For a look at some real war heroes – as opposed to the ones the propagandists would have you revere – see my latest, “The Real War Heroes” now up at LewRockwell.com.
The word hero is bandied about so often that it’s all but lost its meaning in the American lexicon. Virtually everyone is a hero; policemen, firefighters, and “first responders” are heroes, teachers, government workers, and other “public servants” are heroes, soldiers, sailors, marines, and drone operators, too, they’re all heroes. The result of declaring everyone heroic naturally devalues the word and we end up in a world where the true heroes are ignored, forgotten or never even considered in the first place. Virtually no one in the mainstream lauds the innovators, the ones who make civilization itself possible. And the businessmen and individual employees, the ones who slave day in and day out to satisfy their fellow man, they’re never celebrated (except of course when the latter is pitted against the former to advance a particular agenda).
This is certainly the case in the military, perhaps more than any of the other categories mentioned above. In fact, the sense of ubiquitous heroism runs so deep that when my wife mailed me a t-shirt that sarcastically read “I’m a Hero,” the irony was lost on all but just a few of my friends. When I returned from my second deployment there were of course many signs welcoming home the “heroes,” but one in particular stuck out as exceptionally ridiculous, it read “I gave birth to a hero.”
Given this idolatry and misplaced reverence for soldiers, I thought it important to tell the story of a few actual heroes. These are men who, despite making the mistake of joining the military gang and allowing themselves to be used in that way, distinguished themselves, both on the battlefield and in garrison before and after deployments. Note that I’ve taken care to use other names in order to protect their privacy, but all other information is true and accurate, to the best of my knowledge.
Read the rest here.
