PRESENT TENSE:THERE WAS SOME coverage this week of the death of former US army medic Private Joseph Dwyer, who killed himself five years after appearing in one of the Iraq war's most famous photographs, which featured him carrying an injured four-year-old boy, writes Shane Hegarty.
The picture was taken by an embedded Army Times photographer, Warren Zinn, who wondered, in a Washington Post piece that also ran in this newspaper, if the subsequent attention it brought Dwyer may have contributed to his death.
The War on Terror has been defined by many things, and heroism is far down that list. Even the campaign in Afghanistan - which has claims to being morally just in a way that the Iraq conflict can not - has found few heroes. So, as is traditional in times of war, where the US military couldn't define heroism it simply created it.
Dwyer's death came in a week in which the spotlight was on the death of another "hero" of the War on Terror - or rather, on the twisting of the events surrounding it.
Pat Tillman was the professional American football player who turned down a multimillion contract renewal to enlist instead in the aftermath of 9/11. When he died in Afghanistan in 2004, the US military went into great detail about the circumstance.
There had been an ambush, Tillman's unit chased after Taliban fighters, and a 15-minute firefight followed, during which Tillman was killed.
None of this was true. Tillman had been killed by his own side, shot three times in the head. The exact circumstances remain unclear, but the possibility of murder has been raised.
The military knew of all this within a few days, but kept it a secret not just from the world but from Tillman's family until weeks later.
Instead, it took the media, initial collaborators in propagating this recruitment exercise, to chip away at the fiction. When the truth emerged, Tillman's father expressed the family's disgust: "I think they thought they could control it, and they realised that their recruiting efforts were going to go to hell in a handbasket if the truth about his death got out. They blew up their poster boy."
In fact, the full truth is still not out. A congressional inquiry this week complained that it couldn't get to the bottom of who was responsible for the misinformation because those who may have been involved have had a puzzling loss of memory.
The Tillman case was not the only one examined by the inquiry, which also attempted to get to the bottom of the Jessica Lynch "rescue".
You will remember that the army private was badly injured in an ambush in Iraq and was cared for by Iraqi medical staff, who at one point unsuccessfully attempted to return her to American troops. When she was recovered by US special forces, her story was released to the world as one of a desperate firefight followed by a daring rescue. The green night vision footage and the photograph of a brave female soldier clutching a stars and stripes patch while being taken to safety were the foundations for an impressive and briefly sturdy edifice of US propaganda.
As with the Tillman case, the congressional inquiry was stumped by the "lack of recollection" afflicting those involved. The whole planet remembers the version that was presented, but those who created it can't remember how they did it. How fickle the muses can be.
Governments and their military are hardly alone in creating martyrs and heroes, or in turning pointless defeat into great moral victories. Terrorists have done it for years; the media creates its own heroes; and the movie industry has specialised in it. But in appropriating the stories of the dead, governments violate those who sacrificed themselves because of their decisions. While, by appropriating the stories of the survivors, they rob them of their actual experience, replacing them with a cartoonish narrative.
Becoming a hero in such circumstances must induce a terrible sense of powerlessness. This was especially so in the case of Jessica Lynch, whose story was literally rebuilt around her, and who faced the consequences of deciding that she didn't want to play the lead role in her own action movie.
For Joseph Dwyer it was somewhat different, in that the original event did happen as we saw it; the photograph was an accident and was not subsequently doctored. Yet, it's right to ask if becoming a "good news story" contributed to Dwyer's difficulties in dealing with the realities of the post-traumatic stress which beset him.
And yet, accidentally, and via the duplicity of their own side, Tillman, Lynch and Dwyer have indeed become icons of a sort.
Shot by his own side, Tillman's death in Afghanistan is a graphic example of how young men with lofty ideals signed up after 9/11, only to be sent across the world to die in the most unheroic of circumstances.
Lynch's story represents the deceit that underpinned not just her own adventure, but the political machinations that sent her on it in the first place.
Meanwhile, Dwyer's tragic death is a portent of the true impact this war will have on those fighting it. And a metaphor for a nation that went to war for misplaced reasons, and now can't escape the consequences.
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