heroic leaders

I'm playing VotG16 Under Murderous Fire as the Russians via VASL. By SSR, my 8-1 leader (Pavlov) is heroic. In VASL, that just means my 8-1 counter has a little orange stripe along the bottom that says "heroic." But, for my purposes it's actually considered a 1-4-9, right? To add its heroic...