At 12:21 AM 5/24/01 -0700, Christopher Gwyn wrote:
> {snipped from a recent post, attribution irrelevant to my
>question/comment}
> > who gave their lives in the defense of
> This phrasing always bothers me when I hear it - and particularly
>when I knew the deceased. When I hear this phrasing it sounds to me
>as if the people entered the situation that resulted in their deaths
>*knowing* that it *would* result in their deaths - but many, if not
>most, of the people whom are referred to by this phrasing were simply
>unlucky (i.e. If they had done something slightly different the
>bullet would have missed them). In many cases the deceased were
>doing something that required a lot of courage and a very strong
>dedication to duty - but they were not wanting to sacrifice their
>lives, if there were any lives that they wished to be sacrificed it
>was those of their opponents.
> (Until a few months ago I lived almost adjacent to a Veterans of
>Foreign Wars Hall and frequently ended up in conversation with the
>Veterans who hung out there. I got several stories out of them, some
>of which could be described as 'heroic' - a term they denied, saying
>that they were only trying to survive. I then asked them about the
>'gave his life for...' phrase - they could think of a couple of
>incidents where that was true, but said that almost all of their
>fellow soldiers who died were either 'idiots', or simply run out of
>luck. They said several times that one of the hardest parts of
>losing friends in combat was that it could have just as easily been
>themselves - and sometimes would have been if 'being a good soldier'
>or 'a good person' were the criteria for survival. They were very
>clear that the few cases where they would say that someone 'gave'
>their life it wasn't someone who was wanting to die, but someone who
>didn't see a way that he could also survive the situation.)
> So why does this phrasing continue when it so rarely describes the
>events, and implies a death-wish that the deceased so rarely had? (I
>know that I would be really annoyed if I were to die 'trying to get a
>dozen handicapped orphans out of a housefire' and someone were to
>describe me as 'giving my life for...' - I was trying to live, I was
>just trying to see that others lived too! Avoiding death was the
>whole idea!)
> Thoughts?
Such comments are for the deceased's family & friends, to make them feel
that the loss of their husband/father/friend was not meaningless.
-- Ronn! :)
