Public Recognition of War Heroes Has Faded, Along With Their Role as Civic Models

Nic Palmer has a theory about why Americans may struggle to name a recent Medal of Honor recipient. During the Second World War, he says, the US government needed to raise money from the public. War-bond rallies helped do that: a decorated service member could speak, rally an audience, and persuade people to buy bonds. When someone received the Medal of Honor, Palmer says, he was often sent home to tour the country and raise money for the war.

That gave the government a practical reason to make war heroes famous. The soldier was both a symbol of the cause and a fundraiser for it. Palmer speculates that once the government no longer needed public bond sales in the same way, it had less incentive to build those figures into celebrities. He links that change to the move away from the gold standard and to what he calls fractional-reserve banking, arguing that the government could create money rather than depend on citizens buying war bonds.

He offers another explanation, also as speculation: a celebrated young service member could become a political risk. If officials present a 22-year-old as “the model American,” Palmer says, that person might later criticize the government or embarrass it. In his view, that possibility now figures into decisions about whom to promote and even who receives the Medal of Honor. The question, as Palmer frames it, is no longer only what someone did on the battlefield; officials may also consider whether the person could become a liability later.

Palmer extends that suspicion to veterans’ political influence. He suspects public discussion increasingly presents veterans as victims of trauma, rather than as people whose views might carry authority, and thinks this weakens veterans as a political constituency. As an example of their ability to organize, he points to First World War veterans who marched on Washington to demand benefits; Palmer says active-duty troops were called in to drive them away. He argues that if veterans are treated as trusted public voices, politicians may find them harder to ignore.

The argument contains two different claims about what heroism is for. Palmer’s account of wartime bond tours is about a government’s practical use for decorated soldiers. His concern about role models is about what public recognition might offer to everyone else. He thinks people lose examples to emulate when acts of courage disappear from public life. Stories of someone knowingly running into danger can challenge the assumption that extraordinary conduct is impossible. People may be more capable than they believe, Palmer argues, but it helps to have examples that make that possibility concrete.

A displayed list of Medal of Honor recipients brings the discussion to contemporary examples. The list identifies Thomas Payne, recognized for rescuing Iraqi prisoners, and Eric Slover, a Chinook helicopter pilot whose legs were struck by gunfire but who landed safely. Williamson and Palmer look at a photograph of Slover receiving his medal while supported by a walker. Palmer says Slover had recently left hospital and notes that the recognition came quickly; the source does not establish the precise interval.

Williamson asks whether the ceremony might be an attempt to gloss over the political consequences of the operation in Venezuela. Palmer declines to comment on those consequences, calling the operation one of the coolest things any military has done. He recalls a post criticizing Hollywood’s portrayal of special forces as a handful of men who could topple a nation; after the operation, the author returned to say he had been wrong. The exchange distinguishes admiration for a military feat from an assessment of its politics.

Williamson adds another dimension to the attraction of such missions: elite operators may see a high-risk operation as a rare chance to test their abilities against a formidable challenge. Palmer compares it to building a fast race car and wanting to drive it. Their exchange is about the appeal of difficult work as well as its public meaning.

For all the uncertainty in Palmer’s explanations for why heroes are less visible, his case for remembering them is direct. He wants people to have examples of courage, judgment, and service—not only to admire a decorated person but to imagine how they might act in a difficult situation themselves. His concern is that when heroism is no longer celebrated, the possibility of emulating it becomes less visible too.

Palmer’s approach to military history grows out of that interest in what people can understand and remember. He thinks school history often begins too far away from human action: a class starts with a war, backs up to its causes, moves through earlier conflicts and treaties, and only gradually reaches the people whose choices shaped events. By that point, he says, students may have lost interest.

His alternative is to start close in, with a person and a decision, then widen the frame. Begin with a pilot such as Richard Bong: establish who he was and what he did, then explain the battle and its place in the war. Palmer thinks this approach covers less history but helps people retain more, because they first have a reason to care about the wider context.

