Why I don’t thank military members for their service, and you needn’t do so either
04
Thursday
Aug 2011
Posted by The Curmudgeon in History, International Relations, Personal, Politics ≈ 1 Comment
Elizabeth Samset, a professor of English at the US Military Academy (i.e., commonly, “West Point”) explained in a Bloomberg column how her colleagues and students were always being thanked for their service when she would accompany them off-post in public places:
One former captain I know proposed that “thank you for your service” has become “an obligatory salutation.” Dutifully offered by strangers, “somewhere between an afterthought and heartfelt appreciation,” it is gratifying but also embarrassing to a soldier with a strong sense of modesty and professionalism. “People thank me for my service,” another officer noted, “but they don’t really know what I’ve done.”
I’ve even had it happen to me, though not while I actually served. This idea of thanking service members didn’t gain purchase until the Cold War concluded and people began to realize (if perhaps only subconsciously) that every subsequent engagement in which troops were asked to serve had little to do with defending the freedoms provided by our Constitution and more to do with defending the unwritten imperative that every American soccer mom has the right to a McMansion and a gas-guzzling SUV, and every investment banker a multi-million dollar annual bonus.
Interestingly, on all the occasions I can remember having been thanked, it was Asian-Americans that did so, after learning some way or another that I had served in the military. One time, it was in church on (or close by) Veterans Day. The pastor had asked all the veterans to stand and be recognized, and I stood for the brief smattering of golf-clap applause. After the worship service concluded, an elderly Korean man (I know he was Korean because he had a Korean-English Bible in his hand) sitting in the pew behind me offered his hand and “thanked me for my service”. Another time, it was a French-Vietnamese woman at the Red Cross that showed her appreciation that I had served. (I discovered her heritage through further conversation after the initial, awkward “thanks” she offered). I thought to myself that she should be thanking me for donating blood, not for my service in the military. While both donating blood and serving in the military are voluntarily undertaken, there is no financial compensation received for the act of donating blood, though I had good reasons for donating blood that made the lack of financial compensation irrelevant.
Every time someone offers their appreciation for my time served, I want to explain that my service was not selfless—I was getting paid to “support and defend the Constitution” as I had pledged an oath that I would, and would never have voluntarily served otherwise. Besides, what I did was in no way heroic or remarkable; I just did my job. Each time somebody thanks me, I want to say that you’ve already thanked me for my service by paying the taxes that paid my salary, which is as true of my service as it is of the volunteers serving today. There is no reason to thank someone for doing that which they volunteered to do, and for which they are paid. Do you thank the grocery boy bagging your groceries for his “service” in protecting your groceries from spillage?
When I first volunteered for the military in the early eighties (I did Army basic training in 1983 as a reservist), the purpose of the organization was clear—to protect and defend the country from annihilation by Soviet nuclear or conventional forces. As a practical matter, this involved fighting skirmishes on the boundaries of the two superpowers’ global influence. For example, during about nine months of my six years on active-duty, I flew missions in and around Central America in support of the American presence in Honduras and El Salvador. We were there to counterbalance the Soviet influence in Nicaragua and among rebel groups elsewhere in the region. We indirectly (and at times, directly) helped the Salvadorans beat back the Soviet-backed insurgent group, the FMLN (which ironically now run the country). I’m sure the Salvadoran regime we supported killed a good many people, and I’m sure our actions helped them along in doing so (particularly as we flew missions in direct support of US Special Forces attached as advisers to the Salvadoran military). It was not a pleasant thing to consider that people were dying, if indirectly, by my actions, but it posed no harsh ethical dilemma for me, because the Soviets, who we were fighting by proxy, had the ability to destroy us, and a nation or state, just like an individual, has the right to kill in defense of its continued existence.
When the Cold War–the sole existential conflict the US has faced since the War of 1812–ended, I promptly asked to get out of the military. By that time, I had served four years of a six-year obligation (due to flight school), but could not see where they needed my services anymore. The Army felt otherwise, and refused to allow me (and legions of cohorts like me) to leave.
