Unlikable Heroes

I recently finished the book A Helmet for My Pillow by Robert Leckie, the war memoir of a WW2 Marine and (in part) the basis for HBO's new war series, "The Pacific." In reading it I realized that I don't like the guy, which is frustrating because I so admire veterans. As I wrote on Facebook:

Me: "I'm reading Helmet For My Pillow (Leckie) and With The Old Breed (Sledge) now."

Facebook Friend: "Jared... I need to read both of those books too. How are they so far?"

Me: "I'm realizing I don't like Leckie, as a person or as an author (reminds me a lot of David Kenyon Webster of Band of Brothers fame, whose book & personality is snobby, lazy, selfish, ignoble). But Sledge's book is one of the best war memoirs ever written."

Leckie is a self-described brig-rat (repeated thrown in jail while in the Marines) and a chronic thief; he disobeys orders, goes AWOL, avoids fighting, and avoids responsibility at all costs. He doesn't seem sorry at all for giving such a poor effort.

I remember when I read Webster's book how disappointed I was that one of the "Band of Brothers" men was purposefully dragging his feet. You might recall that Harvard educated "Web" got lightly wounded in Holland, was slow returning to Easy Company, missed the Battle of the Bulge, and was received coldly by his remaining comrades. In his book he openly talks about avoiding responsibility and deliberately being difficult.

Leckie had him beat by a country mile.

On the other hand, both of these men (Leckie and Webster) volunteered to fight and engaged the enemy. They both were intelligent authors who cast themselves in the unfavorable light of their own books. I guess they both still deserve our respect; it's just hard to see heroes act in a way anything less than heroic.