Do Veterans Like To Be Thanked For Their Service
News Analysis
Please Don't Give thanks Me for My Service
HUNTER GARTH was in a gunfight for his life — and virtually to lose.
He and seven other Marines were huddled in a mud hut, their only refuge after they walked into an ambush in Trek Nawa, a Taliban stronghold in Afghanistan. Down to his last fifteen bullets, one buddy already terribly wounded, Mr. Garth pulled off his helmet, smoked a cheap Afghan cigarette, and "came to terms with what was happening."
"I'thou going to die hither with my best friends," he recalled thinking.
I didn't know any of this — nor the remarkable story of his survival that twenty-four hours — when I met him two months ago in Colorado while reporting for an article about the marijuana manufacture, for which Mr. Garth and his company provide security. But I did know he was a vet and so I did what seemed natural: I thanked him for his service.
"No trouble," he said.
It wasn't true. At that place was a problem. I could see information technology from the manner he looked downwardly. And I could meet information technology on the faces of some of the other vets who piece of work with Mr. Garth when I thanked them too. What gives, I asked? Who doesn't want to be thanked for their armed forces service?
Many people, it turns out. Mike Freedman, a Light-green Beret, calls information technology the "thanks for your service phenomenon." To some recent vets — by no stretch all of them — the thanks comes across every bit shallow, disconnected, a reflexive offer from people who, while pregnant well, have no clue what soldiers did over there or what motivated them to get, 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. Information technology 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.
Mr. Garth, 26, said that when he gets thanked information technology can feel cocky-serving for the thankers, suggesting that he did it for them, and that they somehow understand the sacrifice, night terrors, feelings of loss and bewilderment. Or don't think about information technology at all.
"I pulled the trigger," he said. "You didn't. Don't take that away from me."
The issue has been percolating for a few years, elucidated memorably in "Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk," a 2012 National Book Award finalist about a group of soldiers being feted at halftime of a Dallas Cowboys game. The soldiers limited dread over people rushing to offering thanks, meaning with obligation and blood animalism and "their voices throbbing like lovers."
The effect has as well surfaced, at least tangentially, with Brian Williams's admission that he'd exaggerated nigh being in a Chinook helicopter striking past enemy burn down. In explaining his failed retentiveness, the NBC News anchor said: "This was a bungled attempt by me to thank one special veteran and by extension our brave military men and women veterans everywhere, those who have served while I did not."
The thought of giving thanks while not participating themselves is one of the cadre vet quibbles, said Mr. Freedman, the Green Beret. The joke has get so prevalent, he said, that servicemen and women sometimes walk up to one another pretending to be "misty-eyed" and mockingly say "Thanks for your service."
Mr. Freedman, 33, feels like the thanks "alleviates some of the civilian guilt," adding: "They have no peel in the game with these wars. There's no draft."
No real opinions either, he said. "At least with Vietnam, people spit on you and you knew they had an opinion."
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"Thank you for your service," he said, is almost the equivalent of "I haven't idea well-nigh any of this."
For most of united states, I suspect, offering cheers reflects 18-carat appreciation — even if ill-divers. It was a muddied job and someone had to practice it. If not these men and women, then us or our children.
Tim O'Brien, a Vietnam vet and the author of the acclaimed book "The Things They Carried," told me that his war's vets who believed in the mission like to be thanked. Others, himself included, observe that "something in the stomach tumbles" from expressions of appreciation that are so disconnected from the "evil, nasty stuff you practise in war."
The more then, he said, "when your war turns out to have anxiety of clay" — whether fighting peasants in Vietnam or in the name of eradicating weapons of mass destruction that never materialized.
But doesn't their cede merit thanks? "Patriotic gloss," responded Mr. O'Brien, an unofficial poet laureate of state of war who essentially elevates the event to the philosophical; to him, nosotros're thanking without having the backbone to ask whether the mission is even correct.
Information technology'southward hard to appraise how widespread such ideas are among the men and women of today's generation. So, rather than try to sum upwards what invariably are many views on the subject, I'll relate more of Mr. Garth'southward story.
He grew up in Florida, son of a Vietnam vet, grandson of a busy World War 2 vet, himself a bit of a class clown who drank his style out of college and wound up working the docks. The Marines offered a hazard to make something of himself and, despite his parents' pleadings otherwise, to fight.
It wasn't what he romanticized. First training and waiting. Then the reality that he might die, forth with his friends — 17 of them did, in action, by accident or by suicide. And, he now asks, for what?
His ideas about the need to bear witness himself slipped away, forth with any patriotic fervor. He hates it when people dismiss the Taliban as imbeciles when he saw them as cunning warriors. To Mr. Garth, the war became solely nearly survival among brothers in arms.
Like that day in September 2011 when Mr. Garth was surrounded in the hut. A last-ditch call for aid over the radio prompted a small group of swain Marines to run three miles to save the solar day, one of them carrying 170 pounds of gear, including a 22-pound machine gun and 50 pounds of ammo.
THE thanks Mr. Garth gets today remind him of both the bad times and the skillful, all of which comport more meaning than he has now in civilian life. Hardest is the gratitude from parents of fallen comrades. "That's the nigh painful thank you lot," he said. "It'south not for me, and I'm not your son."
He struggled to explain his irritation. "It's not your fault," he said of those thanking him. "Merely it's not my mistake either."
So what to say to a vet? Perhaps hope to vote next fourth dimension, Mr. Freedman said, or offer a scholarship or job (as, he said, some places have stepped up and washed). Stand up for what's correct, suggested Mr. O'Brien. Requite $100 to a vet, Ben Fountain, writer of the "Baton Lynn" book, half-joked, saying information technology would at least evidence some sacrifice on the thanker'due south part.
Mr. Garth appreciates thank you from someone who makes an endeavour to invest in the human relationship and experience. Or a fellow vet who gets it. Several weeks ago, he visited one of his soul mates from the mud hut firefight, which they refer to as the Boxing of the Unmarked Chemical compound. They drank Jameson whiskey in gulps.
"We cried in each other's arms until we both could tell each other we loved each other," Mr. Garth said. "We each said, thanks for what you've done for me."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/sunday-review/please-dont-thank-me-for-my-service.html
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