Are soldiers heroes, or are they not?

I received an invitation to the group ‘Petition to remove “Soldiers are not heroes” from Facebook!’ today, but there are two reasons I won’t accept it. The primary reason is that I am a firm believer in the 1st amendment. I may find much of their strident message to be distasteful, but I won’t call for censure.

As for their message, ‘Soldiers are not heroes’ have a basic premiss I happen to agree with, that soldiers are not inherently heroes. If they had stopped at that basic premiss, I may have even joined the group.

Many soldiers are heroes, don’t get me wrong. For all I know, most soldiers perform heroic acts during their career and deserve to be called heroes.

Heroism, to me is an individual accomplishment. It is the acts of an individual that makes him or her a hero, and to brand a whole class of people waters down the word so that it loses some of it’s meaning.

All that said, individual soldiers (and policemen, firemen,…) still deserve all the respect we can give them, until they (individually) prove themselves unworthy of it.

‘Soldiers are not heroes’ stepped over that line when they advocated attacking the role of the individual (soldier) when the problem they have is with the policy the soldier is following. They stepped over the line when they describe soldiers as ‘murderous’. Just as I will not label the entire class of soldiers as heroes, I will not label that class as murderers.