Sounds like a semantic issue to me. At any rate, its a lot easier to glorify dead heroes than to live with the ones who survived. Everybody wants to go on facebook and cheerlead but its funny how the only people down at the va hospitals are patients and staff.
I’m sure it was just the wrong rank and billet. Medals are used to embellish the resumes of people who intend to go higher and further in the plutocracy or the warrior culture that supports it. Back then they didnt understand the importance of keeping the war dogs well fed. Thats changed, mostly, although the best way to get an individual award is still to do exactly as you are told and make sure all blame is directed below your echelon, and all praise is directed above. At least in my experience. I got a few awards but I can tell you that every single one was awarded, ultimately, for showing up to work on a particular day or series of days and nothing else.
Thats another semantic issue. I never shot anyone or was shot at. My unit found its share of ied’s, sometimes by accidentally blowing them up with our vehicles. Of course God blessed my unit and we brought everyone home both times. There were some injuries. These were both infantry deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. At the time I was disappointed because I was bloodthirsty but I see the error in my attitude. This was in 2008 (Iraq) and 2010 (Afgh). At the time, Iraq was more of a police type deal anyway. In afgh we did security and I was about over the marines’ bs at that point but I was still disappointed because I could see all kinds of cool shit directly south of me, and we used to get all of our high-speed shit on and do these rikki-tikki-recon patrols through the wilderness in the middle of the night making sure the taliban wasnt trying to sneak up on us or something. Of course, no, just the coldest and most boring nights of my life in a fighting hole in some anonymous afghan hill. Well its not quite anonymous. Ted’s hill. Ted was a British servicemember who stepped on an old soviet mine on a hill and died. So I spent cold boring nights in the next hill over from Ted’s hill. WITH A SNIPER RIFLE. THAT I DIDNT GET TO USE. and, to be honest, I’m glad (I didnt get to use it).
Allow me to say just one things. All these vociferous supporters of the military are probably the worst enemies the military can have.
For all their flag waving and saber rattling their “support for the troops” seldom goes beyond bumper stickers or insults on he Internet. None of them is enrolling and I think they have hammered in their children’s heads signing up is “not cool”: you have to go to Harvard, go to Yale, start a career… no time for playing soldiers. None of them is taking any time to go visit the military hospital or to go beyond a tweet to provide comfort to a soldier. None of them is buying “comfort packages” and shipping them to the troops. Worst of all they are constantly clamoring for more needless bloodbaths. They are not asking their soldiers to defend Seattle from the Soviets or Anchorage from the Chinese. They are asking to send them over to some God-forsaken valley in Central Asia which has nothing the US wants and whose people pose no threat to the US. At least the French could console themselves that, by feeding troops into the meatgrinder of Verdun, they were defending their own soil.
Surely they are not caring for the veterans coming back home. Sure, many of them will go on to lead perfectly normal lives but what about the ones turned into dangerous sociopaths or those with no arms and legs? Recently I noticed the news are only reporting fatalities among NATO troops in Afghanistan. The wounded rarely makes into the news, yet for every soldier killed three or four are grievously wounded, to the point CASEVAC helicopters have been stripped of all fabric so they can be hosed down once they land to wash the blood. This reinforces the belief war is a neat thing: the dead arrive home in a sealed casket, they have a nice funeral and then it’s over. As Fred Reed said the people supporting this at home should be tied to an HUMVEE bumper and be taken for a stroll in a war zone or, even better, be forced to take a tour of the militar hospital at Bethesda to see the young men who will spend the rest of what cannot be called life be turned from side to side to avoid sores.
After decorating a soldier blinded by splinters, Marshall Joffre turned to his staff and said “You must never put me through this again, otherwise I will never be able to order another attack”. Despite being often painted as a man of limited intelligence and being a career military, he understood it. The best cure for armchair militarism is witnessing war firsthand.
