Can All Soldiers Be Considered Heroes?

When someone mentions our troops we are immediately filled with the images of them valiantly fighting to protect our rights and values that we hold dear. We envision them heroically risking their lives charging straight onto the battlefield so that we don’t have to. But what we don’t envision is that behind the romanticized view of war and of our troops lies a dark and grim reality. A reality where soldiers have to do unthinkable things because they were ordered to do so by their commanding officers. War is undeniably a force that can change people and cause them to slowly lose their humanity little by little.

There exists a different reality behind the image of a hero that a soldier has

Rise Against, a band, addresses this specific issue in its song titled “A Hero of War”. The song talks about how so many young men join because they see soldiers as someone who is the epitome of hero and they too want to become heroes in the eyes of family members but they don’t realize that not all soldiers are heroes.

“A hero of war
Yeah that’s what I’ll be
And when I come home
They’ll be damn proud of me”

However, as the song progress the man sees that being a soldier isn’t always heroic and that there are times where the soldiers have to do what their told no matter how much pain is caused.

 

I kicked in the door
I yelled my commands
The children, they cried
But I got my man
We took him away
A bag over his face
From his family and his friendsThey took off his clothes                                                                                

 

They took off his clothes
They pissed in his hands
I told them to stop
But then I joined in
We beat him with guns
And batons not just once
But again and again

In the second stanza we can see just how much change war can cause on a person. Until that point in the war the man still had some shred of humanity in him since he tried to tell the other soldiers to stop, but the moment he joined in in beating the captive he lost all of his humanity. This stresses the point that was presented in the the Fall Quarter of Humanities Core that sometimes war itself changes soldiers from simple civilians into battle harden human beings who seem to rely on their instinct in order to survive the harsh situations in the war. Basically the soldiers become trained killing machines and these song lyrics support that idea.

Towards the end of the song, after the man finishes his tour and returns home, what seems to stand out the most is that the lyrics change from:

 

A hero of war
Yeah that’s what I’ll be
And when I come home
They’ll be damn proud of me
I’ll carry this flag
To the grave if I must
Cause it’s a flag that I love
And a flag that I trust

To:

 A hero of war
Is that what they see?
Just medals and scars
So damn proud of me
And I brought home that flag
Now it gathers dust
But it’s a flag that I love
The only flag that I trust                                                                                                

 

This change in the repetition of the lyrics is very significant because it shows that he had a false impression of the soldiers being heroes. He now realizes that all that the people see when they see soldiers is this heroic image of them but it doesn’t cross their minds that some soldiers had to perform twisted things on the battlefield. The man still believes that he did what he had to do for his country but he doesn’t hold that naïve view of soldiers anymore. Throughout his life he will be hailed as a hero but no one will really understand that he committed atrocities on the battlefield that don’t earn him the name of hero. In the end what really matters is that not all soldiers are heroes. Ultimately war forces the men that enlist to change and lose their humanity but how ling it takes for that to happen is up to them.