one comando, "G.U.", his special friend. G.U. was missing both legs and was confined to a wheelchair. And yet he was always in good spirits and hard at work making toys -- Mike's kind of guy.
As always, Mike embraced G.U., gave him a few words of encouragement and bought a couple of his toys, always carefully paying enough to help but not so much that it looked like charity.
Later Mike accompanied a group of disabled comandos back to their homeland and kept a special eye on G.U., making sure his friend was not overlooked in the rush. Those were Mike's rules. Always root for the underdog, care for the weak, be loyal to friends and support those you believe in.
But it was another "Mike," one Nevadans hardly knew, I had accompanied, one whose championing of those he believed in overseas changed for the better millions of lives of people who didn't even know his name. This was the Mike I called (behind his back, I hasten to add, because he never would have approved) "Global Mike."
Others also took notice and gave thanks for what he did for them. In a March 6 letter of condolence to Mike's widow and family, Ambassador Francisco Xavier Aquirre Sacasa, former Foreign Minister of Nicaragua and perhaps its future president, says of Global Mike: "I speak for the overwhelming majority (of Nicaraguans) when I say that his generosity and commitment to freedom made a tangible difference in the lives of millions of Nicaraguans and that we owe him a debt of gratitude that we will never be able to repay."
In another letter Oscar Sobalvarro, president of the Contras veterans organization, says: "Governor O'Callaghan's death is a great loss to the Resistance, to all of us who knew him personally and were honored to shake his hand, and to Nicaragua, a country he helped immensely because he was its very special friend.
"We remember with special gratitude his most recent visit, bringing help to the victims of Hurricane Mitch. And we remember with deep appreciation his help with arranging visits for us to the White House, the Congress, the Organization of American States and the State Department when we were looking for help to assure that during two successive presidential elections no one would go without having the right to vote.
"He always was and will be someone very special whom we will never forget."
Why such extraordinary expressions of loss from so far away? Because of the Mike Nevadans hardly knew, my Global Mike who, along with another son of Nevada, Harry Reid, made sure not once but twice that hundreds of thousands of the poorest of Nicaragua's poor, on the brink of being disenfranchised, were able to vote in two national elections, and to cast votes that changed the course of Nicaraguan history. Mike believed deeply in free elections, and in freedom itself.
But Nicaragua was not the only country Global Mike championed. He championed Israel, putting actions to his words in 1991 when he flew to Israel to stand under Saddam Hussein's incoming Scuds. He championed the Kurdish minority of Iraq, repeatedly slipping into Saddam's killing fields to observe elections to help those he felt needed him.
He was such a steadfast friend of the people of the Republic of China -- Taiwan and its struggle to remain free from mainland China -- that Taiwan named him its Man of the Year.
Mike O'Callaghan was a Nevada treasure, true. But Global Mike was more than that, a major player on the international scene. Not bad for a one-legged war hero. Not bad at all!
So Nevadans have an even greater right to be proud of Mike O'Callaghan than they think they do. Gov. Kenny Guinn was only partly right to call Mike a "Nevada treasure." Mike was also a treasure far beyond our deserts and mountains, in fact far beyond this country's shores, from Israel to Kurdistan to Taiwan to Nicaragua and beyond.
So there are also millions abroad with cause to mourn the passage of the great Nevadan who was to them, not "Governor Mike" but "Global Mike," their friend, their mentor and their hero.
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