BBC: No Heroes Allowed!

It pays to know at the outset that the Victoria Cross is the highest award a British soldier can earn. The VC has occupied the same place as our Medal of Honor for British soldiers ever since Queen Victoria occupied the throne. In May 2004, Private Johnson Beharry drove a Warrior armored personnel carrier (which looks much like our Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle) through heavy enemy fire to rescue a foot patrol from an ambush. Insurgents fired several rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) and pummeled the vehicle, but Beharry managed to secure the foot soldiers and led a group of five Warriors through the ambush. After clearing the immediate line of fire, he climbed out of his vehicle and administered first aid to his wounded crew members while under fire. On a later date, Beharry was again driving the lead vehicle when an ambush hit his vehicle with a number of RPGs, wounding the vehicle commander and injuring Beharry in the head. Although his wounds would later require brain surgery, Beharry drove the vehicle out of the kill zone and reached safety just before losing consciousness. In these two instances, his cool conduct under fire with total disregard of his own safety saved several lives. The consensus to bestow the Victoria Cross on him must have been unanimous because the medal arrived quite promptly.
Recently, the BBC has cancelled funding for a movie about Beharry's courage, allegedly because it portrays the War in Iraq in too positive a light. London's Daily Telegraph reports the story here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/04/08/wiraq308.xml
Spokesmen for the BBC will not confirm exactly why they have pulled their funding from the project, but they have seldom been shy about expressing their hostility to the war effort. All good news must be censored at all costs. I have to give the Brits credit: at least they started making this movie, and if another distributor signs on, they can complete it.
Our media does the same thing, of course. While I was in Iraq, my father and I separately exchanged a series of tense emails with the Atlanta Journal/Constitution, whose reporters could never seem to find any successful missions to report on. I wrote to inform them about a number of successful raids in which troops captured large stocks of enemy weapons - over one ton of explosives on a few occasions - and they informed me that they do not print news about anything combat-related other than deaths of soldiers. We are still waiting for the movies about our heroes from the last two wars. Sergeant Smith earned the Medal of Honor four years ago, but we are still waiting for the film about his life. Personally, I'd like to see a film about Captain Brian Chontosh of the Marine Corps, but I'm not holding my breath. None of the movies about Desert Storm has shown true-life soldiers doing heroic deeds. When will our movies show soldiers as heroes again?