On the other hand, there is media kerfuffle on the Right about Chris Hayes of MSNBC saying he has a problem with using the word, “heroes” for the dead on Memorial Day because that word ennobles war and worst of all, ennobles the current war effort. What could be worse? I saw Chris Hayes opening a discussion and saying what was , on the surface, something a little outrageous. This discussion, I thought, had to have more depth. I offer the longest version I can find. What I hear is not exactly depth. However, the question he raises could be a good one. We call everyone who serves a hero. Are they all heroic?
I have been having a similar conversation with my son, a Navy corpsman who is home for a few days, about who we call heroes these days. His job is working in the Wounded Warrior program at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. (He is the one in the back with the ironical eyebrow.) His first deployment, back in 2006, was to Guantanamo Bay where he worked in the detainee hospital, mostly coordinating data. He did that so successfully, he has a citation and medals for his work. His next deployment was to Okinawa where he was responsible for the logistics of sending personnel to and from the war fronts of Iraq and Afghanistan. His last deployment was last year, for six months in Afghanistan, at Camp Bastion, a British military base. Then he was part of a team receiving the damaged from the battlefield stations and moving them further down the chain towards the hospital job he currently has.
He has stories, but pointedly observes that he has always, basically worked at a desk. He is not hero. He works with heroes and has met some heroes so heroic that telling about them makes him weepy. Mostly, he works with servicemen like himself, who are not heroes. They are just doing a job. At base, they should be doing a good job, but that does not make them heroes; we should all do a good job when we work. There is nothing heroic in that.
He will tell us a variety of stories about the people he meets through the Wounded Warrior program. Through him, I have met some of our war’s casualties. Some of those young men I have met were, there is no doubt about it, wounded while being heroes, rescuing other people from harm, risking their lives. However, most of our wounded warriors were hurt while simply doing their jobs, serving their country for mixed reasons. They were driving trucks or patrolling or in a service job. They were not being particularly heroic. They may have taken the job to be heroic, but for most of our servicemen and women, the job of their service is not heroic.
He says that driving a truck in Afghanistan is not inherently more courageous than driving a truck anywhere a little risky, using the Bronx as an example. In fact, according to census bureau statistics, a young man is more likely to die in the cities of the U.S. or on its roadways than when serving in a battle station overseas. Automobile accidents are a major cause of death and disability among young men. So is suicide. Life is risky. What is the difference?
For me there is a difference. I will concede that we have softened the idea of heroism too far. Not all who die or are wounded in the course of duty are heroes. There are true heroes. Among the wounded, there are all sorts of stories. Given the nature of the fight in the Middle East, most people are blown up by IEDs, which leave horrific wounds. He says that, in Afghanistan, at least, people are less likely to get shot because the Taliban cannot shoot straight. That’s a good thing. Getting blown up because your foot landed in the wrong place is the most common way of dying or being wounded. That’s not heroic, he says. He has got a point, and maybe we ought to be more careful in the designation of honor for the heroic. The way our military confers honors for heroism these days has more to do with efficient paperwork than a life laid down in sacrifice. However, I think that volunteering for duty where you know there is the risk of losing limb or life is at least somewhat heroic; certainly if those Marines and soldiers are in the field serving us, we owe them gratitude.
Which brings me back to Chris Hayes, and his discussion about the term heroism. Heroism doesn’t just ennoble war, it ennobles all of us. Mr. Hayes and friends were clearly uncomfortable talking about what might be heroic about war. They’ll nod at gratitude, but clearly think is it gratitude over waste. They offer caveats and hedge their language as if trying to work through a minefield of political correctness. It is a different conversation about heroics than I have heard among our war’s casualties in my son’s living room. But I’ll ask you. Who is a hero? What is heroism about?
May 28th, 2012 | 12:52 pm
Anyone who volunteers to be placed at risk of life and limb; who volunteers to participate in the fight against our nation’s enemies is a hero.
And, that includes your son, Kate.
With that said, as citizens of a republic we are duty bound to debate the issues surrounding any war and not permit an empowered elite to usurp our responsibilities re: the question of war because, it is our children and grandchildren who find themselves forming line-of-battle against our nation’s enemies.
May 28th, 2012 | 11:10 pm
This is a thoughtful commentary, unlike most of the screeching responses to Chris Hayes’ show. I think Chris himself would like it, though he’d disagree with it, at least somewhat.
