The Greatness of our Military, and how the Media fails us by failing to tell their stories

How often do you hear tales of heroic achievement by our military from the Media?

Oh, sure, occasionally one such story slips through, like Medal of Honor recipient Sergeant First Class Leroy Petry back in 2011, or more recently, former Staff Sgt. Clint Romesha. But how often, and how loudly, are these stories repeated? Here’s an easy test: mention the two names above to 20 people at random, and see how many folks know who they are.

I’m betting none, unless you stack the deck.

Most of us never have and never will see combat (thank God), but don’t we want to know about the men and women who have? Wouldn’t we be interested in hearing about how they conducted themselves flawlessly, under the harshest of circumstances? These people are allowing us to go about our lives, after all.

But no, instead we get a blip of a report here or there and then right back to normal, with most of the stories showing our fighting men in as bad a light as possible. As for the movies, overwhelmingly who we’ve seen on the cinema screen for the past 30-odd years are almost cartoons, parodies of the real thing.

There’s no need to list all of the films to which I’m referring here: if you pick up almost ANY of the Vietnam War movies (or of any other war, made since at least the 1980s), the characters are largely the same: either (1) bloodthirsty, (2) broken and pitiable, ready to snap at any moment, or (3) have just had a John Kerry-esque epiphany where they realize that war is bad, and arms are for hugging.

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You need look no further than the immensely popular, Oscar-nominated ‘Zero Dark Thirty‘ for the reason why.

Its director, Kathryn Bigelow, has been labeled a “Nazi” by Naomi Wolf, & has been the subject of calls from the Leftist Hollywood crowd to snub her from Academy Award consideration completely. Her crime? Allegedly “promoting torture” in her movie, by which they mean that ‘ZDT‘ failed to be expressly against enhanced interrogation, …regardless of whether or not that was historically accurate.

That’s it. Simply for the secular sin of not aligning with their worldview, the ever-intolerant Left demanded both Bigelow and her work be publicly shunned. They ended up being half successful: ‘Zero Dark Thirty‘ was nominated for an Oscar, yet Bigelow wasn’t.

Make no mistake, this was an explicit warning to other film directors. Don’t expect another movie along these lines any time soon, regardless of its box office success.

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How hard would it be for both our news media & the movies to positively feature our military heroes on anything even approaching a regular basis, to cheer our bravest and most selfless soldiers, airmen and sailors? I suggest it takes at least as much effort pretending that they DON’T exist, as it would in telling their stories.

If you agree, please give me just five more minutes of your day to watch the following:

Our heroes deserve far more praise than they currently receive.

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