Heroism is just a word that describes a concept. One of the main reasons I admire our troops is because I know they’re going through something I am too scared to go through myself. They’re heroes to me precisely because they’ve faced hell. Regardless of how they come out or if they come out at all, they’ve still got my eternal respect and gratitude for being a part of what they’ve been a part of and doing the things they’ve done with the kind of courage I find lacking in myself.
It’s precisely because I’ve led my comfortable silver spoon type of life that I admire our servicemen as much as I do. They make my comfy life possible through their efforts and sacrifices. So when I see some armchair warrior/pundit talking trash about our troops I find myself overcome with disgust because my moral intuition tells me that they have no right whatsoever to make those comments even if some servicemen might agree with them. It’s not their place. Fuck Chris Hayes.
When I look up the word heroism in the dictionary I find synonyms like: intrepidity (fearlessness), valor (boldness or determination in the face of great danger), prowess (skill or expertise in the field), gallantry (courageous behavior especially in battle), bravery (the ability to confront fear, pain, danger, uncertainty or intimidation), courage, daring, fortitude. These are just words. But to me they help to conceptualize why I hold our soldiers in the highest respect. They represent traits that I aspire to but I don’t find in myself. That’s what makes them heroes to me.
Agreed. Chincy sentimentalism, vapid maximalisms, empty “tough guy” routines, and outright hypocrisy is one of the bigger faults of conservativism’s loss of any significance. Bad as it may be, you can only blame leftist subversion and their “will to idiocy” for so many things.
What’s wrong with just keeping your mouth shut with such professions? There is no need to nationally politicize such people and things, it’s maddness in either direction.
Soldiering is widely considered in the US to be an honorable occupation. In places where the police and army are perceived to be corrupt, this is less the case.
In a private law society, soldiering would definitely be a lawful occupation, while “similar” occupations such as piracy would be unlawful. Because of human nature (feelings of tribal loyalty even on a very large, arbitrary scale such as national borders), many armies would still be organized around some kind of territorial/ethnic/cultural commonality rather than being purely commercial endeavors as in the “PDA Utopia” envisioned by some ancaps
It’s rather silly to suggest that most people in the military are there because of some kind of unusual bravery or courage
What makes the military aggressive is not its weapons or even its purpose for the waging of war but, rather, how it is funded - through tax revenues. It is obvious that we would not have large standing armies and naval fleets in peace-time but for tax revenues. Military goods and services are insanely over-produced.
Ex post collection of payment for goods and services rendered but not contracted by the recipient is just so much buffoonery - the fact that the military “protects” me does not ingratiate me to them, does not evoke feelings of fraternity within me and most certainly does not entitle the government or its military to one penny of my income or wealth. If they intend to charge me for it, they should have checked with me before producing a good or service I didn’t ask for.
It’s ridiculous to either praise or diminish the choice of mostly high-school graduates with generally low private-sector employment prospects for signing up for military service. They are no altruistic angels but neither are they the root cause of the problem of imperial adventurism. The organizational impetus for our military adventurism lies within the ranks of the non-military governmental apparatus and its supporting special interests in combination with the fanaticism of public opinion in the post-9/11 world.
Well for one thing, I certainly wouldn’t use signing a contract after being bombarded with cultural propaganda about what it means to “be a man”, and promises of adventure and learning awesome skills and paid-for university education, because the person had no real direction in their life and very few options — as a benchmark, that’s for sure.
Second, I don’t exactly see how simply following orders even if it means you are putting your health at risk, automatically makes one “brave” or “courageous”…let alone a “hero”. It could just as easily mean one is an idiot.
For me “hero” always implied a degree of ethical and moralistic integrity…doing something of high moral regard in the face of great adversity and possibly to great cost to oneself. Obviously soldiers make a sacrifice, but you will have a hard time convincing a lot of people that what they are doing (possibly a majority of the time) is moral or ethical.
I mean, you could say it takes courage to walk into a shooting range exhibition and open fire on random people (would you not be scared to do that?)…but that doesn’t make such a person a hero in my eyes. According to the definition you’ve given, such a person would be. Essentially as long as someone does something you’re afraid to do, they’re a “hero” to you.
I guess different people just have different standards.
