The image of Sergeant Rick Yarosh’s face conjures a whirl of reactions. It is hard not to feel some shock—Yarosh, the gunner on a U.S. Army Bradley fighting vehicle in Iraq in 2006, is quite scarred from burns received when his Bradley blew up, an event that also cost him part of a leg and the full use of his hands.
The shock subsides, and you see that his gaze is frank, straightforward. He seems like a matter-of-fact guy who bears a remarkably heavy burden with grace. But the nature of that burden is a complicated matter to plumb.
In a Youtube video, Yarosh addresses a room full of Medal of Honor recipients and many other guests, including Daily Show host Jon Stewart. “We’re filling America with people who are surviving things they wouldn’t have survived 10, 20, 30 years ago.” He goes on to express a lack of regret on the part of servicemen and women, and says he is “damn proud” to have served the country.
The video, posted by the Washington D.C. area USO, begins with a white caption on a black background: “An American Hero&”. It’s a given that Yarosh deserves to be called a hero—he has gone through more than most of us ever will. That appellation gives pause only in this fashion: what does it mean in a war that has so divided American opinion?
I deeply opposed the Iraq War. It seems likely that the reasons for which I see Yarosh as a hero are quite different than those of a war supporter. Now that Amherst artist Matt Mitchell’s portrait of Yarosh (part of the monumental series 100 Faces of War Experience) has been accepted for an exhibition in the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian, the good Sergeant’s image will likely take on something of a life of its own, a life independent of the flesh-and-blood Yarosh, who seems like the kind of guy who will simply take that, too, in stride.
This soldier, and the many more that he mentions in his USO speech—people who would not have survived their extreme wounds in earlier wars—will be long-term reminders of this conflict. They simply did their jobs, serving the ends of an administration whose justifications for the war—whether you agreed with them or not—shifted time and again, offering war supporters and even the soldiers themselves little in the way of firm ground upon which to stand. The administration who put them in harm’s way let them down. To some extent, all of us did. Don’t we as a nation have a responsibility to offer unambiguous reasons when we ask soldiers to go through such things?
They are, perhaps, heroes twice over—they have borne the costs of war that soldiers bear in the most unambiguous of conflicts, and have done so when those for whom they are willing to fight have been sold a bill of goods and asked to make no sacrifices of their own. These soldiers’ wounds, like those of Iraqi civilians and soldiers, are the uncomfortable consequences of our going to war in an unnecessarily seat-of-the-pants way.
The Bush administration did not let us see the coffins returning from Iraq, but they could not hide the faces of the heroic soldiers who did not die. When Bush visited the wounded—and even posed beside Yarosh for the cameras in 2007—it was an exercise in contrast. Little of Bush’s public persona would indicate that he understood the gulf of sacrifice that separated him from Yarosh. Yarosh, a remarkable man no matter your viewpoint, bears the weight of his place in history with far more grace than the distanced politicians who asked him to put himself in harm’s way.
Matt Mitchell’s luminous painting of Yarosh, together with Yarosh’s statement, has accomplished something fascinating: it is a moment frozen on canvas, but a moment that, in a broader context, goes on. It is a distillation of a story repeated many times over. In his statement, Yarosh begins, “Whether it’s a look in the mirror, or the thought of a lost friend, it all goes back to that day.” It ends this way: “That day started the same as every other day, but that day has never ended.”