Chris Williamson connects the method to how people respond to stories of individual need. A story about one person can feel more immediate than a statistic about a much larger group. In a historical account, the individual gives an audience a way into circumstances that might otherwise remain distant. Readers can ask what they would have done, whether they could have made the same decision, and what led someone else to act.

For Palmer, those questions make history a study of judgment as well as chronology. A hero’s story can show not only where a unit fought, but what someone chose when a safer option was available. The lessons he wants to draw concern decision-making, character, and leadership: what it might mean to be a good person or leader when circumstances turn against you. The individual story is not a substitute for the broader history; it gives the audience a reason to follow the broader history outward.

That interest also explains Palmer’s pride in finding stories that are barely documented. Logan Weston, whom Palmer calls “the fighting preacher,” did not have a Wikipedia page when Palmer began covering him. Palmer says his video helped lead to one. Weston’s life spans the Second World War, Korea, and Vietnam; the point of the story, for Palmer, is not only the scale of his service but the decisions within it and the ordinary life that followed.

Weston grew up poor and worked in coal mines and as a lumberjack. During the Great Depression, Palmer recounts, Weston gave his coal-mine job to a friend with a wife and children. A week later, the mine collapsed and people died; the friend survived. Weston later gave that same friend his lumberjack job. After another serious accident, Weston felt surrounded by death and reached a low point. He tried to take his own life, but the gun did not fire. Palmer says Weston later recalled hearing someone say “Wait” just before the hammer fell. When Weston tested the gun afterward, it fired. He took the failure as a second chance and decided to become a preacher.

The plan was interrupted by the draft. Palmer says Weston was studying at a religious college when he was called up, before the United States entered the war. At induction, men were directed toward different roles. Weston did not know what the choices meant and went to the infantry.

His first landing in the Pacific was at Guadalcanal, but the battle he expected to enter had ended months earlier. He was later sent to New Georgia, where, Palmer says, his company was surrounded for 29 days with little food and no supplies. Weston was among the last men still able to move by the end. When the company was surrounded again, the men had learned from the earlier experience. They repelled attacks and, with help from local guides, identified edible plants. In Weston’s memoir, as Palmer recounts it, the men even held cooking competitions with what they could find.

On a night reconnaissance, Weston and a local guide came under fire. Palmer recalls rounds striking Weston’s helmet, passing through his coat and pocket, and hitting his boot without wounding him. The guide had heard Weston talk about his Christian faith and interpreted the near misses as evidence that Weston’s God had protected him. He asked to become a Christian. After they prayed together, the guide apparently decided that he, too, could not be hit. He began singing and dancing behind enemy lines; Weston had to tell him to stop.

The comic episode sits beside a harder turn. After this stretch in the Pacific, Weston received two letters from home: one from his fiancée, who was leaving him, and another from his parents, who were divorcing. When a dangerous mission was offered to volunteers, he signed up.

Palmer says Weston joined Merrill’s Marauders, a force of experienced jungle fighters sent from India into China to fight the Japanese. He describes the march to the operating area as roughly 800 miles. For months in the jungle, the unit depended on airdrops for food, ammunition, and other supplies—deliveries that also revealed its position. Palmer does not recall the precise casualty figure, but says only about 300 of the original 3,000 members finished the campaign. Weston was wounded and evacuated near the end.

He returned to the military for the Korean War. Palmer says Weston had hoped to serve as a chaplain but was too old for the role and went back into the infantry. At the Pusan Perimeter, Weston spotted approaching soldiers and recognized their uniforms and rifles as North Korean, not friendly South Korean. His warnings were dismissed more than once. When the attack came, Weston and about 30 men held their position. Palmer says men under Weston’s command were credited with killing two to three hundred attackers; he argues that their stand may have prevented a breakthrough that could have ended South Korea’s resistance.

Weston was nominated for the Medal of Honor, but, according to Palmer, the officer who had dismissed his warning ensured the nomination was reduced to a Distinguished Service Cross. Palmer’s account is that a Medal of Honor investigation would have exposed the officer’s mistake. Weston later faced three tanks with an anti-tank crew. The other crew members were killed by tank fire; Palmer says Weston knocked out one tank with a bazooka and took out the other two at close range.