But I’d like to point out, by the standards of the right-wing noise machine, you too are being grossly disrespectful of our fallen heroes by stating your belief that they’re not all heroes.
But Chris wasn’t walking through a minefield of political correctness as you claim — he was trying to articulate the fact that the language of “heroism” generally functions in this society to place a stamp of approval on anything undertaken by our military. We avoid the realities of war by relying on slogans, catch-phrases and pompous rhetoric. Yet Chris wanted to say this without disrespecting what’s genuinely admirable about the people who do make sacrifices for the nation.
That’s not political correctness. It’s honesty and moral integrity.
May 29th, 2012 | 2:31 am
Bob, my son is correct that much of our armed forces do not actually go about armed and are support personnel. That they sign up for service, not sure where that service will be in time of war, takes nerve or courage or something. (That’s what I say, not him.)
However, I have had veterans, especially Marines, in my classes who argue as my active duty son does. Not all men are Achilles or Hector. Some do heroic things, but most never have to. Yet, if they are wounded, the “most” are treated with the same respect and deference as men who were wounded while being more truly heroic. If you read their stories that I link to, above, some of them are embarrassed about this. Maybe in our democracy we are holding an egalitarian definition of heroism.
May 29th, 2012 | 3:19 am
Mr. McManus, try as I did, I’m not sure I got the whole discussion Mr. Hayes led. However, it was a discussion and he was not the only person speaking. Did you listen to everyone at the table? I agree with you that Mr. Hayes was not the worst at the table in that, although I disagree with him. What I did hear of the discussion was full of slogans, catch-phrases and the pompous political rhetoric of the Left — that’s political correctness. Maybe you cannot hear it because you rely on that rhetoric, too. Just as the rhetoric you hear from the Right sounds like one long screech to you, what we hear from the Left is more like a ululation, long looping ironies without humor. For both sides, on television or radio, that kind of program is rehearsed. The arguments are prepackaged and predigested; the various discreet thoughts emulsified into what must seem like a neat smoothie from that side of the camera or microphone. One reason I do not watch television is to avoid the group-think it engenders.
Hayes pulled an undigested bit of idea out of that MSNBC group-think mass and found himself with a conundrum. Can we hate the war and love the warriors? The question is really about how to cast anti-war political rhetoric, isn’t it?
May 29th, 2012 | 6:07 am
The situations that give ordinary people the opportunity to become heroes are always distressing events, whether a natural disaster like the Japan 9.0 Sendai earthquake and tsunami, or a criminal action involving violence against innocents, or a conflagaration or vehicle accident, or an attack by terrorists on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. None of those events are desirable. What makes the actions of people who respond to these events heroic is a refusal to let those events take lives without defiant resistance, even if it puts their own lives at risk.
If you go read the citations which explain the award of the Medal of Honor, you will find that far and away the recipients were primarily concerned with defending their comrades in arms. They include taking the force of a grenade to save fellow soldiers, to rescuing wounded under fire and while themselves wounded, to staying at the controls of a disabled bomber so that a crew member too wounded to bail out would have a chance to live. None of those heroes (most of whom died in their heroism) was hoping that those awful things would happen. But when the worst case scenario presented itself, they acted on behalf of others. They put their own lives on the line.
There once was a time before the Civil War and photography when people could glory in the pageantry and nobility of war, before the effect of artillery and bombs and machine guns was seen as they turned young men into broken flesh. But no one who seriously understands war now volunteers for military service without understanding that they could be at risk of deployment into a combat zone on a few days notice. Even the paper pushers and medical caregivers are targets of enemy wrath. Saddam Hussein fired rockets into Kuwait to prove that. While our fighter and bomber planes can strike deep into enemy territory, the bases that launch those planes, including especially aircraft carriers, are targeted by the enemy. Even the most mundane activities that support combat against our nation’s enemies are undertaken with the knowledge that wearing the uniform makes them targets. Injuring and killing them is a goal of our enemies, and the decisions made to enlist and to serve despite that risk of harm are heroic because they put the lives and wellbeing of fellow service members above that risk. There are gradations of heroism, to be sure. That is why there are different awards for valor. But serving in a war zone meets the basic criterion for heroism. People don’t volunteer for the Marine Corps in order to avoid the risks of driving in Brooklyn.
May 29th, 2012 | 9:08 am
I think how we think of heroism can legitimately differ based on where we come from. The men and women who have volunteered for service can have their own standards for heroism, developed by the actual experiences of serving. If Kate’s children want to distinguish among various sorts of casualties and declare some more heroic than others, then I think they are welcome to do that in a way that seems base when the rest of us engage in it.
