"Where death becomes absurd and life absurder" - Literary Responses to War & Peace

Do you have to be a hero? | October 1, 2009

We all have different definitions of what we believe heroism to be.  I think in the broadest sense, everyone feels that there is a certain grandeur that needs to be present in an event or person for it to be classified as heroic.  However, any personal connection with said event/person might cause that definition to be slightly less grand.  This lofty idea of heroism can also make people feel inadequate if they have been faced with adversity in combat or some other situation and he or she has not lived up to heroic expectations.

For many people loss of a loved one, in any situations, but in war especially, can be more easily justified of there is a logical explanation or some greater good was achieved.  In the instance of Vera Brittan’s “Testament of Youth”, the death of Roland nearly ruin Vera.  The only solace she finds is that perhaps his death had been a heroic one and served a greater purpose than his life.  Vera contacts everyone who had any sort of connection to Roland’s death to reaffirm this notion.

Brittan claims, “had it been heroism or folly, I asked myself for the thousandth time, which had urged him forth to inspect the wire beneath so bright a moon?  In those days it seemed a matter of life or death to know.” (243)

Whether Roland acted heroically or not does not change the brutal fact that he has died.  However, if Vera can manage to put a positive spin on his death, his memory will be better preserved.  This notion of verbally adjusting events of combat to make oneself seem more heroic is still prevalent today,  and I believe will continue to be for as long as we hold heroism up on such a high pedestal .  In an MSNBC article about the Library of Congress’s efforts to gather American veterans’ personal war stories.  The article claims that the stories have been

“peppered with inaccurate information and fraudulent claims of heroism”

which cheapened the Library’s efforts.  One of the main inaccuracies that the article identifies are people claiming to be awarded Medals of Honor when they have not.

The incorrect Medal of Honor listings are just the tip of the iceberg in a collection of 50,000 oral and written histories that also includes numerous other errors regarding everything from lesser medals to rank attained and whether or not the soldier was ever a prisoner of war, according to outside experts on the database.

I think this shows that the majority of people who have participated in any war feel like they need to have done something great to be considered heroic.  It is society that expects every soldier to be a hero and this pressure is what has caused embellishment or stretching of the truth in the stories collected by the Library of Congress.  However, lacking a medal or an extravagant story does not make military service any less honorable and if everyone came out of combat with these things it would cheapen our perception of a hero.

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