“Our American Heroes”: Why It’s Wrong to Equate Military Service with HeroismBy William J. Astore[E]ven if elevating our troops to hero status has become something of a national mania, is there really any harm done? What’s wrong with praising our troops to the rafters? What’s wrong with adding them to our pantheon of heroes?
The short answer is: There’s a good deal wrong, and a good deal of harm done, not so much to them as to us.
To wit:
*By making our military a league of heroes, we ensure that the brutalizing aspects and effects of war will be played down. In celebrating isolated heroic feats, we often forget that war is guaranteed to degrade humanity. “War,” as writer and cultural historian Louis Menand noted, “is specially terrible not because it destroys human beings, who can be destroyed in plenty of other ways, but because it turns human beings into destroyers.”
When we create a legion of heroes in our minds, we blind ourselves to evidence of their destructive, sometimes atrocious, behavior. Heroes, after all, don’t commit atrocities. They don’t, for instance, dig bullets out of pregnant women’s bodies in an attempt to cover up deadly mistakes. They don’t fire on a good Samaritan and his two children as he attempts to aid a grievously wounded civilian. Such atrocities and murderous blunders, so common to war’s brutal chaos, produce cognitive dissonance in the minds of many Americans who simply can’t imagine their “heroes” killing innocents. How much easier it is to see the acts of violence of our troops as necessary, admirable, even noble.Comment: I agree, and I don't equate military service with heroism. When soldiers come under fire and don't run away, then I'll consider calling them heroic. Or at least courageous. But just for enlisting and serving? No.
As few people are willing to acknowledge, we haven't fought an enemy who threatened our country since WW II. You don't get a lot of credit from me for participating in stupid and unnecessary wars. Someone who protests these wars, even when the wars are popular, is arguably more heroic.
A commenter on Facebook concurs:
Making sure that you're actually standing for the right cause regardless of the cost--that's heroism.He adds:
This is not just an American tendency...Native Americans as a whole have a thing with turning soldiers into heroes as propaganda.I agree with that too. As longtime readers know, I've criticized the Native obsession with warriors many times. For instance:
Shawn Hawk the "Sioux Warrior"Weaponized drone = Indian savageGang culture in Indian countryIndians join military for paycheck?Bottom line: Many (Native) soldiers are heroes and many aren't. But nobody's a hero automatically. Do something heroic and then we'll call you a hero, not before.
For more on the definition of "warrior," see
Billy Mills Defines "Warrior" and
Sitting Bull Defines "Warrior." For more on the subject in general, see
Indians in the Military and
Diplomacy Works, Violence Doesn't.
