Christmas Day 2004 marked the start of Capt. Brian Sayer’s yearlong dance with the hazards of war.
A sapper platoon leader in Iraq, he took shrapnel to his face, both arms and his femur and received pulmonary contusions from flying metal that sliced right through his body armor. In that one year, he earned four Purple Hearts and three Bronze Stars, one with a “V” for valor for staying in the line of fire to pull a driver out of his burning truck despite his own wounds.
Sayer recounted a conversation he’d later had with an infantry veteran of the Vietnam War. When the man asked Sayer how he felt about his decorations, “I told him I felt like a fraud, a fake, a pseudo hero,” said Sayer, who subsequently returned for two more tours. “I told him war heroes were guys from Vietnam or Korea who were in real battles. I further explained that I’m just an ordinary guy who happened to be in a bad place and I did what anyone would have done”.
The veteran asked, “Were others present?”
“Yes”.
“Is this what they did?”
“Well, no”.
And what, the veteran asked, did Sayer think a Vietnam veteran might say to being called a hero?
He’d be proud to have served, Sayer replied.
But the veteran corrected him. He said most would say they felt like a fraud and war heroes are guys from Korea or World War II who were in real battles.
Heroism isn’t always obvious in this insurgent war, now in its ninth year, where the enemy is often invisible and success is not necessarily combat victory.
“In a war like this, a counterinsurgency, sometimes you have to make tough decisions,” Gen. Stanley McChrystal said when asked what heroism means to him. “Sometimes, you test your willingness to stand up and be counted and do the right thing”.
Because counterinsurgency is low key, heroic deeds don’t always stand out, he said. But for the men on the ground, the war hero lives — and often dies — strong in their midst, with courage and self-sacrifice.
