A Veterans Day 'thanks' for our service is a sorry stand-in for honest talk about war
Veterans Day can be surprisingly awkward for troops. Every combat vet I know is very uncomfortable with being “thanked” for his or her service. I don’t doubt that a lot of the gratitude is genuine, but it has also become a cover for what many veterans perceive to be the public’s ambivalence toward an increasingly complicated war.
Holiday or no holiday, thanking the troops – at sporting events, in airports, in beer commercials – has become so routine and automatic that, as a soldier, I often feel like I’m getting away with something. Soldiers know that there will always be an operator out there – possibly a good friend – who had it way worse than they did. Modesty and social restraint swell in proportion to combat experience.
The manipulation of soldiers and veterans by powerful organizations does not add to our confidence. A week ahead of Veterans Day this year, Americans were greeted by the depressing news that a variety of professional sports teams had received millions of dollars from the Pentagon in exchange for “saluting” soldiers and veterans during games.
Scandals like these remind us that the public’s relationship with the military is much less genuine than it might seem. And there are many reasons for that. In acover story for the Atlantic this year, writer and journalist James Fallows pointed out that while nearly 10% of the entire US population was on active military duty following the second world war, only three-quarters of 1% of our population have served in Iraq or Afghanistan in the past 14 years.
The result – due in part to the end of the draft – has been a self-segregated and narrowing warrior caste: volunteers from red states in the deep south and the sunbelt are overrepresented, and a disproportionately high number of all recruits are raised in military households.
Disparities between educated, wealthy people and everyone else are the most profound. In 1939, about 80% of Harvard graduates entered the military. In 1956, a majority of the graduating classes of Stanford, Harvard and Princeton served, most undrafted. Today, less than 1% of all Ivy League graduates will ever wear a uniform. In many ways, we’ve witnessed our nation’s executive talent content to place the American empire on autopilot.
There are still parts of the country where working in the oil fields or joining the military are an aimless young man’s only good options, but where I grew up – amid the wealth and privilege of California’s Silicon Valley – joining the military was virtually unheard of. Everyone had better options than enlisting in the army, a billet that online guidance counselor Careercast now ranks as the third worst job in America.
In my hometown, I watched most of the best and the brightest lured into tech and finance, job fields awash with an educated, socially conscious demographic of Americans. I never imagined that I would be counting myself among the veterans of foreign wars.
My decision to enlist had more to do with a certain recklessness than unerring patriotism. “An antique saying has it that a man’s life is incomplete unless or until he has tasted love, poverty, and war,” wrote the late Christopher Hitchens. If a person doesn’t know my motivations for going to war, they can’t really know what they’re thanking me for either.
Being the victim of ‘excessive gratitude’ might sound like a trivial complaint, but veterans are beginning to learn that the awkwardness is symptomatic of a deeper problem – namely, an inability to engage in honest dialogue with the public. It may be polite to say thanks, but don’t expect it to spark an honest conversation about war, or our nation’s debt to those who have served.
by Connor Narciso
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