By the end of the Korean War, Weston was in his mid-40s. At 46, he became a Green Beret. He later helped write a manual on jungle warfare and counterinsurgency, drawing on his experience with Merrill’s Marauders, and served as an adviser in Laos during the Vietnam War. Palmer says Weston was hit by a sniper on his last day in Korea, but the bullet was stopped by the Bible in his breast pocket. After retiring, he served as a chaplain at Texas A&M for ten years.

That return to community life matters to Palmer as much as the combat. He says many people he covers made it home and became parents, neighbors, or chaplains. Someone could fight across several wars and then spend the rest of his life serving a community without telling people what he had done. In Palmer’s telling, heroism does not have to become a permanent public identity.

The people Palmer likes to cover often refuse to accept that an official plan is good enough. Asked why some effective service members also seem rebellious, he suggests that major achievement often requires enough confidence to act when other people are sure you are wrong.

He compares that conviction to Henry Ford’s account of refusing to give people what they said they wanted—faster horses—instead of making a car. The point is not that every rule should be ignored. It is that a person may have to trust a judgment before others agree. Palmer sees that quality in people who decide a tactic, procedure, or order is not meeting the need in front of them.

Pappy Gunn is his clearest example. Paul Irving Gunn was a Navy pilot who had retired and moved to the Philippines. When the Second World War began, he had a wife and two children there. Palmer says Gunn tried to get his family out as the Japanese advanced, but was ordered to fly senior personnel to Australia. While he was away, MacArthur declared Manila an open city; Gunn’s family was captured.

Gunn returned to military service and tried to get back to the Philippines. After several unsuccessful attempts, he joined a unit in Australia. There, he found American B-25 bombers under Dutch control. Gunn and other pilots forged documents and took the planes, Palmer says. When they discovered the bombers lacked bombsights, Gunn went back and took the equipment from a supply sergeant at gunpoint.

He also thought the existing bombing tactics were ineffective. Palmer describes high-altitude attacks as attempts to hit small, moving targets by dropping bombs from far above. Gunn wanted planes to fly low and drop bombs directly on ships, but first needed to suppress their anti-aircraft guns. Palmer says Gunn modified A-20 light bombers by mounting six .50-caliber machine guns in the nose, working through problems of weight, vibration, and balance. The A-20s could strafe a ship’s deck while B-25s came in low to drop bombs.

Gunn then put guns on the B-25s as well. Palmer says he fitted eight .50-caliber machine guns into their noses. When a broken pinky got in the way of his work, Gunn asked a surgeon to amputate it. The surgeon refused until Gunn threatened him with a pistol.

At the Battle of the Bismarck Sea, Japanese ships carrying a division were heading to reinforce New Guinea. Palmer estimates the force at between 8,000 and 12,000 troops. He says the Japanese mistook Gunn’s low-flying aircraft for torpedo bombers and turned toward them, exposing the decks to strafing. Gunn’s aircraft attacked, and the B-25s bombed at low altitude. Palmer says all eight troop carriers were sunk.

The attack led General Kenney, who commanded the air war in the Pacific, to push for mass production of Gunn’s B-25 conversion. Engineers in the United States initially argued that the design would not work. Gunn returned to demonstrate it. Palmer says the engineers then developed a version with 12 .50-caliber guns. Gunn went further on another variant, fitting four machine guns and a 75-millimeter gun from a Sherman tank. Palmer describes both configurations as becoming official versions of the aircraft. A photograph shown during the discussion shows men working on a modified B-25 nose; Palmer points out the machine guns and the tank cannon.

Gunn was eventually reunited with his wife and children after they were recovered from captivity. His effort to reach them unfolded alongside the wider military campaign: he designed, tested, and flew aircraft modifications while trying to get back to his family.

