Aslaug's Axe Shed

Well, it seems there’s more to be said about warfare and what it means.

One of my readers correctly pointed out that I can’t know what war really is as I haven’t experienced it myself (you know who you are), and he’s right. However, I do have a fairly substantial working knowledge of war throughout the ages, and of how it has been perceived culturally and even personally by men fighting in many, many different conflicts.

I also know it’s controversial to say there are no heroes in war, only desperate men, trying very hard to stay alive.

I know this, and I hope that people who read this also realize that what I am doing is deliberately trying to provoke a response by saying something like that.

Naturally, heroes exist.

But what is a definition of a hero?

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica (a work I would recommend to anyone), a “Hero” is:

“In literature, broadly, the main character in a literary work; the term is also used in a specialized sense for any figure celebrated in the ancient legends of a people or in such early heroic epics as Gilgamesh, the Illiad, Beowulf or La Chanson de Roland.”

We, as modern people, have become used to using the word “hero” to describe men and women performing extraordinary feats of bravery, even before they are described in writing, and for once, I’m not going to blast people for violating the meaning of a word. Frankly, I don’t think Achilles was terribly heroic when seen through modern glasses. He was just a self-righteous, self-absorbed git who happened to be bloody good at killing people.

To the ancient Greeks, that made him heroic. To us, it generally doesn’t.

As culture has evolved overall, so must our understanding of the word “hero”.

In this case, it simply means that our definition of a word has broadened dramatically. So to return to the issue of war and soldiers, I acknowledge that there are heroes out there. I simply refuse to say that ALL soldiers are, by definition, heroes.

I’ve come across people who were dreadfully offended that I didn’t think so (and yes, I’m sorry to say that those people were, in fact, American ? you know who you are too). People who would literally give me grief for DARING to doubt the heroism of every single man or woman donning a uniform and setting off for Iraq or Afghanistan or wherever they end up getting shipped off to.

Well, ladies and gentlemen ? here’s the trick: if they are ALL heroes, it frankly takes away from those I believe honestly deserve the label. Most soldiers today are doing a job. Pure and simple. It is a vocation.

A job.

And it is a LOT less dangerous than it used to be.

Since the start of the Second Gulf War, over the occupation of Iraq, to present day, US losses totals 4,287 dead and 30,182 wounded. This is from March 2003 up to and including December 2009. Six years, nine months. Seven years by now, including however many casualties there have been since then.

These are US casualties only. I am not including casualties for allied countries and I am not including the, in my opinion quite horrific, casualties amongst civilian Iraqis. Nor am I including casualties in the Iraqi armed forces during the war itself.

The United States, over its less than four years of active involvement in World War II, lost 416,800 dead. Never mind how many wounded. The US of A had over four hundred thousand DEAD in that war.

Which, in the case of the United States, officially lasted from December 7th, 1941 (although I believe a few hundred American naval personnel had died previously on two Destroyers, torpedoed by Nazi submarines) to the Japanese surrender on board the USS Missouri on September 2nd, 1945.

Even if we take the ENTIRE Second World War, it lasted from September 1st, 1939, to September 2nd, 1945. Still shorter than the Second Gulf War, and the subsequent occupation of Iraq.

Now, let’s add another number to the pot to give people a little further perspective.

On the first of July, 1916 ? England and her Commonwealth lost 58,000 casualties on the first day of the battle of the Somme. Of these, one third were battle fatalities. I want you to look at that number and I hope it makes your stomach turn.

Fifty eight thousand men in one single, horrific day!

Or if we must stick with American examples, let’s go back just a little further for my last example?

July 1st to July 3rd 1863 ?

46,286 casualties at the battle of Gettysburg. Alright, those were, strictly speaking, two different armies clashing together, but the fact of the matter remains that they were all American casualties. As Lincoln famously remarked, when General Meade refused to chase the fleeing Confederates, on grounds that the Army of the Potomac was not ready for an Invasion of foreign soil

“When will these generals realize that it is not foreign soil and that it is not an invasion?”

Of those forty six thousand men “only” 7,863 were deaths, but considering the way the weaponry of that day and age maimed those wounded by it, as compared to today, it’s fair to say they generally suffered worse than most soldiers wounded in battle today. For one thing, your survival chance if you made it to an aid-station or a hospital was between 40 and 50 percent, depending on how drunk the surgeon was, how many legs he’d already cut off that day (and consequently how much infected, ruined meat and marrow was stuck on his bone-saw) and how strong you were when having to survive amputation-shock without anaesthetics.

Today, praise be to modern medicine, a soldier who makes it to an aid station or a hospital with a combat wound has to be in an exceptionally sorry state not to survive.

Where am I getting with all of this?

I’m saying that while it is dangerous to be a soldier today, and while every life lost in the line of duty is a tragedy, it is a LOT less dangerous than it used to be, and it is no more a tragedy today, than when the greatest President the United States has ever had spoke of brave men, giving “the last, full measure of devotion” for a good and noble cause. Those men had families too, waiting for them to come home.

Just as soldiers do today.

I am simply asking for perspective. Today, being a soldier is a job. It is an occasionally dangerous job, but it is a job nonetheless. And I think we respect and honour those worthy of it far more if we remember this, rather than heaping laurels on every Tom, Dick and Harry putting on a uniform, regardless of his nationality.

Recently, I saw a post my brother had made on Facebook, in which he questioned the incessant “gratitude” called for towards men and women serving abroad. It should be said that he generally speaking does not like any use of military force in the first place, but in this case, that’s not too important. What matters is that he stated that he didn’t understand the calls for “supporting the troops” that are getting more frequent around here too. I pointed out to him that supporting the troops, in fact, did not necessarily mean supporting the war they were sent to fight, but simply saying “come home safe”.

He said that he could agree with that, but that he’d be damned before he’d ever stoop to thanking a soldier for his or her service in a war he disagreed with the legality of.

My brother, for the record, has a degree in law.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion, in any case, and frankly, I find it hard to disagree with his stance on that. But having said that, I too want the troops to come home safely. Of course I do.

Naturally.

My main beef is with the army-hysteria that seems to sweep some people the moment they see someone wearing a uniform. And here, for once, I am not aiming specifically at the United States. I am aiming at people in the western world in general. We can’t seem to dote on soldiers enough, and while I’m sure many of them think it’s great to get all that positive attention, I’d rather some of that attention were spent on people in other walks of life who do incredibly important tasks as well. Having a crew cut, a no-nonsense attitude, an M16 (or whatever equivalent whatever army uses) and a professional dress-code that specifies camouflage suitable for the appropriate setting does not make you a better person than say, a nurse caring for children with cancer or a wildlife preserve worker who tries to save an endangered species. Just to name a couple of examples.

Being a soldier means you have a job. It doesn’t automatically make you a hero.

Once in a while, someone gets the chance to be a hero, but it is rare. And most of the times where this chance is acted upon, it is done out of fear and as a reaction to the most primal, basic drive in humankind. Self-preservation.
What makes someone a hero in war is when a soldier is able to rise above this drive for self-preservation, knowing that taking action will likely kill him or her, and then still taking that action.

That is very rare indeed. And it is, by nature, something which very few survive.

Which is why it is true, when soldiers say “I’m not a hero. The heroes are the ones who stayed over there.”

That’s why it’s not an empty phrase.

Being a soldier means having a job that I can respect a person for having, and which I am pretty sure I couldn’t do, myself. But I couldn’t be an auto-mechanic or a meteorologist either, and I respect those as well.

Being a soldier is a job.

Being a hero isn’t.

Give credit where it’s due ? and respect those who simply do a job for that. It doesn’t take away from the effort.