Stop Calling Iraq War Vets Heroes

 Veteran’s Day is upon us, so here is something to think about?  Why do we call our veterans "heroes" when they return from deployment?  If our definition of a hero is someone who sacrificed so much for the good of so many, then the term perhaps applies to veterans of World War II, maybe Korea.  This is not to say that the sacrifices of Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan Veterans should not be acknowledged daily and honored consistently by our government and our society, but their sacrifices worked counter to the interests of the countries both in and for which they fought.  Vietnam is still a communist country; Iraqis and Afghans have seen their homes destroyed, their family members killed, and their land depleted of natural resources.  Veterans themselves are homeless and killing themselves at a rate of 22 per day.  The country in which their sacrifices largely go unnoticed or unappreciated is bankrupt and crippled economically, due to the War each vet has gone through in his or her own way.

In other words, calling Iraq War veterans "heroes" is not only something they don’t want, but it is also something which makes the mission seem more heroic than in reality.  This is a very dangerous thing.  If Americans are allowed to believe Iraq War Veterans are heroes, they might just start to believe that the Iraq War was a heroic effort by the American military that produced a great number of heroes, even though it was a most definitely a tragic effort from the start.  Even still, the mission of any soldier is never the mission of the president or his generals.  Those missions are almost always political.  An ordinary soldier’s mission is their brother-in-arms first and themselves second.  It is survival or, if they aren’t in combat, the mission is hard work and dedication to their job of cooking or cleaning or operating a radio, etc.

So, instead of treating vets as "heroes," we should be treating them as "survivors" – survivors of this American political process.  Vets are survivors of the American idiocy, ignorance, greed, arrogance, hypocrisy, and violence that landed them in brutal combat and then ignored their needs and the needs of their families.  They are not heroes of some political cause or global effort towards peace.  Heroes ought to exist in movies and comic books only.  When we call vets "heroes," we run the risk of thinking they can handle any stressful situation.  The instinctual tendency to call a veteran a "hero" is, therefore, most certainly linked to the absence of healthcare and mental healthcare for returning vets.  After all, why does Superman need a doctor?  Often our social problems in America are deeply rooted an ideological error in Americans’ heads regarding the issue.  Let’s try really hard to fix this one on Veteran’s Day, 2015, and every day after that.