Giving Veterans More than "Thanks"

Honoring Veterans Requires Understanding their Service and Taking Responsibility for Sending them to War

Have you thanked a veteran for their service, today? Better yet, how do veterans feel about our “thanks”? For some our thanks comes across as an empty gesture—a perfunctory platitude. As veteran and veteran studies scholar, Eric Hodges, pointed out in his 2013 Ted Talk, empty praise without genuine consideration of what it means to be a veteran can contribute to soldiers feeling even greater alienation in civilian life.

For there to be genuine meaning in our thanks there must be some depth of understanding. Veteran Jake Wood writes,

"The health of our all-volunteer force rests on our nation's ability to understand what life in the military and at war entails. A poor understanding leads to poor policy decisions—both during peace and during war."

But such understanding may force us to deal with moral complexities and civic responsibilities many of us have grown accustomed to pushing to the side. Taking this step requires us to do more than “thank” veterans; it requires us to attentively and empathetically talk with them about their experience.

Exchanging Pleasantries for Genuine Dialogue

During a recent class discussion I facilitated, a combat veteran shared that he doesn’t like identifying as a veteran, let alone a combat veteran. Given our nation’s adulation for the military and veterans this may seem strange. Why wouldn’t he want to identify as a veteran? His answer boiled down to this: he’s not convinced most people really want to understand the complexities of his experience. As he spoke two more hands in our small class darted up.

The next student said he understood why his colleague didn’t like identifying as a combat veteran. He explained that his brother, currently serving in the military, disliked the empty flatteries soldiers are showered with; they didn’t comport with the traumatizing conditions of military service and the moral ambiguities that service routinely forces him to wrestle with.

A third student explained that she understood what both were talking about. She said her stepfather, who fought in the Vietnam war, didn’t like talking about his experience in the military. She sees the pain and discomfort in his eyes when people ask insensitive questions like, “So, did you kill anybody over there?” “How many did you kill?” Missing from such questions is the basic awareness that killing another person is always a traumatizing experience.

War as Cinematic Abstraction

The problem, in part, is that warfare is a cinematic abstraction for most Americans. Fewer than one in 10 Americans are now or were in the military. An even smaller share of the population are combat veterans. In place of direct experience many rely upon a cartoonish characterization of American warfare provided by popular culture, from movies to superficial news reporting. News programs feature the voices of upper-level officials who rarely offer a window into the treacherous toil of combat but instead offer rosy characterizations of mission progress. At times officials in the Defense Department have actively misrepresented the facts.

Meanwhile, businesses devise marketing campaigns extolling the heroism of our military while trying to turn a profit.

Even our sports are inundated with ceremonial praise for the military and our veterans without seriously addressing the challenges of that service. In 2015, Republican Senators Jeff Flake and John McCain issued a report criticizing the Defense Department for paying for patriotic ceremonies in professional sports. Many still fail to realize the active effort to advance particular political interests in our sports and entertainment culture.

For its part, the Defense Department actively works with movie makers to ensure a particular vision of the U.S. military and warfare are presented. Established in 1948, the Pentagon's Entertainment Liaison Office has supported movies including Top Gun, Zero Dark Thirty, American Sniper, four of the Transformer movies, and two of the Iron Man movies. More recently the Defense Department has supported the making of Captain Marvel, and two Captain America movies.

The Air Force was actively involved in helping to make Captain Marvel. According to the military branch’s press release,

“Airmen partnered with Marvel Entertainment through the Air Force Public Affairs Entertainment Liaison office, which offered direct access to resources including personnel, aircraft and equipment, technical assistance and military advice and locations. This ensured the portrayal of the Airmen and missions were plausible and realistic.”

The Air Force also placed pre-movie ads in more than 3,600 theaters nationwide showing Captain Marvel and teamed up with the star of the film for press events. The moral ambiguities of whether a war was justified in the first place, whether and when people of another nation are justified in invading and occupying another people’s country; the questions about when force is merited, about what differentiates a freedom fighter from a terrorist are all washed away by patriotic anthems, sloganeering, and perfunctory “thanks” for service.

Moral Injuries and Suicide

Occasionally movies and reporting will address the fact that 30,177 soldiers have committed suicide, since post-September 11 fighting began, compared to the 7,052 who have died in combat. But they rarely open an honest conversation that allows us to understand why so many would take such drastic measures; about why so many veterans who have not killed themselves struggle with suicidal thoughts, now. While we increasingly make space to discuss PTSD and the trauma of being in the life-or-death situations of war, there is very little cultural room for soldiers to discuss the “moral injuries” they wrestle with.

A moral injury occurs when you feel compelled to act in a way that violates your own core moral code. Examples include everything from fighting a war that you feel might not be justified to forcibly evicting a family from their home, accidentally taking an innocent life, to simply killing another person at all. While many of us are fed reductive good-guy versus bad-guy narratives, many in the military learn through direct experience of the gray-areas that exist within the us/them dichotomy. And many, like the student in my class, realize that their feelings and experiences simply cannot be meaningfully understood by people viewing the world through such a simplistic, black and white lens.

Taking Civic Responsibility

It is often lost upon us that we, the citizens of the United States, bear responsibility when the elected officials whom we have elected send our fellow citizens to war. Veterans deserve more than unthinking flattery from those who send them to war. They deserve to be understood. This in turn means understanding what we, ourselves, have decided to do and not do. This means confronting the “blind-eye” many of us take to global affairs and matters of war and peace.

 Too many Americans lack meaningful knowledge about their nation’s military activities and histories. Too many lack basic understanding of how much money and resources we spend on warfare, the hundreds of places outside of the United States our military is based, the stated rationale for going to war with nations such as Iraq and Afghanistan, the loss of life resulting from these fights, and the moral and political complexities soldiers are burdened with as they engage in such battles. Most of us are discouraged from thinking that these are matters for us to concern ourselves with. But they are.

Above all, veterans—and everyone impacted by our nation’s military actions—deserve that we take responsibility for our government’s military decision making. As members of a free democratic republic, we must realize that wars are begun by government representatives; and these representatives are elected by the citizenry. With citizenship comes the moral responsibility to guide our government in exercising reasoned judgment in matters of war and peace.

With this responsibility in mind let us consider the advice of Afghan combat veteran and Bronze Star Medal recipient, Erik Edstrom. He contends that those who truly care for our nation and military personnel should use three visions as they exercise their civic duty to determine whether or not to send others to war.

• We should first imagine our own death and ask ourselves if we would be willing to personally die for this cause, this war.

• We should imagine that we are on the other side of our nation’s war and ask if we would consent to being treated the same way our nation is going to treat the other nation and inhabitants.

• Third, Edstrom challenges us to imagine what might have been if the war was never fought. Will going to war and causing the inevitable harm and suffering that intrinsically accompanies warfare be worth it? (Book excerpt here).

If we answer “no” to these questions are, no, Edstrom believes we have no business allowing others to be sent on our behalf to do fighting we do not believe in.

If we are sincere in our appreciation of veterans, we must make time to learn more about their experiences, engage them in authentic dialogue, and, last but not least, take seriously our responsibility as citizens before, during, and after war breaks out.

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