TITLE: Hero
AUTHOR: Vid Z.
NO PAIRING
TIMELINE: soon after Bud was injured
DISCLAIMER: All publicly recognizable characters, settings, etc of the TV show JAG are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author of this fic. The author is in no way associated with the owners, creators, or producers of any media franchise. No copyright infringement is intended.
AUTHOR'S NOTES: written as a reaction to some idiot on Youtube declaring himself to be a hero, just cause he was in Iraq (even though he hasn't done anything special but his job), and who then in a very aggressive manor challenged anyone to dare say he's not. And when reading his lines of bs, I thought of what a hero really is. Here is the result.
I also personally think this is probably my best fic.
SUMMARY: What is a hero? Who is a hero? What does make one into a hero? Looking at two of them Harm muses of the true measure of a hero. NO SHIP AND NO PAIRING OF ANY KIND
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What is a hero?
What is a hero's true measure?
How does one become a hero?
Is a hero some loudmouth who christens himself/herself a hero because he/she is deployed in any of the number of hotspots around the world, just because he/she is there?
Is a hero someone who enjoys killing?
Is a hero someone who deploys to a warzone and terrorizes old men, women and children, abuses prisoners, and in his/hers phone calls and letters home is diatribing about how there are terrorists behind every corner?
Is a hero someone who takes the credit for things he/she has no right to take credit for, who blows up his own role in something beyond proportion?
Is a hero someone who makes profit out of war? Who loots, extorts, rapes, kills?
Is a hero some General or Colonel who takes the credit for his soldiers' wins?
Or is the hero the quiet, unassuming soldier who never takes any credit for what he/she did, for protecting the local, civilian, terrorized indigenous population and not being the cause for fear himself/herself?
Looking through the hospital room's corridor window at LT Bud Roberts lying in his bed and talking to Jen, with just empty space in the place where his leg once was, the leg he lost when he tried to save a small boy from a minefield, and Harm knows he's looking at true heroes.
For the hero is not the loudmouth, nor the selfish bastard, nor the war-profiteer, nor the General, but the person who did or tried to do something good for another person because he/she knew it was the right thing to do, who tried and did something good because it was the right thing to do and never gave a damn if he/she would get any credit for it, didn't care if they would be showed on television, receive commendations, awards, promotions, praise,...
Harm looks at Petty Officer 2nd Class Jennifer Coates, the brave young woman who risked her own life and endangered her own career to force the chopper pilot into flying Bud to where he could receive medical care. She expected no praise, she expected no awards, in fact she herself insisted she did nothing, that what she did was nothing special, and she especially didn't declare herself a hero and challenge anyone who dared think otherwise. She did only what she knew was right, with no thought of her own safety and what she would get out of it, with her only motive being to save another human's life.
Then Harm's mind goes over to non-military heroes, to Greenpeace activists who drive their small inflatable boats between large whalers and the whales, knowing they are in danger of being killed by a pressure-powered harpoon and not caring, just wanting to save that whale or even a pack of them and not caring if they ever get any credit for it. Their only concern and only motive is for those poor, magnificent animals to survive. Or the Greenpeace activists who defy the threat of being incarcerated or even killed by governments (like Fernando Pereira who was killed by the French secret service agents when they sunk the Rainbow Warrior, moored in a foreign country's port) to stop experiments or nuclear weapons tests, tests that destroy our own planet. Or the activists who go against logging companies and many of them either disappear or they are found dead. Or the activists who protect baby seals with their own bodies from the hunters so the poor, helpless animals wouldn't be slaughtered just so some rich women could prance around in their skins.
His mind goes to the biggest and most poignant symbol of heroism and a single man's courage there is: to something he first saw a little over a decade ago, on 5th June 1989, the picture that sent shivers down his spine and filled his heart with awe at the man's fearlessness: the picture that went around the globe several times, showing a singular man opposing a whole long column of Chinese tanks on Tiananmen Square, stepping in front of them and using his own fragile, mortal body to stop them. One singular person actually stopped a whole column of the highest developed killing machines known to man, belonging to the world's largest military, with a single act inspiring thousands of others and changing the world forever by teaching it an important lesson.
One person CAN make the difference.
True, the best known and propagized heroes are soldiers, because their action's help their government's propaganda, but the biggest heroes are not the ones holding a rifle and aiming it at the enemy, but men and women like Bud Roberts, Jennifer Coates, field medics, civilians; peace, nature and animal-protection activists, and especially the unknown man who went into history known only as the "Tank man".
Heroes are people who don't see their actions as something special, who are willing to sacrifice their own lives for other people, for the truth, for what they know is right and good, for nature, for animals, for this world's future, heroes are people who don't demand credit and who especially DO NOT demand to be called heroes.
Funny, the biggest hero the entire world has ever seen, the most influental and well recognized person in the history of this planet, more so than any president or king or a pop celebrity, yet no-one knows who he is.
And since the identity of the Tank man is still unknown, and would never be known, and Harm thus never had and would never have a chance to shake the man's hand, Harm steps into the small hospital room to shake the hands of these two people, the hands of the ones he can.
Of true heroes.
Unaware that he too is one.
THE END
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