History Project- Does America Still Have Heroes?

[Alex R]

There's a contest held every so often (I believe once a year) by the VFW (Veterans of Foreign Wars) in which students are assigned topics to write a speech on. The contest is only for high-school juniors and is always related to modern-day America. My school is participating in this some way and I am supposed to write a speech for History class. The given topic is "Does America Still Have Heroes?" At this point in writing the speech I'm confident that I'll be one of the two chosen people from my class of around 20 kids. However I seem to be having a little trouble relating the idea of a "Hero" to modern-day people. So I decided that an unbiased place (like Yahoo) might be a good place to learn different perspectives of heroes. I will not plagiarize any information any of you give me. What I'm asking is that people share their PERSONAL idea of what a hero is and examples of a "hero" you know PERSONALLY. Tell me about them and what they do. I'm not going to use any names in my speech, however you can be certain that I will not try to use YOUR ideas as my own; I'll simply state that I asked a message board over the internet to interpret some of the answers. I want to know how this connects to the average person. If you would like, you can email me at [email protected] and when my speech is done I'll send you a copy via email. Once again I'm looking for real-life accounts of a hero because my basic answer to the question "Does America Still Have Heroes" is "Yes". Thanks