Please re-read carefully:

>And while "orders to do wrong" are undoubtedly given and obeyed, one may presume, perhaps, on the basis of regulations and ordinary judgment, that they are only a small fraction of all orders given *in comparable circumstances,* at least in American and, I imagine, NATO forces.

Note the emphasis. The point is that even in the set of "comparable circumstances" (treatment of prisoners or enemy civilians, etc., etc.) it is likely that relatively few "orders to do wrong" are issued.

Back to the major issue. In my view whole "armies" cannot be "heroic" in the usual sense of the word (even if the default government description of armies of the Communist world has always been "the heroic People's Army of [fill in blank].")

Actions can be heroic, and people who perform such actions are heroes - at the time. Human nature being what it is, they can be non-heroes and even villains at other times. Look at Oskar Schindler.

To define someone as a "hero" is to say that their heroic action(s) notably outweigh their innumerable failings.


>Equally, the axis soldiers and the allied soldiers in WWII were (generally) both of the view that their actions were right.

True, but which of their countless actions were truly heroic? When an SS trooper risked his life to save his comrades on the Eastern Front, was he a hero? Or did he merely do something heroic that was absurdly insignificant in the broader picture? (It wouldn't have been absurd to the men he'd saved.)

As Richard syas, the lionizers' perspective makes a difference. The British Army and pacifists alike both endorsed the heroic actions of Captain Siegfried Sassoon, but they were different heroic actions and very different forms of heroism.

In America, John Brown and his sons murdered and mutilated five unarmed pro-slavery men in Kansas in 1856. Three years later, they seized a government arsenal in an attempt to incite a slave rebellion throughout the South. John Brown: mostly hero or mostly psycho? Are the labels even meaningful in a case like this? (He was definitely not a mercenary.)