Re: Stop calling soldiers “heroes”, it stops us from seeing

27
A friend of mine was a "hero". He and his buddy were driving down the freeway when all of a sudden the car in front of them veered off the road, flipped over a couple of times and caught fire. They stopped, raced over to the burning car and pulled a mother and young child from the car just before the whole thing exploded. I asked him what it felt like to be a hero. He told me he didn't feel like a hero. He said he didn't really think about it. He and his friend had simply seen something that needed doing and they did it. That was all.

We need better role models for our young men than sports or military figures or celebrities.

Re: Stop calling soldiers “heroes”, it stops us from seeing

30
I was a moderator at a heavily-trafficked depression support chat for some time. I talked to a number of younger veterans. It always broke my heart, pretty much the saddest I ever got on that chat was when talking to young teens and veterans. Here is a guy who literally got blown up, and his country isn't doing much of shit to get him treatment for his PTSD, severe depression, alcoholism, and chronic, extreme pain. If you're going to call them heroes, at least provide them with some heroic level of medical care.

And yeah, the other thing that really crushed me was when the veterans would come on to chat, needing some kind of support that they could not find elsewhere, but unless they were stinking drunk (and in most cases not even then), they would not speak about anything that happened to them. Not only because it would obviously be traumatic, but because they often expressed genuine concern at anyone else having to hear about - and therefore imagine - the kinds of things they had seen.
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