“Thank you for your service.” seems to be what most people say to members of the military, usually but not always in uniform. The expression of gratitude sometimes includes some mention of the vet’s helping to keep us free; preserving our rights and our freedoms to be who we are without fear.
A guy on a TV news show interviews a soldier returning from Afghanistan and who was a local high school football hero, and thanks him for his service. Now dressed in “civvies,” the young man’s just another guy mustering out with a missing leg. Or an arm. Maybe one side if his once handsome face was burned from exploding gasoline. (Of course, women are now included among the injured and maimed these days.) In any event, the man being interviewed is not the same man who left for the front a year ago. He’s not the man who left the comfort and familiarity of his family and friends who had watched him grow from boyhood into a man the services would gladly have among its ranks. His only solace is that he is told by just about everyone that his sacrifice keeps us free and preserves our freedom.
I’ve often wondered how that all works out: How does some poor enlistee who gets blown up in some godforsaken part of south Asia preserve my freedom to write or say what I want? How do those soldiers who got blown up by roadside bombs some Muslim guys planted in the middle of a Iraqi road really feel about having preserved American freedom? Do they internally question their leaders or do they simply accept that they were “just doing their job” and were in the wrong place at the wrong time? What impact on my liberty does some yammering Muslim cleric in Syria or Iraq have on me?
Increasingly, I’m thinking again about how it happens that these young people, male and female, are used not as protectors of my freedom. These people, in the prime of their lives, all of them with futures, hopes, dreams; who laugh and cry, who miss their family back home; and who, like soldiers have done from time immemorial would lay down their lives for their brothers in arms, are deluded into thinking they are protecting my liberty.
I’m beginning to think about the war I got into the middle of as a young sailor when I was their age—the one in southeast Asia. Once again, the waste of young American lives raises horrific questions. I’m asking myself if the few people like Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, and Condoleeza Rice, two of whom did all they could to avoid being drafted in the 1960’s and early 1970’s and who as leaders perpetrated this current war, can sleep at night. Does “Thank you for your service.” get them through it? I, for one, hope not.
It’s time to ask the same questions all over again. We have lost nearly 7,000 young Americans in South Asia and the Middle east, since 2003. And another 51 thousand wounded and maimed. What do all these young people get for their sacrifice? “Thank you for your service?” Which of my liberties were they sacrificing theirs for? What do I get for their deaths; and the dismemberment and mental illnesses of those who make it back home? I cannot make the connection between reality of their deaths and suffering and the abstraction of their protecting liberty in a war in which we were not attacked by another state.
I’m tired of this mindless patriotism; this delusion; this massive lie being said over and over again, first by our leaders, and then we to ourselves: that all these warriors were somehow preserving “liberty and justice for all.” They didn’t. They were used as instruments of American foreign policy. And it was an easy thing to accomplish because we are taught at an early age how noble it is to be a warrior. We make movies, we write books, and compose poems and music ennobling those who wear a military uniform. But rarely is the true carnage of war shown these days. Now, even our government protects us from the grizzly truth of war by controlling what reporters can see and televise. They called it “embedding” but I call it lying by omission.
Even worse, we’ve morphed into a nation with a fully professional, standing military instead of citizen-soldiers called to service. The sons and daughters of the privileged no longer need worry about having to risk their own lives. We buy soldiers as we buy an insurance policy.
So, to the 1.2 million American dead who gave their lives in service to the country since its founding, and the veterans who lived through war, I am at the same time eternally grateful, yet conflicted as to what the vast majority of the dead did for freedom and liberty in wars against native Americans, against Mexicans, against Filipinos, against Spaniards and Chinese and Vietnamese and Laotians and Cambodians; and now Afghans and Iraqis and Syrians.
So, I, too, will add my “Thank you for your service.” And I will add that “I’m glad you made it home” but privately I will bow my head in anger at their being sent into the maw of war for less than noble purposes by our leaders.
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