The same tension between caution and action appears in Palmer’s account of the Battle of Trenton. The battle took place on December 26, 1776, after Washington’s army crossed the Delaware on Christmas night. Palmer says Washington had spent much of the Revolutionary War fighting defensively, trying to make the cost of continuing too high for the British. By that winter, many colonial volunteers were nearing the end of their enlistments. Washington needed a victory to persuade them to stay and give the cause momentum.

The operation required a night crossing and an attack on the Hessian garrison at Trenton. Washington’s men needed boats used for local commerce. They tried to buy them, then rent them, and took them when neither option worked. Palmer says only two of the three groups made it across as planned. Henry Knox, a former bookseller who had become an artillery expert, brought cannons into town rather than leaving them at a distance. At crossroads, the guns could fire canister shot: a mass of smaller projectiles Palmer likens to a giant shotgun blast.

Palmer says the Hessians were German soldiers serving the British, rather than British regulars. He recounts that civilians in Trenton helped the Americans during the battle. His focus is on the pressure behind the decision: after a series of defeats and with enlistments expiring, Washington needed a win before the army dissolved. Trenton was a risky departure from the defensive approach Palmer describes, at a moment when caution alone might have ended the war through attrition.

Palmer says he often hears from people whose grandfathers served in the Second World War and never talked about it. After a veteran dies, a family may find a display of medals and realize he was more decorated than they knew. Palmer explains that a Bronze Star with a V device signifies valor; a Bronze Star without it could recognize other kinds of service.

He does not treat silence, by itself, as proof of post-traumatic stress. His explanation is partly historical and partly practical. Many men who fought in the Second World War, he says, came from places with little electricity or indoor plumbing and limited exposure to modern technology. They went from rural lives into aircraft, tanks, radios, radar, and combat on a scale that would have seemed like science fiction, then returned to families with no shared frame of reference. Explaining that experience to someone who had never seen an airplane could feel, he says, like trying to describe a color to a blind person. Veterans talked with others who understood.

Palmer also contrasts the return home after the Second World War with deployment during the Global War on Terror. Veterans of the Second World War might spend months traveling home, still with the people they had served beside, before being discharged. That time together could provide a gradual transition. By contrast, a modern service member could reach Afghanistan within 48 hours and video-call a spouse and children the night before a patrol.

Williamson describes the sharper contrast between family life and war. Technology can keep someone in close contact with home, but it can also make it harder to separate the demands of deployment from the life waiting elsewhere. Palmer compares it to trying to complete a hard workout while FaceTiming your family between sets. The divided attention would be difficult even without the stakes of combat.

Neither man makes this a simple argument for cutting off contact. Palmer notes that professional special operators may approach deployment differently from young conscripts or ordinary infantrymen. Someone who has chosen that career, and whose family understands its demands, may be better prepared for the emotional transitions than someone drafted at 18.

The familiar military image is the person at the front with a weapon. Palmer says that image obscures the labor that makes combat possible. He estimates that roughly 100 to 150 people may work behind each person on the front line, supplying food, water, ammunition, and other essentials. A soldier without those supplies cannot keep fighting; in his account, the saying that wars are won by logistics is literal.

If he has to name one neglected role, Palmer chooses military truck drivers. He points to the Red Ball Express during the Second World War and to service members known as 88 Mikes during the Global War on Terror. The job may sound ordinary—drive a truck—but the cargo has to travel roads where attacks and improvised explosive devices are expected. The vehicle is a large, visible target. Palmer says drivers adapted their trucks because they had to keep supplies moving through hostile territory.

He describes Vietnam-era supply trucks converted into armed vehicles, including one fitted with mounted .50-caliber machine guns and other weapons. In later deployments, he says, drivers lined truck beds and cabs with sandbags to reduce the danger from blasts. They may describe themselves as “just a truck driver,” but the work puts them in danger and supports the soldiers whose combat roles are more likely to be celebrated.

Improvisation is also the subject of several British military stories the two men trade. Williamson describes the limpet mine as an example of practical ingenuity: he recounts a story in which an aniseed sweet was used to keep two firing pins apart until the sweet dissolved in seawater, while a condom protected it from humidity. He adds the anecdote that staff bought up local supplies of condoms to avoid drawing attention to the plan.

