The Coward's Guide to History - Foreign Affairs
It takes about two minutes to mash up national anthems—in the example above, from Venezuela, Turkey, Italy, Myanmar, Australia, China, and France—to show how often they celebrate martial courage. In a couple moments more, I could have drawn on another hundred anthems to the same effect, from Afghanis singing that their “sons are all braves” to Zimbabweans “prais[ing] our heroes’ sacrifice. But the brave heroes who inspired these anthems were likely not inspired by the desire to be brave heroes. As Eugene Sledge wrote of himself and other young Marines in World War II, “the only thing that we seemed to be truly concerned about was that we might be too afraid to do our jobs under fire. In The Things They Carried , the famous fictionalized account of his combat experience in Vietnam, the author Tim O’Brien wrote that the “common secret of cowardice” was the “heaviest” thing soldiers carried. Worry about revealing this secret “was what had brought them to the war in the first place, nothing positive, no dreams of glory or honor, just to avoid the blush of dishonor. Cowards don’t get mentioned in anthems, of course, and acts of cowardice seldom make it into the historical record. In his long career as a military historian, Max Hastings noted , “No U. S. or British regimental war diary that I have ever seen explicitly admits that soldiers fled in panic, as of course they sometimes do. ” As a Spanish proverb has it, “ De los... Source: www.foreignaffairs.com
