What Does ‘Hero’ Really Mean?

By Richard Martin, 12-12-06

For the last week the tabloid TV shows and print media have been fixated on the tragic tale of James and Kati Kim, who were stuck in their car for nine days in a remote, snowy part of the Oregon Coast Range. Kati, 30, and the couple's two young daughters were finally rescued; James, 35, unfortunately, was not: he died of exposure trying to hike out to safety.

"Hero Father," went the headline on the Larry King Show, which devoted an hour to the Kims and other "miraculous survival" stories. " "Hero Dad" was the headline on most accounts of the ordeal. Even Kati Kim's father said, "He's a very heroic father."

Well, I don't mean to cast aspersions on the dead, and I certainly don't want to add to the burdens of Kati Kim, who now faces raising two daughters on her own. But James Kim was no hero.

In some ways the Kim story reminds me of the Jon Krakauer book Into the Wild, a harrowing account of Chris McCandless, a young, inexperienced would-be frontiersman who attempted to make it through an Alaskan winter living in an abandoned bus. He also perished. Krakauer's book didn't glorify McCandless, who was utterly unprepared for his misadventure; but by its very retelling it made his sad, and slightly ridiculous, tale into something more emblematic.

The difference, of course, is that James Kim didn't set out to get his family stuck in the snow. They were on their way from a Thanksgiving visit with family in Seattle back to San Francisco, where Kim worked as an editor for the online tech media co. CNET. They were driving south on Interstate 5 after 10 p.m. and, after apparently missing a turn, took a winding logging road called Bear Camp Road to try to get to the coast, where they were scheduled to spend the night at Gold Beach, Ore. Turned back by heavy snow, they decided to spend the night in their Saab station wagon. The next morning they couldn't drive out.

I've driven those roads between I5 and the Oregon coast, and they're as wild and remote as any in North America. To attempt to drive Bear Camp late at night, in winter, in a Saab station wagon, with a storm coming on, without supplies and with your two young daughters in the back seat -- that's beyond risky. It's criminally foolish.

Again, don't get me wrong: James Kim didn't deserve to die. But he shouldn't be lionized either. He got not just himself but his young family -- his daughters are 4 years and seven months old -- into a life-threatening situation by vastly underestimating the risks he was taking. Calling him a hero does him no service, and it does a disservice to those who risk their own lives almost daily, rescuing people who get in trouble in the mountains in winter.

Let me put it this way: what if James Kim had made it out, and his family had died in the car? Would we be calling him a hero then?