He comes into the chamber on a walker.
The uniform is full dress, the chest a grid of ribbon, the leg still healing under the trouser. His wife Amy stands beside him. The President speaks from the rostrum, the gallery rises, the chant goes up, USA, USA, and a three-star general reaches over the rail to settle the pale blue ribbon around his neck. No President had ever handed out the Medal of Honor at a State of the Union before this night. Eric Slover (b. 1980) is forty-five years old and he steadies himself on aluminum tubing to receive it.
Six weeks earlier he sat in the right seat of an MH-47 Chinook in a jungle valley outside Caracas, leading a flight of helicopters through air defenses and weather and terrain toward the compound where Nicolás Maduro (b. 1962) was sleeping. The aircraft touched down. Machine guns opened from close range. Fifteen armor-piercing rounds came through the cockpit glass. Four of them went into his leg and hip. He held the rotor disc level, kept the aircraft in the line of fire long enough for the assault force to get out the back, then turned the airframe so his door gunner could kill the guns that were firing on the men on the ground. After that he flew the Chinook back to the USS Iwo Jima with his leg in pieces. Then he told his copilot, who was also hit, to take the controls.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) would have understood the walker and the chant as one event, not two. In The Denial of Death he argues that a man lives by a hero system, a structure of meaning that tells him his life counts in a drama larger than his body, and that the structure exists to hold off two terrors at once. The first terror is the body. A man is an animal that bleeds out in a valley, a femur that shatters, meat that the jungle takes back. The second terror is worse and quieter. It is the fear that the bleeding meant nothing, that the seat was given to a man who could not hold it, that the eleven souls in the back went down in a fireball deep in enemy country and the name attached to the failure was his. Becker’s claim is that the second terror governs the first. Slover keeps the disc level not to save his leg. He keeps it level so the death, if it comes, will read as something.
What the citation calls valor sits on a set of sacred words. The words look plain. Control. The crew. Pain. Sacrifice. The name. Each word does specific work inside Slover’s hero system, and the same word, carried into another man’s system, means something he might not recognize.
Take control first, because control is the whole vocation of the warrant officer. Slover holds the rank of Chief Warrant Officer 5, the highest of the warrant grades, the first man at that rank to receive the medal. The warrant officer commands no formation. He masters a craft. His authority comes from the airframe and his hands on it, not from a column of soldiers who salute him. For the pilot, control names the marriage of will and machine. The body serves the aircraft. The legs work the pedals, the hands work the cyclic and collective, and the disc stays level because the man refuses to let physics carry the ship where physics wants to go. Control is what he has instead of command.
Carry the word to a trauma surgeon and it turns over in your hand. The surgeon also speaks of control, of controlling the bleed, controlling the field, controlling the airway. For him the body on the table is not the instrument. It is the object. The surgeon’s calm hands work on flesh that belongs to someone else, and control means a sterile field and a clamped artery and a heart rate that comes down. The pilot extends control outward through a machine that obeys him. The surgeon imposes control downward on a body that does not.
Carry it to a Stoic and the word reverses. Epictetus (c. 55-135), who was a slave before he was a teacher, builds his whole school on the division between what is up to us and what is not. The judgments are up to us. The body is not. The bullets are not. A Stoic reading the citation says that Slover’s leg was never his to control and never could be, that the only thing in that cockpit under his authority was his assent to the situation, and that his freedom lay in wanting what happened rather than in steering the ship. The soldier achieves his heroism by claiming control over the nearly uncontrollable. The Stoic achieves his by releasing the claim. Same word. Opposite spiritual posture.
Now the crew. Trump told the chamber that the lives of Slover’s fellow warriors hinged on his ability to take searing pain. The men in the back, faceless under night-vision, are the reason a crash is unthinkable. They are also the vehicle. A man cannot carry his own immortality alone, so he loads it into the unit, and the unit becomes the thing that must not die. To bring them home is to win. To lose them is the only real death, worse than his own.
A Pashtun elder in Badghis Province, where Slover flew medevac in 2009, knows this loyalty in his bones and draws it on a different map. His band is the qawm, the kin group, and the brother is the brother by blood and lineage, bound by nang, by honor, and by the long arithmetic of badal, the obligation of revenge. The loyalty runs as deep as Slover’s and deeper into the past, and it owes nothing to a recruiting office or a security clearance. The American crew is a brotherhood assembled by the state and dissolved by reassignment. The qawm is a brotherhood you are born into and buried inside.
A wildland firefighter on a hotshot crew loves his squad the way Slover loves his, forged on deployment, sealed by the work no one outside the work can see. But the firefighter has no enemy. His fire wants nothing, hates no one, neutralizes nothing. The warrior frame breaks against it. There is the line to hold and the burn to read and the brother to keep alive, and there is no gun to turn the aircraft toward. The crew-love survives. The enemy drops out, and with him drops the whole grammar of valor against fire that does not know you are there.
