Why do Americans celebrate defeats?

A pleasant delight to come across an author who you know you will enjoy in the future and who already has an extensive oeuvre.  John Sandford is the nom de plume for John Roswell Camp, author of the Prey series with 31 titles.  Sandford has two other series as well and several other non-series books. 

Strong on plot, light on character development, good observational detail.  Set in Minneapolis and the upper Midwest he is also good with cultural and regional history.  

I happened to pick up Hidden Prey just as a small gamble.  I am delighted it paid off.  Here's an example of micro-observational detail.  

A group of gawkers stood down the street, every one of the women with their arms crossed. 

Paints such a picture.

Camp also interweaves all sorts of detail into the dialogue of his characters.  I have observed in the past that the British have a peculiar quirk in their national character shown in their celebration of some their greatest military defeats or tragedies.  Dunkirk, Charge of the Light Brigade, Rorke's Drift, the HMS.  Birkenhead, the RMS Titanic, the sinking of the HMS Hood, Battle of Jutland, etc.  It is an interesting psychology.  Sandford raises the stakes.

Lucas, Nadya, Reasons, and no-name, who’d finally introduced himself as Larry Kelly, trooped to the back, clunking along the wooden floor. Lucas stopped to look at an old Budweiser-made print of Custer being wiped out by the Sioux at Little Bighorn.

Nadya stopped at his elbow, took in the print, and said, “Why do Americans celebrate defeats?”

Lucas shrugged. “Like what?”

“Bunker Hill, the Alamo, Custer, Pearl Harbor, the Chosin Reservoir, September eleventh—I have even seen this movie Blackhawk Down. It seems strange.”

“You know a lot about our history,” Lucas said.

“I studied it, of course. But this is not so much history as psychology.”

Lucas looked at the picture for a few more seconds; in the lower right corner, an Indian was peeling the scalp off a dead cavalryman. “I don’t know why we do it,” he said. “But we do, don’t we?”

I had seen the trait in the British but not in ourselves.  And yet, there it is.