“I can understand entirely why someone reading those headlines would think, at a very minimum, ‘what a jerk,’” Hayes ceded, explaining that that was, in fact, a concise summary of much of what he heard from viewers. “Many responses I received via Twitter or email were profane,” he noted, but more importantly to him, he received messages from people “genuinely anguished by what I said,” people who had family who died in wars and objected to a TV personality decreeing they were not heroes. “Reading those messages,” Hayes explained, “I had to agree.” Hero, he continued, “hardly seems a designation that is mine to deny or even to confirm… which was, in a very clumsy way, what I was trying to say, or what I was trying to discuss.”