An effective altruist reads the same loyalty as the flaw in the design. The eleven men in the back are eleven men, and the moral circle should not bend around the fuselage that happens to hold them. He asks how many lives the operation saved against how many it cost and whether the dollars and the risk bought more good somewhere else, and he treats the love of your own as the bias the impartial mind exists to correct. The thing Slover would die for, the EA would subtract. The crew, to him, is a coalition, and coalition feeling is the bug.
Then there is pain, and the offered body. The President built his account on it, on the man absorbing shot after shot and flying anyway, on the success of the mission hinging on the ability to take searing pain. The wound is the proof. The Purple Heart is the receipt. The leg, shredded, earns the seat the way nothing else can. In Slover’s system suffering is the toll paid for meaning, and the meaning is public, witnessed, sung in a chamber full of standing men.
A Carthusian monk offers his body too, and hides it. He mortifies the flesh in a cell, fasts, keeps silence, and unites his small daily suffering to the suffering of Christ, and the whole point is that no one sees. He flees the gallery. His audience is God, and the offering loses its worth the moment it is performed for men. Slover’s wound is honored before a joint session of Congress and broadcast to the country. The monk’s wound is known to Him alone. The same act, the body given up, runs toward the brightest light a nation owns or away from all light whatever.
And here the essay reaches the man Becker most wants us to see, the man the citation cannot name and the ceremony cannot include. Somewhere behind one of those machine guns outside Caracas stood a Venezuelan soldier who also offered his body that night, who also believed he was defending something sacred, who fired on a foreign aircraft descending in the dark onto his country’s soil. He held a sacred value with the same grip Slover held his. He called it sovereignty, or the homeland, or the defense of a government he had sworn to. Slover’s door gunner killed him so the mission could live. No gallery rose for him. No general reached over a rail. His name went into the column of the enemy, and his sacrifice counts, in the American story, as the obstacle that valor overcame.
This is the engine of Becker’s later book, Escape from Evil. Hero systems do not merely differ. They negate each other. If the man at the gun was right to die for his homeland, the man in the cockpit was wrong to come, and the reverse holds with equal force, so each man’s immortality project requires the other’s defeat to stay true. The two of them shared the value almost to the word and the value pointed them at each other across a few hundred feet of contested ground. Becker thought this the root of human evil, that our finest devotions arm us against each other, that the gunner and the pilot are brothers in the structure of what they believe and enemies in the content of it, and that one of them had to bleed for the other’s meaning to hold.
Watch what the hero frame removes to stand as clean as it does. The citation speaks of countless American lives saved and of complete and overwhelming success, and the frame requires that language. It cannot hold the men the door gunner killed, or the question of whether a raid to seize a head of state and fly him to Florida to face drug charges was lawful or wise, or the seven wounded Americans whose names the country never learned, or the politics that put the Chinook in that valley at all. Charles Taylor (b. 1931) calls the modern habit of explaining a thing by what you strip away a subtraction story, and warns that subtraction conceals a construction. The valor here is built, not found. It stands only because the killing and the cause and the contingency get bracketed off to the side, where the light does not reach. None of this makes Slover less brave. He held the disc level with his leg in pieces and that fact survives every argument around it. It means the bravery and the bracketing arrive together, and the second is the price of the first being legible.
Three coordinates to carry out of this.
The first concerns the rank. Slover is a master of a craft, not a commander of men, and his heroism is the heroism of the technician, the man whose immortality vehicle is competence, the disc held flat when the femur cannot help. Most hero systems reward the man who leads or the man who glories. This one rewards the man who keeps the machine flying. That is a quieter shape of significance and a rarer one, and it deserves its own name.
The second concerns the light. The 160th blurs the faces of its men in training photographs. It builds its ethic on the unnamed professional who does the work and disappears. Achilles chose the short bright life for the song that would carry his name forever, and the modern operator is the photographic negative of Achilles, valor that must stay dark to function. Then this man, the exemplar of the dark profession, gets pulled into the loudest civic moment the country stages and chanted at by name. The hero system built on anonymity produced a national icon, and the contradiction is not a flaw in the telling. It is the telling.
The third concerns the gunner. The strongest test of any hero system is whether it can see the man it had to defeat as a man who also believed, who also offered his body, who also held something sacred and died for it. The American story has every reason to leave him in the dark column where he fell. Becker’s whole work is an argument that the dark column is where the truth lives, that the pilot and the gunner are two instances of the same human need, and that the medal around one neck and the grave under the other mark not a difference in courage but a difference in which side’s meaning the night allowed to win.
