Too often, I hear the media and bereaved families refer to soldiers, firefighters, and police officers (alive or dead) as heroes.
But they aren’t, not by my definition. Mostly, they’re just doing their job.
To me, a hero is someone who performs an action beyond the call of duty, a person who commits an act of courage or self-sacrifice when he or she didn’t have to; or at least an act that is beyond what would normally be expected of an individual in that situation. When a firefighter rescues someone from a burning house, when a soldier charges into battle, when a police officer gives chase to an armed suspect, they’re all just doing their job.
Granted, it can be dangerous. Certainly, it takes a fair amount of courage and skill. But these people were trained to do what they do; they’ve been taught not only the best methods of performing difficult and risky tasks, but trained to suppress their fears, questions, and doubts while doing them. To some extent, instinct and reflexes take over.
In addition, it shouldn’t take much reflection to realize there must be venal firefighters, corrupt cops, and cowardly soldiers out there. Some of the rest of us perform only the bare minimum of our work responsibilities and get by on laziness and kissing rears, so why should things be any different among a certain percentage of law enforcement, fire suppression, and military personnel?
This week, the Public Broadcasting System television series “Frontline” featured a documentary titled “The Wounded Platoon” that illustrates my point. The film follows the fortunes of a single U.S. Army platoon of infantrymen from Ft. Carson, Colorado: 3rd Platoon, Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 506th Infantry. Since returning from Iraq, three soldiers have been convicted of murder or attempted murder, another for assaulting his wife, and another has attempted suicide.
Since the beginning of the war, 17 soldiers from Fort Carson have been charged with or convicted of murder, manslaughter, or attempted murder back in the U.S., and 36 have committed suicide. Whether their war experiences have driven them to such madness, or they were unstable to begin with, is immaterial. My point was, and remains, that nobody is automatically a hero simply due to his or her professional role.
This automatic tendency to refer to certain classes of trained workers as “heroes” simply by virtue of their position reaches the height of absurdity when soldiers in Iraq are killed by an anti-personnel device while patrolling in a HUMV -- or worse, shot by so-called “friendly fire” -- and identified in news reports as heroes. That’s as absurd as calling a dead policeman a “hero” because he was on duty and faithfully observing the right-of-way when an off-duty colleague, driving drunk, plowed into his cruiser.
It’s when a person has time to think about what he’s doing, when she isn’t obligated to step outside her daily routine, training, and duties, but goes ahead and chooses to act anyway, that a person becomes a hero.
Watch the documentary, “The Wounded Platoon” here:
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