Who Are the Heroes?

The date that we now call Veterans Day was originally known as Armistice Day. In other words, a holiday that was founded to mark the end of a war has somehow been co-opted into a day of military propaganda. This makes me angry, and I wonder why it doesn't seem to make other people angry as well.

Contrary to popular belief, I don't think that every person who has served in the military is a hero. Signing up for the army because you can't afford to pay for college, or because your parents say, "The discipline will shape you up, and you can learn some work skills and get good insurance," does not make you a hero. It does suggest that you are a young person who is trying to figure out how to become an adult, and that, as far as I am concerned, is an honorable and fascinating and sympathetic and eminently human position to be in. Nor does killing a swath of government enemies on someone else's order make you a hero, though it does dramatically complicate your moral, emotional, and intellectual obligations and impulses. Yes, sometimes individuals in the military do undertake specific heroic actions. Some may become longterm models and sources of support for those around them, and that is heroic work too. But they aren't heroes because they have served in the military. They are heroes because their acts of physical or social bravery specifically helped others who desperately needed that aid.

One might argue that military personnel face the possibility and presence of death in ways that make them uniquely heroic. But even if I set aside the fact that most career service members have non-combat jobs, a focus on military service as the ultimate heroism gives us latitude to ignore the perilous work of, say, public health doctors, not to mention the contributions of coal miners and uranium millers, who die every day so that we can keep our refrigerators cold.

Heroes live all kinds of lives. Some are poets, and some are clerks, and some are homeless people, and some are teachers, and some are social workers, and some are sisters, and some are soldiers, and some are ambulance drivers, and some are cartoonists, and some are ministers, and some are atheists, and some are kids on a playground. Why not call the holiday Heroes Day and celebrate all of them?

I feel a lot of bitterness about the way in which the military, over the thousands of years it has existed on this planet, across so many cultures and nations, has repeatedly lured young people into sacrificing their own humanity for the sake of someone else's political and financial gain. I'm not claiming that I have a solution. I don't see how an empire the size of ours can not have an army, and I also don't believe that an American president should ignore situations of genocide beyond our borders. In moral terms, withholding aid may be worse than sending in troops.

There is no right answer because all of the answers are complex and ambiguous. The situation is not heroic.

In 1968 my father's younger brother, Paul, went to Vietnam. Paul was a regular central Jersey farm boy--blond, cheerful, not too interested in school. So when his grades at Rutgers started to slide, my exasperated grandparents pushed him to join the army. He went over as a lieutenant, and in the photos taken before he left he is nervous, chunky, baby-faced. The hat of his dress uniform looks stiff enough to rub blisters.

I was only four years old, but I remember the tears when he left, and later I remember singing songs from The Music Man into a tape recorder so that he could listen to them in the jungle. I wonder if he liked listening to them, or if playing back those tapes was too embarrassing, or distressing. Or maybe the world back home seemed so detached from his present life that he could not even push the play button.

The North Vietnamese dropped a bomb on Paul's barracks. He was killed while he was sleeping. This was not a heroic death. It was just a death--an unnecessary death, a stupid death, one that damaged his brother's relationship to his parents, one that scarred the small nieces and nephews who had learned to love him. His death was a tragedy, as the death of Hamlet's father is a tragedy: which is to say, it reconfigured the bonds of the living; and those reconfigurations created ripples of anger, guilt, grief, led to repressions and explosions, redirected the futures of every player on the family stage.

I loved my fun uncle--that big boy who teased me and played with me and held me on his lap and consumed a ridiculous amount of food at dinner. I miss him, and I honor his memory; but his death saved nobody, and calling him a hero masks rather than illuminates his life.

Yesterday Facebook overflowed with portraits of military family members along with expressions of pride and gratefulness. It was moving, yes, to feel that commonality of emotion. The photographs kindled and rekindled love, and also amazement at the youth of the faces, and also fear, and also grief. These are noble sentiments, and they cross within and beyond the uniforms those children were wearing. Why not call the holiday Admiration Day and sing out our love for all of our families and ancestors?

On October 13, 1915, Scottish poet Charles Hamilton Sorley, a captain in the British army, was shot in the head by a German sniper, years before anyone dared to think about an armistice day. According to Wikipedia, his favorite activity as a high schooler was "cross-country running in the rain," an image that makes me want to cry. In his memoir Goodbye to All That, Robert Graves spoke of Sorley as one of the three most important poets of World War I, alongside Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg.

Sonnet 

Charles Hamilton Sorley 

Such, such is Death: no triumph: no defeat:
Only an empty pail, a slate rubbed clean,
A merciful putting away of what has been. 

And this we know: Death is not Life effete,
Life crushed, the broken pail. We who have seen
So marvellous things know well the end not yet. 

Victor and vanquished are a-one in death:
Coward and brave: friend, foe. Ghosts do not say
"Come, what was your record when you drew breath?"
But a big blot has hid each yesterday
So poor, so manifestly incomplete.
And your bright Promise, withered long and sped,
Is touched, stirs, rises, opens and grows sweet
And blossoms and is you, when you are dead.

12 June 1915