And this article in Slate argues that firefighters aren't necessarily the heroes we make them out to be. It brings up a point that I keep meaning to get around to, which is that our notions of heroism may need to be rethought from the ground up. The word has been used awfully loosely since 9-11 to categorize whole groups of people: soldiers, firefighters, astronauts, police officers, U.S. presidents, Oliver North, even an Army colonel accused of criminal assault for firing a revolver to scare an Iraqi prisoner into revealing information.

I spent enough time as a volunteer firefighter to vouch for some of what the Slate article says. Finding people to fight fires was the easy part of running a volunteer fire department, a job I did for a couple of years. The heroes, if any, were the people who put together the barbecues and bake sales to keep us afloat.

Even the Army recognizes that not everybody who puts on a uniform deserves a medal for heroism. Soldiers in difficult combat circumstances, such as troops who spent years in the trenches in World War I, for instance, exhibit more courage just getting up for breakfast than most of us do in a lifetime. To become a hero, the Army decided, you have to exhibit valor "above and beyond the call of duty." So an infantry soldier who ran toward opposing trenches with bare chest exposed to machine gun fire wasn't a hero, just a soldier doing his duty. The same could be said for New York firefighters who ran up the Twin Towers as ordinary citizens were running down. They weren't heroes -- just good, brave men doing a difficult job -- but a job all the same. That should be enough.

Similarly, I have heard it argued that airline pilots who manage to land a damaged plane aren't heroes because they are acting in their own self-interest. They may be courageous, skilled and cool under pressure, but their motives aren't fundamentally heroic.

Sometimes when I think about all this I fear that I push the standard of heroism so far that no one can meet it. Once, trying to come up with a working definition of evil, I composed one that let even Hitler off the hook, at least during his insane years. That's no good. Any definition of evil that leaves out Hitler obviously needs to be reworked.

And, I sometimes think, maybe I'm too demanding of heroes. At least most people now recognize that being a professional athlete doesn't make you a hero. That's progress.

Then I ran across an item about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian who left Germany when Hitler came to power and then returned to help resist Nazism. He was executed in 1945 for helping Jews escape.

Now that's a hero.