For the rest of us, taking pride in our military and the men and women who make up the military seems to me to be an appropriate (and justified, even in these difficult and complicated conflicts) response without worrying too much about which soldiers saw “real” action or which died in some brave act and which soldiers worked behind the scenes. Because not everyone has to join the military, those that do are set apart to some extent from the rest of us, and when they are wounded or killed answering the call (which we civilians make on them through our politicians) to go to war we as a nation should honor them all as heroes. Let the military make distinctions and honor those who went above and beyond with even more accolades. It’s the military’s right. Let the nation as a whole be thankful for the service of all our soldiers and chastened by the price some have had to pay for our conflicts.
A final thought: it strikes me that thinking of all our wounded and killed soldiers as heroes should, if anything, make us less likely to pursue war and more likely to consider the death of a soldier a supreme tragedy to be avoided if at all possible.
May 29th, 2012 | 11:37 am
I’m sure you’re onto something, Ms. Pitrone. Yes, Chris Hayes’ show does tend to function too much as an in-group discussion among lefties, with the result that to non-lefties — anyone to whom the lefty shorthand is questionable — it all sounds “like a ululation, long looping ironies without humor,” as you so wonderfully put it. Dougherty on that panel was supposed to be the conservative who prevents that from happening, but obviously he didn’t manage it on that segment.
However your response implies a parallelism between the “screeching” and the “ululations.” I was referring to the “screeching” of those who read the headline “Hayes ‘uncomfortable’ calling war dead ‘heroes’” and responded with outrage, vitriol and worse. Ann Coulter screeches; Kate Pitrone, for example, does not.
I used to be a conservative myself … well, maybe a semi-conservative, or (God help me) a pomo conservative. I wish I could find more places where real leftism and real conservatism were in dialogue; I’ve always thought they have, or may have, a lot more in common than they think. And one thing I love about Chris Hayes is precisely that he’s willing to challenge so much of the blandly liberal-centrist verbiage of most TV punditry from a real left-wing perspective — and is even willing to question that real left-wing perspective itself on occasion.
So no, conservative rhetoric doesn’t all sound like screeching to me. Most of it? Yeah, I’m afraid so. But I’m always happy to find exceptions.
Is the discussion on Hayes’ show about “how to cast anti-war political rhetoric”? Sure … somewhat. I think maybe the reason the discussion got as convoluted as it did is because those speaking were confusing themselves over whether or not that’s what they wanted to talk about. But a big part of the issue is substantive: What are we to make of members of the U.S. military who put our wars into effect? When the wars themselves are objectively immoral, what does that make of those who participate in them?
That’s the big question on my mind, anyway, and I think it was present beneath the surface in Hayes’ discussion.
May 30th, 2012 | 10:54 am
Raymond Takashi Swenson and Peter, yes, contaxt really matters. Compared to those of us who go about our lives, perhaps never being called upon to decide whether to sacrifice ourselves or something for others or for our country, anyone who volunteers for national service has to seem more heroic than we are. My son works with corpsmen who go on the battlefield and rescue the injured at considerable risk to themselves. He looks on them as his heroes. He volunteered for that duty, but was put at a desk where the Navy he would be more useful. He cannot honor that, so this is as much about him as about anyone else who serves like he does. Even on terms of utility, he insists I speak to you all about the innovations and inventions of his medical corps that has been revolutionizing emergency medicine over the last ten years. They have a 97% survival rate off the battlefield. That’s amazing. He wanted me to tell you that those guys who save lives are heroes, too.
He and I are still arguing about this. His context, contact with the most heroic and the least, is so different than what is possible for the rest of us, I had to mention it.
I wish Chris Hayes could talk to my son; he could probably get a press pass to visit Walter Reed, if he was curious.
May 30th, 2012 | 11:03 am
Frank McManus, I’ll have to try to remember the “ululation” line and use it again.
I used to be a liberal. I think I still am a liberal in a stricter sense than the term is commonly used. God and Cambodia were the agents of my conversion. That was a long time ago. I know what you mean about the screeches, but that’s not all there is on the Right and there is absolutely no place for someone like me on the Left.
I wrote a response to Pete Spiliakos about the leftism of Chris Hayes that applies to some of what you write here. If Chris Hayes and company want to politicize the military, they are welcome to it; it’s a loser in American politics, especially when we have a volunteer force.
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