Palmer offers a more elaborate example: the British plan to use nuclear landmines to slow a possible Soviet advance through the “Main Gap.” The mines needed to stay warm enough for their electronics. After trying other methods, Palmer says, planners worked out that three chickens sealed inside could keep the device warm for about eight hours; when the chickens died and cooled, the mine would detonate. The story’s comic absurdity is inseparable from its practical premise: people were trying to make equipment work in conditions where ordinary solutions had failed.

The animal stories make the same point about practical work. Palmer says Wojtek, the bear adopted by Polish soldiers, learned to carry artillery ammunition. Sergeant Reckless, a horse acquired by US Marines during the Korean War, carried ammunition up steep terrain to recoilless-rifle positions. At the Battle of Outpost Vegas, Palmer says, Reckless made repeated trips with ammunition and carried wounded soldiers back down. A photograph shown during the discussion places her beside a 75-millimeter recoilless rifle, the weapon whose ammunition she carried.

The Marines later smuggled Reckless from Korea to the United States after being told she had to be left behind. Palmer says they arranged a blood test to address restrictions on bringing livestock into the country, then moved her out before the official returned. They eventually brought her to a Marine Corps ball, where she ate flowers and drank whiskey and soda with the Marines. The military later embraced her as good publicity, and she was given the rank of sergeant. Palmer says junior enlisted Marines had to address her accordingly.

These stories are colorful, but their practical details matter: how to move supplies, keep equipment working, or get ammunition to guns over terrain trucks could not cross. The celebrated fighter depends on a network of people—and sometimes animals—whose contributions are easier to overlook precisely because they keep the fighting possible.

Palmer has usually told stories about people who died long ago. His video about Ed Eaton, a Vietnam veteran still alive, was different: Eaton could watch a draft before publication and correct the account. Palmer says he rewrote and re-filmed parts after Eaton objected to his wording or corrected details.

The process made the work more intimidating. Palmer’s recurring fear is that a family member will see a video and hate it. Relatives have also told him they appreciated his work, but telling a living person’s story raises the stakes. Eaton thought Palmer was making too much of some events. Palmer calls this “classic war hero minimization”: someone who lived through an extraordinary event may regard it as ordinary.

Eaton’s story, as Palmer recounts it, follows a young man who arrived in Vietnam wanting to be a medic but was assigned to infantry. On the way to his base in the Mekong Delta, his transport ship was hit in a sabotage attack. Palmer says Eaton woke in a compartment filling with diesel fuel, swam through it to reach the deck, and waited there with others for rescue. Later, heat and dehydration affected men on patrol; Palmer says several suffered brain damage. Eaton gradually learned the environment and the work, served in different roles, and eventually attended a newly established sniper school in Vietnam.

Palmer says Eaton was the top shot in an initial competition, but failed to hit the 900-meter target in the final examination. He returned to his unit as an infantryman rather than a sniper. On a later volunteer mission, he carried a sniper rifle with an early night-vision scope that he had obtained from friends who were snipers.

The patrol entered a village and found a concrete-reinforced cave structure Palmer says was unusual for the area. As the group tried to withdraw, they heard Vietnamese voices discussing machine guns, rockets, and helicopters. The team believed the enemy was waiting for the evacuation aircraft. Helicopters arrived under fire. After takeoff, the group realized a soldier had been left behind. One aircraft returned to retrieve him, but as the men climbed aboard, another soldier jumped out on the other side. The helicopter left again with a man still on the ground.

On another attempt, the helicopter was shot down. Eaton woke pinned beneath it, able to breathe because his face was above the water. He helped pull others from the wreckage. The group was still under fire, and the other men were unable to fight effectively. Eaton climbed onto the overturned aircraft, took an M16, and fired toward the muzzle flashes. He later found his damaged sniper rifle. Its scope was out of alignment, but he used it to see the enemy and adjusted his aim according to where the shots landed.

