Dam Busters, Victoria Crosses, Doctors and Nurses

You sometimes forget how beholden you are to strangers for your well being. I was reminded of this by something MG’s sister posted on Facebook recently. It was a simple statement by a nurse, or a sympathiser with nurses, who wished to point out what exactly it is to be a nurse. These kinds of things are all over the web but this somehow strangely moved me. The tract went like this (edited for style!):

"You're a nurse?” Somebody asked. “That's cool, I wanted to do that when I was a kid. How much do you make?" 

"How much do I make?" The nurse replied.

“I can make holding your hand seem like the most important thing in the world when you're scared; I can make your child breathe when they stop; I can help your father survive a heart attack; I can make myself get up at 5.00am to make sure that your mother has the medicine she needs to live. 

I work all day to save the lives of strangers. I make my family wait for dinner until I know your family member or friend is taken care of; I make myself skip lunch so that I can make sure that everything I did for your wife today is charted; I make myself work weekends and holidays because people don't just get sick Monday to Friday. 

Today, I might save your life. 

How much do I make? 

All I know is, I make a difference.”

It is clear that the obvious point of this is to demonstrate that financial reward is not the only reason for taking a job or choosing a career; other factors may come into play. It is not only restricted to nurses. Hospital doctors working late into the night to save some junkie’s life after an overdose; emergency service personnel risking life and limb as they career through traffic at breakneck speed towards an RTA; the fireman who ascends a 50 feet ladder to rescue a child from a burning building. And what of the people who are not even paid to hazard the risk. The mountain rescuers who would climb down a rope in a snow storm to rescue a man with a broken leg; the pot-hole rescue teams who risk drowning or becoming trapped underground themselves to save a party who cannot even take the basic precautions; those of the RNLI who go out in gale force winds and appallingly rough seas in what can be little more than rubber dinghies to pull survivors from wrecks impaled on the rocks.

It is, I think, easy to hold these people up as paragons of virtue, miniature versions of Mother Teresa, prepared to make perhaps the ultimate sacrifice, their life, in return for a scant reward. However, is that elevation to the high table fair? Is that fair on the rest of you?

Is the social worker, burning the midnight oil to research care homes for an elderly client any less committed to making a difference than the nurse? Is the teacher marking assignments until the early hours to give his or her pupils the best feedback possible on their performance, foregoing food and making love to their spouse, any less worthy of praise than the doctor? Is the volunteer who does the shopping for an elderly person and stops to have a chat and make some tea any less humane, possessed of a basic humanity, than the RNLI part-time sailor.

In the end, how you, and by that I mean Western societies, measure someone’s commitment, to whatever cause or belief, is how willing they are to die for that belief or cause. Countries and governments award medals for bravery ‘in the face of the enemy’. To this penguin the awards, lowest to highest, seem to range from doing your job under heavy fire, not chickening out when any sane individual would just give it up as a lost cause and, eventually, to downright, unmitigated, unalloyed foolishness; a total disregard for one’s own personal safety, and possibly one’s crew or company or what have you, which borders on clinical insanity. However that is not the whole story. To take one example: Guy Gibson.

Wing Commander Guy Gibson led ‘Operation Chastise’, the so called ‘Dam Busters’ raid on the dams in the Ruhr valley; the Moehne, Eder and Sorpe dams. Now the first question one has to ask is: was Wing Commander Gibson given any choice in the matter; could he choose not to go? The answer to that is simple and straightforward, no! Once training in the bouncing bomb was complete and they had taken off for the perilous trip through anti-aircraft fire in 
Holland and the Rhine Valley, could Wing Commander Gibson turn back and abort the mission because he believed that it was a pointless exercise and likely to lead to his own death and that of his squadron? (It was, in the end, pointless; it took only a few weeks before the Ruhr industries were back up to full production.) Yes, he could have done so but he would have been shot for either desertion or cowardice in the face of the enemy; even if they did not shoot him, he would have spent a goodly period behind bars. So, in the end, he didn’t have any real choice; it was war and he did as he was told, as he was ordered. He was awarded the Victoria Cross, the highest award in the UK armed forces for bravery! (With respect to the award, the citation lists many other actions as well as ‘Operation Chastise’ but would anyone seriously argue that he would have got the medal if he had not led the Dam Busters raid?)

Why? Shouldn’t every soldier who went over the top in the First World war, under murderous fire from enemy machine guns and who were only doing as they were ordered, receive the same award as Gibson; shouldn’t every man who came ashore at 6.00am on the 6th June 1944, the first wave, have received the highest award for bravery; shouldn’t every soldier who goes out on patrol in Helmand province in Afghanistan, at very great risk of setting off an IED, be awarded the same medal?

At the final analysis, there should be no difference; humans make the difference for political or social reasons, for expediency, to allow sanctioned hero-worship, to engender false hierarchies. I mean no disrespect to the families or to those, who receive accolades for their bravery or their commitment, but is there is a place for such behaviour in a fair and just society?