ABSTRACT
In April 2003, several US soldiers died in a helicopter crash on the east coast of the United States. The President and the press called them heroes and they were given the burial with full military honours which that status requires. Why, you might ask, when US soldiers die in what, from a journalistic point of view, are high enough numbers but before seeing combat, are they described as heroes? It sounds as though new meaning were being given to the phrase ‘jumping the gun’. In connection with that you might ask why the suicidal acts of desperate young men and women elsewhere, with no army to defend them, not only cannot qualify them for that status, but instead earn them the vilifying label of ‘terrorists’. It may also occur to you that if nations with armies choose to perform acts of personal vengeance in the name of the nation, the guaranteed collateral damage that is always taken into the reckoning makes that choice already – except under the antiquated rites and jargon of warfare – tantamount to premeditated murder. Should not sound common sense tell us that the helicopter crash prevented potential accomplices to murder being party to crime?