Palmer says Eaton held off the attackers until more helicopters arrived. Captain Perkins, Eaton’s commanding officer, had broken both hips and could not leave upright. Palmer recounts that Perkins told the others to leave him. Eaton returned to Perkins and stayed beside him, firing until another helicopter could take the captain away.

Eaton eventually escaped on the skid of an attack helicopter. Palmer says he had a broken back from the crash and that shrapnel had stripped flesh from his chin. The number of attackers is uncertain in Palmer’s account: estimates ranged widely, but Eaton considered a figure around 30 most accurate. Palmer’s emphasis is on the sequence Eaton described—fighting while injured, helping others escape, and refusing to leave Perkins behind.

Williamson suggests that painful memories can fade, and that people may later remember them as less severe. That process can help people live with what happened, he says, but it may also obscure how difficult the experience was. Palmer agrees that time can heal wounds, while describing military service as “the best shitty time you’ll ever have”—a phrase that captures how hardship and attachment can coexist.

Palmer’s children’s book series, Heroes Erased, is meant for readers who may not watch his videos. Parents have told him they want their children to hear these stories but find the videos too graphic or full of profanity. Censored videos did not work for him, so he is putting real historical accounts inside a fictional adventure.

The first book centers on Richard Bong, whom Palmer describes as America’s leading fighter ace of the Second World War. Two boys, based on Palmer’s sons, live in an alternate world where the Nazis won. Their father, an electrician and museum curator, discovers that time travel was used to prevent ten American war heroes from becoming the people they were meant to be. He is kidnapped before he can fix the timeline, so his sons use a tape-player-like device to travel back and intervene.

The boys can first witness historical events without changing them, then use the device to interact with the past. Palmer says the historical material and the heroes’ actions are real, while the time-travel plot is invented to give children a reason to follow the facts. One scene shows Bong firing at an alligator to protect a downed pilot. Palmer says the incident really happened.

The books were tested with parents and children. After reading, children were asked whether they felt they had learned history. They said no. Then they looked up Richard Bong and came back feeling they had learned a great deal. Palmer’s interpretation is that the story felt so fantastical that the children had not realized they were reading about real events.

The teaching principle is the same one he applies to his videos: make a person’s choices legible before asking an audience to absorb the larger history. Palmer wants history to feel like a story worth following, not a list of dates and battle names. He hopes readers who become absorbed in the story of a pilot, preacher, or truck driver will then be willing to learn about the world around them.

Away from military history, Palmer describes how he became interested in the stories behind consumer products. On his business channel, The Fat Files, he has covered products such as Lunchables. His starting point is the product’s design: children assemble the sandwiches themselves, while parents pay for the packaged meal. Williamson calls the appeal the IKEA effect—the tendency to value something more when we have put effort into making it.

Palmer says the product’s marketing also solved a problem: children are the users, but parents are the buyers. His account traces Lunchables through food companies acquired by cigarette manufacturers, including Kraft and Philip Morris. He argues that packaging helped communicate freshness and completeness to parents: clear sections let them see the ingredients, while the layout resembled a school lunch tray.

He describes a similar strategy in products designed to look and feel appealing to children. Teddy Grahams, he says, were presented as bear-shaped crackers, and gummy Life Savers made a mint brand more attractive to children who found mints too strong. Palmer points to a study he recalls from 2003 that found processed foods made by companies owned by RJ Reynolds and Philip Morris were more likely to be “hyper-palatable”—a combination of salt, fat, and carbohydrates that encourages people to keep eating. He connects that product engineering to the food companies’ marketing experience.

The discussion is not an audit of the companies or their products; it is Palmer’s account of what drew him into product history. Williamson recognizes a similar logic in the beverage business, where established brands can extend into new formats through collaborations. The exchange returns to the larger thread of the article: institutions know how to attract attention, whether they are selling a product or choosing which stories to promote. Palmer’s work is an attempt to direct some of that attention toward people whose actions might otherwise be forgotten.