"hero" (UNCLASSIFIED)

[Mullins, Bill AMRDEC]

Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
Caveats: NONE

I hope my "joke" doesn't imply that I think the Explosive Ordnance
Disposal team weren't brave people.

Somewhere I read that the average lifetime of a deployed EOD tech in
Viet Nam was counted in months.


But to me, a hero's actions have to:

1.  be active, rather than passive (simply having the bad luck to stand
in the way of a psychopath's flying bullets, or being in a building that
gets hit by an airplane, is sad, but not heroic.)
2.  involve a conscious choice to face rather than avoid something that
is dangerous.  The cops who secured the perimeter at Columbine, while
Klebold and Harris continued to shoot people inside, don't qualify.




> -----Original Message-----
> From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On
Behalf Of
> Jonathan Lighter
> Sent: Wednesday, July 25, 2012 10:58 AM
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> Subject: Re: "hero" (UNCLASSIFIED)
>
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
----------------------
> -
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: "hero" (UNCLASSIFIED)
>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
------
> -
>
> Amusing.
>
> BTW, I forget to mention, in the theater, the explosion, the smoke,
the
> tear gas, the panic, the  blood, and the sight of wounds.
>
> Yup, a real man coulda taken the dude down.
>
> JL
>
> On Wed, Jul 25, 2012 at 10:53 AM, Mullins, Bill AMRDEC <
> Bill.Mullins at us.army.mil> wrote:
>
> > ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> > -----------------------
> > Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> > Poster:       "Mullins, Bill AMRDEC" <Bill.Mullins at US.ARMY.MIL>
> > Subject:      Re: "hero" (UNCLASSIFIED)
> >
> >
------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
> ---
> >
> > Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
> > Caveats: NONE
> >
> > >
> > > The police performed superbly in nabbing the guy in the parking
lot,
> > alive,
> > > and defusing his booby traps before they blew the roof off the
> > apartment
> > > house.
> > >
> >
> > Given that booby traps had been defused, would it not have been even
> > more heroic to _not_ blow the roof off the building?
> > Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
> > Caveats: NONE
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------
> > The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
> >
>
>
>
> --
> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the
truth."
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
Caveats: NONE

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