Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Philip Bent VC : physical courage of the highest order

Agape Valour has no 'hometown'


The idea that most VCs had one and only one hometown - pace UK Local Government Minister Eric Pickles' idea that their one and only hometown should have a government subsidized cobblestone to mark the one hundredth anniversary of WWI - is factually wrong.

Moreover, it goes against the firm ideas of the lady who set up the standards of the Victoria Cross - Queen Victoria herself.

She felt their true hometown was the entire British Empire .

And the lifestories of most VCs shows they frequently travelled and worked widely across that Empire -- before often joining up far from their birthplace to fight and perhaps dying on behalf of it.

Moreover, true valour, like agape love, is distinguished above all by its open-heartedness.

It is above all else that brave willingness to lose one's own life trying to save the lives of others you often do not know and often may not even like if you did.

The standard talk about 'I just did for the lads in my unit' is just that : talk.

Most military units are not even initially set up upon the idea that all its members were to be drawn from just one locality.

Even the few locality-based combat units in existence generally have such heavy casualties early on that they are eventually mostly made up of replacements drawn randomly from all over the nation.

And there is rarely much time in real war to truly bound into the legendary 'band of brothers'.

Replacements are killed or wounded-out before almost anyone even knows their name or hometown.

No, the brave never liked to admit it publicly, but they general acted to save wider visions : the Allied cause or the American way of life or simply to save a bunch of fellow human beings.

Valour wants nothing to do with hometown turf wars....

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