Byline: GEORGEA KOVANIS Knight Ridder
LANSING, Mich. Christopher Stone has just finished his speech and now, as so often is the case, audience members are rising from their seats and surrounding him, reaching out to shake his hand, pat his back, tell him he's a good young man and God bless.
``He's a hero,'' bellows a former elementary school principal, explaining why he asked Stone to speak to this group of retired Lansing-area school workers. ``We love heroes!''
And so goes another day in the odd life of 26-year-old Christopher Stone.
The Michigan native was just another Army scout until he and two soldiers under his command Andrew Ramirez and Steven Gonzales were captured March 31 last year while patrolling the hilly border between Macedonia and Yugoslavia in a Humvee.
CNN beamed his face, beaten and battered, all over the world. He was an extraordinarily sympathetic figure, with a wife and a son back home, with a father who said he was proud of his boy, sisters who choked up on the ``Today'' show.
People who knew nothing about Stone except what they learned on TV or read in the papers prayed for him and tied yellow ribbons around trees in their front yards and wore POW bracelets etched with his name.
When the Rev. Jesse Jackson and his interfaith delegation of religious leaders finally rescued the soldiers 32 days after their capture, Stone became a celebrity.
President Bill Clinton who had been upstaged by Jackson's rescue mission shook Stone's hand and invited him to the White House. Al Gore embraced him in a full body hug and slapped him heartily on the back. Singer Sheryl Crow treated him to champagne backstage at the Palace and later e-mailed him commemorative photos.
The Detroit Red Wings presented him with an autographed jersey, which is hanging in the closet of his Lansing one-bedroom apartment until he gets around to framing it; Steve Yzerman signed a puck. A music store gave him a guitar, which he would like to learn to play someday. His hometown, …
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