Let me say this right up front. While some politicians may want to try to refer to it as heroic and courageous, I find nothing courageous or heroic about publicly declaring one’s sexual orientation and telling people that their choice of sexual partners is of the same gender. It’s a matter best left unsaid since nobody gives a damn.
But in case you want to hear about real courage and heroism, consider this.
Eighty years ago, on June 6, 1944, thousands of Americans faced the prospect of dying on the shores of France. They did so without flinching, there was no thought of backing out and just saying “The hell with it, I’m not going”. They boarded their landing crafts before sunrise, others parachuted into the darkness over France. Each of them in their way accepts the fact that they might not be alive by day’s end. That was true courage, and those were real heroes.
Less than ten years later on the frozen Korean Peninsula, American soldiers braved the onslaught of tens of thousands of communist Chinese soldiers pouring across the border into South Korea. It was a time and a place where success on the battlefield was measured in inches. While our soldiers stood firm against overwhelming numbers, in Washington a military victory was no longer the overriding strategic goal for our country, instead, we were just looking for a way out. That certainly doesn’t diminish the real heroism that was a daily occurrence by our service members during the Korean War. They fought hard and showed real courage throughout the war in Korea.
In 1960 the American involvement in South Vietnam officially began. It would ultimately cost over 58,000 American lives in a conflict that tore at the very fabric of our nation, pitting families and neighbors against each other. Not much different from our nation’s civil war one hundred years earlier. The Vietnam War ended as Korea did, without a strategic military victory, only “peace with honor”. A barely defined exit from a war we should never have been engaged in, in the first place. But a war fought by American heroes who displayed courage every day in the rice paddies of South Vietnam.
Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, our country embarked on a ‘War on Terror’ that took us to Iraq for eight years, and Afghanistan for twenty years. Combat operations also occurred in many other places around the globe where American service members confronted an enemy who didn’t wear uniforms, and whose allegiance was not to a flag or a nation, but to a religious ideology. Thousands more Americans died or were maimed, and once again like Korea and Vietnam before, the War on Terror has been a war that has not ended in a military victory but continues to this day with no real end in sight. While American service members continue to perform real acts of courage and heroism regularly in small engagements anywhere terrorists operate.
Throughout our history, there has always been one constant. Our nation continues to produce men and women who have been willing to step forward and bear the burdens of war when called upon. They have the will to fight and make the ultimate sacrifice so that their fellow Americans can live in freedom. In other words, they are heroes. Genuine, real courageous individuals. Americans who have risked their life and limb on behalf of this nation. Something that our country is in dire need of nowadays, but unfortunately is more and more in very short supply.
When politicians pander to a particular voting bloc by referring to them as “heroes” and “courageous” for doing nothing more than revealing facts about their sex life that most Americans could care less to hear about, it devalues the word ‘hero’.
At this time in our nation’s history America needs genuine heroes again. We need Audie Murphey’s story taught in our schools so that young people learn about what is truly heroic and courageous. They need to learn about John Basilone in Guadalcanal, Nicky Bacon and Roy Benavidez in Vietnam, David Bellavia in Iraq, and Dakota Meyer in Afghanistan.
Americans who stepped forward in service to this nation, who willingly risked their lives, many even forfeiting their lives in far-off lands, and doing so for something bigger than themselves.
That’s the real definition of genuine, courageous, American heroes.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member