A Lack of Faith in Wartime Hero Worship

At 1 in the morning on March 24, as the Iraq war ground through another day, I found myself sitting in the Fox News studios in New York. I was a former enlisted guy embedded among the journalists -- a color commentator during those ungodly, zero-dark-thirty hours of the war.

An hour earlier, in the green room, I had learned that Al Jazeera was showing clips from Iraqi TV: A bunch of young American GIs got lost in Nasiriyah and had been assassinated; some were kept alive, beaten and interrogated on camera.

What could I say? I had been a Marine Corps tractor-trailer driver in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait during the Gulf War. I knew how easy it was to get lost, how exhausted the young drivers must have been, that they probably didn’t have radios or GPS units -- and if they did, the stuff probably didn’t work. Three guys in our unit had been killed, dozens injured, hundreds of trucks destroyed.

So when I looked into the monitor and Fox’s Washington correspondent asked me to comment on the loss of the 507th, I could say nothing more inspiring than: “You know, you’re driving this truck and you can find yourself 30 or 40 or 100 miles in the wrong direction -- sometimes that wrong direction is going to be where the enemy is. That’s horrible. But the story of war from Homer to now is one of horror and tragedy, so I guess we can’t be too surprised....”

I didn’t know what else to say. That was what I knew.

Col. David Hunt, who was also in the studio that night, was able to articulate a well-calibrated rage against the Iraqis. He immediately made the lost kids out to be heroes.

His story, not mine, became the accepted version.

Ultimately, Jessica Lynch, one of the missing GIs, was rescued, borne on a stretcher with an American flag draped over her body in a night-vision glow of patriotism. According to the newspapers, she had been the one to fire to her last round. She’d been shot several times doing so. She was a hero! -- just as Col. Hunt had predicted.

Except she wasn’t a hero. She was a young woman from West Virginia who joined the service because she wanted to make 1,100 bucks a month and get out of town. Turned out to be a bad bargain, as she soon found herself in a very ugly place. But at least she survived, unlike her best friend, Lori Piestawa. Death in war doesn’t discriminate for sex or race, reason for enlistment or patriotic values. It’s meaning-free, full stop.

Why are we so desperate for heroes, anyway? The ancient Greeks, who taught us the term, found the word inseparable from tragedy, intertwined with disaster by hubris: A hero was someone they feared as often as they praised.

We are too eager for an unambiguous world that does not exist. We’re shocked when we hear the young voices of soldiers returning from war, telling us their stories, sometimes banal, often horrible, always contrary to grandeur.

Which is why I should have said, “Jessica Lynch wasn’t a hero -- yet.”

She became one later, when she spoke publicly of the difficult truth of her experience. She had just survived, she was lucky -- she was in the care of desperate Iraqi doctors and nurses who kept her alive.

The Army had created a web of half-truths and fabrications to paint her as a hero. It wasn’t hard to do, especially in those early, uncertain hours. Soldiers are so unknowing of the context of their actions that, as memory collides with history and rumor becomes news, their acts are inevitably tried in a thousand personal “Rashomons.”

Which is why, when they come home and we ask them their stories, we should not be so eager for them to hew to a heroic script -- or even the same script from telling to retelling.

Some young soldiers do turn out to be heroes, but most do not. And all know the deep ambiguity of their experience.

So when I hear George W. Bush get up on podiums and speak grandiloquently on “democracy” and “freedom” and “sacrifice” and “war,” I wonder whether he knows just how complicated these things are or whether he considers himself a hero -- and how much I should fear him for it.

Joel Turnipseed served in the 1990-1991 Persian Gulf War. He is the author of “Baghdad Express” (Penguin Books, 2003).