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Comments on: Heroes https://whynow.dumka.us/2012/05/31/heroes/ On-line Opinion Magazine...OK, it's a blog Fri, 01 Jun 2012 05:44:55 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 By: Bryan https://whynow.dumka.us/2012/05/31/heroes/comment-page-1/#comment-59635 Fri, 01 Jun 2012 05:44:55 +0000 http://whynow.dumka.us/?p=25524#comment-59635 In reply to Badtux.

The military works exactly the same way – if something requires heroics, it is because there was a major failure of some kind. Something was missed, and the military goes through extensive debriefing to find out what went wrong. You deal with a lot of really dangerous things in the military, but you train hard and long to use them so they are not dangerous to you and yours, but to the other guys.

We had thermite grenades available to ensure nothing was left of certain pieces of gear, and certain documents that we had. You release the handle on one of those suckers and you have entered hell. They were common, but everyone treated them with the respect they deserved, because you didn’t want to be inside the vault when one of them was melting the console and consuming the manuals.

Officers may like medals, but ‘zebras’ look upon them as failures. Senior NCOs want everyone to leave the zone in duty-capable condition, so they will climb one side and down the other if you screw up. Unit awards are good, but individual awards are bad. A major portion basic training is to get people to change their focus from themselves to the unit. The military is a group effort, or it doesn’t work.

]]> By: Badtux https://whynow.dumka.us/2012/05/31/heroes/comment-page-1/#comment-59634 Fri, 01 Jun 2012 05:07:17 +0000 http://whynow.dumka.us/?p=25524#comment-59634 In my job, the last thing I want to be is a hero. Because being a hero means I’m doing my job wrong. If I’m doing my job right, everybody else just does their job knowing that when they need what I’m working on, it’ll be there for them, last-minute heroics mean I didn’t do my job right and eventually it’s going to bite us. It’s the teamwork that counts, heroics just get in the way of getting the project done.

I can’t imagine that the military works much different in that respect. You have a mission, an objective, and you get it done. And if you’re doing it right, you get it done in as boring, methodical, and unheroic a fashion as possible, because heroics just get you killed and the mission blown.

– Badtux the IT Penguin

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