I was recently watching the national news, and they featured the story of a man who "leaped" into a car that was rolling backwards down the street with nobody inside.  They called the man a hero.  However, when they showed the man's actions in real time, the car was maybe going three miles an hour with no danger of going into a busy intersection, or for that matter hitting anybody or anything, and there were no small children strapped in the backseat in danger of dying, or even just being overly frightened.  Truly, if left on its own, the car would've come to a stop probably no more than ten feet from where that man "heroically" climbed through its window.  Yet, it was on the national news (which was more than likely only because they had video of it), and they called the man a hero... even though nothing he did was heroic in the least.

Albert Camus, in his novel The Plague, addresses the idea of a hero.  To Camus, you are not a hero if you are doing the job you are supposed to be doing, or if you are doing what anybody should be doing.  And I agree.  A firefighter is not being a hero simply because she squirts water on a burning building.  Running into that burning building to save somebody when she knows her own safety is in danger might not even be considered heroic.  After all, isn't that what a firefighter is supposed to do?  Isn't that what she's trained to do?  

We've overused the term "hero" so much that it's become a cliché.  It truly means nothing to be a hero if all it requires is that somebody wear a hat.  Take me.  I was in the Navy.  I wore a Navy hat.  That did not make me a hero.  And that's because I didn't do anything heroic.  There's nothing heroic about sitting in front of a teletype reading garbled messages.  Even if I had deciphered a message that saved the world from nuclear annihilation it wouldn't've made me a hero.  It just would've made me good at my job.  Joining the service, being a cop or a firefighter, does not make somebody a hero.  That requires doing something heroic. 

And even then, we shouldn't confuse bravery with being a hero.  That guy who "leaped" into the rolling car could've gotten his toes run over had he not been careful, and I'm sure that really would've hurt.  Risking the chance of pain, though, is not being a hero.  It's just being brave, at most.

My father saw the flag go up on Iwo Jima – you know, the famous one where the six Marines raised the Stars and Stripes on top of Mount Suribachi.  He was there. To this day, he still doesn't call those six fellow-Marines heroes.  He thinks they were idiots for risking their lives doing something that didn't need to be done, at least, not at that moment.  And my father has never considered himself a hero for anything he did during World War II, or Korea, for that matter.  I suspect he may have, but those are stories he's never shared, and I don't suspect he ever will.

Don't get me wrong.  There are really people who act heroically, and that makes them heroes, and we should recognize them as such.  If a soldier gets shot in combat, that really doesn't make her a hero.  It makes her unlucky.  And, truly, what choice did she have?  Desertion in the face of the enemy is still an offense you can be shot for.  You can't be a hero for doing something we'd shoot you for if you didn't.  However, if that wounded soldier keeps crawling back onto the battlefield to save her buddies, and every time she goes back out, she gets shot again... but she keeps going out... and she doesn't stop until she's dead or all of her comrades have been pulled to safety... that woman is a hero.

A hero is somebody who does something heroic.  A hero goes beyond what we would expect anybody to do in that situation.  Leaping off of a bridge onto the top of an out-of-control-bus, climbing through the side window and stopping it before it plunges off the side of a cliff... yeah, I'd call that heroic, but only if there are people on that bus that needed to be saved.  But there's more to it than that.  For an action to be heroic, you first must have a choice.  You must choose to run into that burning building when you don't have to.  You must choose to go back out onto that battlefield when you don't have to.  You must choose to jump off that bridge onto that bus when the chances of stopping it are next to none, along with your chances of surviving any of it.  But it's more than that.  You must do something that nobody would find fault with you if you didn't.  Dude!  You've been shot five times.  Stay here and let somebody else rescue the other soldiers who are wounded.  That's being a hero.  That's not something you will see everyday.  It is not a common occurrence.

A true hero is rare, and it needs to stay that way.  Because when we call people who crawl through the window of a slowly moving car that is in no danger of hurting anybody a hero, it lessens the acts of those people who truly act heroically.  And if you've ever met a true hero, we owe them that.