![]() ![]() But many others will not be, and this is one of the problems of the new war. So are those of Todd Beamer, Thomas Burnett Jr., Mark Bingham, and Jeremy Glick, the brave men who fought on the morning of September 11 to regain control of United Airlines Flight 93 after they realized what the terrorists had in mind for the hijacked plane. But the events of September 11 have underscored just how much this nation owes those government employees. Dean came to Washington and received a Treasury Department medal from then-Secretary Lawrence Summers. Both Dean and Harger had their 15 minutes of fame. In this way was Timothy McVeigh apprehended and prevented from committing more mass murder. The bulge proved to be a firearm-a fully loaded Glock semiautomatic. Harger drew his service revolver, held it to the driver's head, and made him get out of the car. When the driver reached for his wallet, the trooper spotted a bulge in his windbreaker. The car was missing a license plate, so Harger pulled it over. A state trooper who was on patrol on Interstate 35 near his hometown of Perry, Okla., in April 1995, Harger noticed a speeding motorist in a yellow Mercury Marquis and fell in behind. The plan was to blow up an airport in Southern California. Treasury Department employees responsible for stopping a 32-year-old Algerian-trained in a terrorist camp run by Osama bin Laden-from bringing a car full of explosives into the country just two weeks before the millennium celebrations. ![]() So are her colleagues Mark Johnson, Carmon Clem, and Mike Chapman. Diana Dean, a Customs official in Port Angeles, Wash., is that kind of hero. It's just that most Americans didn't bother to learn their names. ![]() Well, such people already exist, and did so before September 11. These men and women would be proclaimed from the Oval Office and from every mountaintop as the truest of the true American heroes. What honors a grateful nation would bestow on these saviors! Think of the ticker-tape parades, the Presidential Medals of Freedom, the television appearances. Suppose that a vigilant Customs inspector or border guard had somehow intercepted the stocks of anthrax now being mailed around the country in what appears to be the second wave of attacks on the United States. And, finally, imagine that even though all of that carnage was averted, Americans could somehow understand what could have happened. Then imagine that the murderous attacks were thwarted by the efficient work of airport security personnel or the prescient actions of a few dedicated federal law enforcement officials. Imagine that the horrors that occurred in the next hours didn't happen, that the twin towers still stood, that the Pentagon was undamaged, that all four tragically fated airline flights took off and landed safely. Imagine for a moment that all Americans could go back in time to 8:45 a.m. But war historians and American scholars call these questions crucial. You can't be a cowboy, but you can be a hero." But can a faceless, behind-the-scenes bureaucrat really be a hero? Can heroes actually be anonymous? Or does that undermine the very purpose society has in proclaiming heroes: to encourage bravery on the front lines and to sustain both soldiers and civilians as they bear the costs, the hardships, and the pain of war? These are only a few of the questions posed by the nature of the first great war of the 21st century. "But you still might save innocent lives, and you can definitely get some bad guys. "You won't get a Medal of Honor, a movie deal, or a political career out of it," he says. Today, Miles Parsons-that's a pseudonym-really is fighting bad guys, but he's doing so from behind a computer screen in an office of a government agency he isn't allowed to name, 6,000 miles from the shooting front in the new war on terrorism. "I wanted to fight bad guys and protect the USA," he says, smiling, but without irony. After getting his college degree, he enlisted in the real Army. As a boy, Miles Parsons loved to dress up and play army, usually pretending to be a GI in World War II.
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