In the meantime, the politicians dutifully found something for us to do, deciding that we should go kill and destroy the citizens and military of a country (Iraq) that posed no possible threat to the Constitution or the continued existence of America. I reluctantly did as I was told, though in retrospect, I should have claimed conscientious-objector status; my personal ethics did not provide for killing people who weren’t trying to kill me or mine, and who presented no existential threat to the Constitution I was sworn to defend. Once the war was over, I promptly asked again to be let out, and this time, they agreed. Because I had served two years as a Reservist prior to my six years on active duty, I had “eight good ones” that allowed me to request a total discharge of any further obligation, which was granted. People with less than eight years of service are placed in the Individual Ready Reserve, subject to recall when the next bit of imperialistic militarism rolls around. More than a few soldiers I ran into in Iraq had been activated from the Individual Ready Reserve. At the time I got out, which was a few months after returning from the first Iraq war, I told my wife that I knew this wasn’t the end of American involvement. Leaving the service was the proper thing for me to do. I knew that Iraq was only the beginning of a new, post-Cold War age of militant imperialism, and I could not in good conscience collect a paycheck from an organization whose mission I no longer supported.
Without an existential threat against which to provide protection, the Department of Defense quickly transmogrified into the Department of Military Support for Capitalist Imperialism and American World Hegemony. It devolved to the status it had held during the early part of the twentieth century, doing the wet work for American capitalists in their relentless pursuit of expansion. I wished to have nothing to do with it. You can thank me for that.
It makes me a bit queasy to imagine that every soldier, sailor, airman and marine that volunteers today understands, or should, that they will be engaged in killing, either directly or indirectly, people who pose no existential threat to the constitution they have sworn to protect and defend. When I entered active service in 1985, it was beyond the scope of my imagination that my service would conclude with a war in the Middle East against a penny-ante dictator with whom we had once been allied, and for the purpose of protecting the unfettered flow of oil and money, just to keep soccer moms and investment bankers happy. I checked the Constitution. There’s nothing in it about defending international commerce such that foreign oil and money flow freely and cheaply to our shores.
Every service member today should know full well that he will be asked to do exactly what I found so repugnant, yet still, they volunteer. Do they actually believe the drivel dripping from the mouths of politicians, that they are protecting “freedom”? Nobody’s freedom is at stake when a Predator drone covertly assassinates a foreign national whose only crime is fitting a terrorist profile, except perhaps the freedom of the putative terrorist and whomever is unfortunate enough to be close by him when the missile strikes. I suppose I could forgive them their innocence at wishing to believe their service protects American freedom, but it’s long been clear that the intentionally-amorphous War on Terror is about something else than the individual freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution. The only freedom today’s service members are protecting is the freedom of American capitalists (mostly investment bankers) to ply the globe looking for cheap labor, leaving American workers to collect unemployment checks. Does that sort of service deserve any thanks? Particularly when one has volunteered to do it and receives a paycheck for the trouble?
Even 9-11 was not a threat to our freedom, and certainly not to the Constitution, except in the manner with which the response to the attack so weakened the social compact until its tenets protecting freedom are now nearly unrecognizable for a certain segment of those to whom it purports to apply. (And 9-11 was at least indirectly the result of the first Iraq war, if the motivations claimed by its instigators are to be believed). The US could suffer a 9-11 attack each year until eternity and its Constitution would not be necessarily threatened by anyone other than itself. 9-11 was tantamount to a flea biting a lion, and should have been mostly ignored, except to seek out and punish those directly responsible, just as murderers motivated by any reason, ideological or otherwise, are routinely punished.
If anyone deserves thanks for their service, it is the vets of the Korean and Vietnamese conflicts, each of which had a purpose as confused as the leadership prosecuting them was feckless. In fact, instead of just thanking a service member that fought in those wars, we should also apologize to them. Those vets had no choice in the matter. They were conscripted into barbarism by a government and a country that understood very little about wielding power, military or otherwise. The Soviet Union was not powerful enough at the time of the Korean conflict to have posed an existential threat to America, so Korea can’t be justified on those grounds. Vietnam was a civil war, much like Cuba, in which we chose the wrong side. It’s always problematic to fight a proxy battle with an existential foe that involves choosing sides in a civil war, as the prosecution of the war in Vietnam bears witness. We owe the troops that fought in Vietnam and Korea, and their families, a huge apology.
Military service is no longer obligatory and hasn’t been, now for almost four decades. It has been clear since at least the first Iraq war that the purpose of the US military is no longer, if ever it really was, defending freedom or the Constitution that provides for it. Because no existential threat to the US exists, the US military now prosecutes wars of its political master’s choosing. Every potential service member should strive to fully understand the reality of the situation, and carefully weigh the merits of service before volunteering. Thanking them for doing what they volunteered and are paid to do, knowing full well what it entailed, is not necessary, and anyway does not absolve one of guilt for asking others to do things that one is not willing to do themselves. If someone really wants to thank them, they should petition to bring them home, and for America to curtail its imperial ambitions.
