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Date Posted: 09:59:07 04/21/03 Mon
Author: e_mc2
Subject: Perhaps heroism is like beauty
In reply to: indigo9 's message, "What does it mean to be a hero?" on 09:16:34 04/13/03 Sun

"... in the eye of the beholder."

If my mission is to cook for the troops, and I complete that mission, I don't consider the completion of that mission "heroic", and by extension, I don't consider myself to be a hero.

People have different criteria for what specific feat might be labeled heroic. Your dad believes it to be the completion of a mission. Personally? I think the mission itself has something to do with whether completion of it is heroic or not. If in the process of completing a mission some other incident arises (such as being captured and tortured), the mission itself has nothing to do with heroism. What one endures outside of their mission *to me* can constitute heroism. In the case of Jessica Lynch, based on what's been reported thus far, her experiences do constitute heroism to me. While I understand the concept behind your dad's criteria for heroism, I personally feel it is rather lacking. I mean, if a soldier's mission was to get supplies to a certain batallion, and in the process that soldier encountered a situation in which the enemy was torturing civilians, and that soldier took action to stop the torture and in the process that soldier was killed but the civilians were saved *and* those supplies never got delivered, I would view that soldier as a hero for risking his own life to help others. That the mission of delivering supplies was never completed is of no importance to me relative to what I consider his heroic act toward others to be. Your father may not consider this example of a soldier's actions as heroic, and specifically because the soldier did not complete his mission that soldier is not a hero to your father. I just don't see it that way *at all*. I don't think that the fact that your dad was in the military and I wasn't lessens my opinion of what constitutes heroism. And I don't think that the fact that your dad was in the military gives his opinion any more value than mine as regards what constitutes a hero or an act of heroism.

Completion of a mission might be enough for your dad to label someone a hero but I don't really think your dad's opinion is the universal one.

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