I did know he was a vet and so I did what seemed natural: I thanked him for his service.
“No problem,” he said.
It wasn’t true. There was a problem. I could see it from the way he looked down. And I could see it on the faces of some of the other vets who work with Mr. Garth when I thanked them too. What gives, I asked? Who doesn’t want to be thanked for their military service?
Many people, it turns out. Mike Freedman, a Green Beret, calls it the “thank you for your service phenomenon.” To some recent vets ”” by no stretch all of them ”” the thanks comes across as shallow, disconnected, a reflexive offering from people who, while meaning well, have no clue what soldiers did over there or what motivated them to go, and who would never have gone themselves nor sent their own sons and daughters.
To these vets, thanking soldiers for their service symbolizes the ease of sending a volunteer army to wage war at great distance ”” physically, spiritually, economically. It raises questions of the meaning of patriotism, shared purpose and, pointedly, what you’re supposed to say to those who put their lives on the line and are uncomfortable about being thanked for it.
May I respectfully disagree? While I hear what he is saying, and I know those who thank us rarely know anything about the sacrifices we made, nonetheless, when someone says “thank you” to me, I smile and say “you are welcome”. It is a bit like saying you are sorry for someone’s loss at a funeral. While the speaker can never know the depth of the loss, it is taken as a sign of respect and caring. I will admit when the “thanking” thing became prevalent several years ago, I didn’t really know how to react at first; but I just remember the manners my Mama taught me and now I just appreciate the thought.
When vets came home from Viet Nam, the populace did not know how to separate their contempt for the war from the soldiers, and they spit on the soldier to show that contempt. Since then we’ve grown up a bit and whether or not we approve of the government’s motives in a particular theater of operation, we have regard for the soldier and his or her sacrifice in defending our country. Though most of us have not served, most know or are related to someone who did, and know that we have only a small hint of the scope of the sacrifice. We might be aware of the missed events in their children’s lives, or the physical disabling of some, the mental disablement of others, the marriages destroyed by prolonged absences and the financial distress, and those who did not come back. But we all know that if they hadn’t gone, the battle might have come to our shores and we all would have had to participate. And for that service we can be thankful. It wasn’t our hometown that was bombed or burned, our family shot before our eyes.
So the “thank you for your service” is collective as well as personal, and conveyed to the nearest representative of that service.