Posting #19: The Stories of “Support the Troops” and “Thank You for Your Service”

The Story:  American civilian citizens are obligated to do two things without question: first, support the troops and second, thank troops for their service.  The first, the story of support the troops, means not only appreciating the work of the armed forces but also accepting without dispute the growing defense budget, the wars the troops fight, and the notion that the troops are the leading, frontline defenders of American freedoms.  Without this silent approval by the civilian populace, the story of support the troops implies, the United States would be lost.  Second, the story of “thank you for your service” is a way to “support the troops,” and dictates that those who have not been a “troop” must thank those who have. Without this expression of gratitude by civilians, troops will feel taken for granted and will choose not to serve, not to defend American freedoms.  While there is no policing of either obligation to support or thank, Americans know that they are expected to do both.  However, supporting the troops must only be affirmative; one may not say “I do not support the troops.”

My take on the story: As an ROTC cadet and on active duty in the mid-70s to the mid-80s, when I would have appeared in uniform in public, I do not recall ever experiencing support or thanks.  Nor did I experience this for the near-decade after I left the US Army.  That might be because I rarely had cause to tell anyone I was a veteran and I never wore a uniform in public.  It wasn’t that I was ashamed of having been an Army officer nor did I conceal it.  Unless I was applying for a job that required the analytical skills I’d practiced as an intelligence officer, my service—to me and to potential employers—just seemed immaterial.  Granted, my service began shortly after the Vietnam War era and the institution of the All-Volunteer Force and continued during the early years of the Reagan Administration, so the reputation of the US armed forces post-Vietnam had not yet been rehabilitated. Still, I never expected as a veteran to be singled out for support or thanks and it would have been strange if I had. 

Times have changed.

I have learned since that both of these stories originated following my service as part of campaigns to rehabilitate the reputations of the armed forces.  In 1981, when I was on active duty, the military registered in Gallup polls the lowest level of public confidence since it has been measured, from 1975-2023. Confidence peaked in February, 1991, in 2003, and in 2009.  Those dates mirror the origins of these stories of support and thanks, what I would call post-Vietnam campaigns to generate American faith in the armed forces to solve all national problems.

The origin of “Support the troops” in early 1991

By February of 1991, the short-lived First Gulf War (AKA Persian Gulf War) was ending as a glorious victory.  In August 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait, and a coalition of NATO and other Middle Eastern allies came to Kuwait’s aid. Within days of the invasion, the US began to deploy what eventually amounted to 600,000 troops as part of what was called Operation Desert Shield.  With the beginning of the air war on January 17, 1991, Operation Desert Storm was initiated, lasting until February 28, 1991.  Thus, combat endured for only a matter of weeks, and although 219 Americans were killed (35 of them by “friendly fire”), an estimated 10,000 Iraqis were killed.  Even though the leader of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, stayed in his position and Kuwait was badly damaged, this was a win that led many to hope for peace in the region.

Though, according to Gallup polls, Americans were initially divided about going to war, feared the deaths of thousands of American servicepeople, and expected a crucial outcome would be removing Hussein from power, Americans reveled in the victory.  Then-President George H.W. Bush (not his son, another President Bush) “received the highest job approval rating any president has received since Gallup began asking the question in the 1930s, with 89% of Americans indicating their approval.” 

On the homefront, though, is where “support the troops” was born.  During the short-lived war, yellow ribbons were used to signal the support, echoing the 1970s song, “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree.” For hundreds of miles, crowds flew American flags and cheered convoys of military units being deployed.  People gave blood in expectation that thousands of wounded troops would need it. Silent prayer vigils were held.  And supporting the troops became a gauge of patriotism. Any anti-war protesters, including college students, were silenced by accusations that they were unpatriotic.  “We support the troops. We just don’t support the policy. We’re not blinded by patriotism” those same protesters claimed in trying to decouple the troops from the war they were fighting. But as David Fitzgerald reports in “Supporting the Troops, Debating the War: The Persian Gulf War in Kentucky,” “one soldier deployed to the Gulf claimed, ‘I am here because I am a patriot. . . I am protecting your freedom, I am your bodyguard. Do not criticize my actions; I am saving life as you know it. My presence here is saving the freedom of America itself’.” His attitude prevailed among those who were not troops. Fitzgerald concludes:

Whereas protesters had to defend their patriotism and their respect for the troops before making any argument about the war, supporters of U.S. policy could (and did) simply affirm support for American soldiers without needing to make any policy-related case for war. Supporting the troops did not mean that they necessarily agreed with U.S. policies, but it allowed for a depoliticized support for the war effort without necessarily having to wrestle with questions about wars for oil or previous American support for Saddam. (577; emphasis added)

Now, not only does the mantra of “support the troops” persist as the embodiment of patriotism, tax-free charities deepen that message. For instance, “Support Our Troops: America’s Military Charity” takes donations and sends Care packages to deployed troops; the Gary Sinise Foundation serves “our nation by honoring our defenders, veterans, first responders, their families, and those in need,” especially military veterans; and Soldier’s Angels “offers a wide variety of services that benefit all those in the Military-connected community.”  Surprisingly, one can at once purchase from the “fiercely political” rock group “Rage Against the Machine” T-shirts featuring Che Guevara, Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, “Take the Power Back,” and also Army green T-shirts that read “Support Our Troops.”

Finally, in her 2022 book, Support the Troops: Military Obligation, Gender, and the Making of Political Community, Katherine M. Millar argues that the All-Volunteer Force and the subsequent decline in the number of men who serve in the armed forces has necessitated a revised form of service: support.  To conduct her discourse analysis of the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Millar examined about 14,000 documents from US and UK sources, including national support-the-troops organizations, peace and antiwar organizations, the mass media, politicians, and government and military officials (12).  What she discovered is that, although traditionally support in times of war is constructed as a feminine role, “supporting the troops addresses gendered civilian anxiety arising from non-service by (re)masculinizing civilian supporters” (197).  “Supporting the troops is [seen as] moral, natural, and apolitical,” she asserts. “Discussing the war on terror is engaging in politics [which we are told we mustn’t do]. Support is the new service; martial deference is the new democracy” (197; emphasis added).  Not only does “support the troops” remasculinize citizens, Millar points out that American and British civilians benefit in other ways through their support:

Supporting the troops turned civilian complicity in the racialized killings of people abroad into a simpler, more palatable question of solidarity at home and across the transnational liberal order. Supporting the troops reveals it’s not just negative relations of enmity that get people killed. It also takes loyalty, solidarity, and love. (197)

In this sense, supporting the troops means we citizens can assuage our guilt and shame about the violence of war and our culpability as citizens with the consolation that 1.) we have done all we can to feel for our troops, and 2.) that we do this feeling in solidarity with our political community.  Not only does this support signal and console us with a new masculinity, it also is the measure of our love for nation.

The origin of “Thank you for your service” in 2003

As the instigator of a “coalition of the willing” determined to destroy Iraq’s alleged Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) and as part of the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT), the United States—led by the second President Bush—invaded in March, 2003.  Though the reasons for the invasion were suspect because WMDs never were found, “support the troops” still prevailed.  Yet another version of “support” was regularized during this period, a year (2003) that registered according to Gallup the second of the three peaks of public confidence in the US military.  An article in Popula writes that thanks began informally during the brief, 1991 First Gulf War with organizations like the Maine Troop Greeters whose objective was to greet and photograph the combat troops who returned from war in the Middle East via Bangor, Maine.  It is notable, however, that it was in 2003 that the group became more formal with a website and 501c3 nonprofit status. 

2003 is when “thank you for your service” was made into a routine, a ritual, something expected as a demonstration of patriotism by those who had not served as troops and it continues today, more than two decades later.  It was in 2003 that I first experienced it myself as a college professor teaching US war stories.  Students, on learning I was a veteran, would issue the thanks to me. It made me want to conceal my veteran status, not only because they would utter the standard thanks and I didn’t know how to respond, but more importantly, because if they knew I had served they would be more likely to accept as Truth my interpretations of the war stories. I noted that this is not something they accorded to me in our reading of any other American stories; they were quite happy to contest my interpretations of those texts.  To them, though, war stories were qualitatively different.  Surely, I suspected they thought, even a (albeit lesser) woman veteran knows best about war and military life and their representations in storytelling.  Instead, I wanted them to come up with their own, what I considered valid, interpretations, and so I usually kept my veteran status to myself.

In 2009, the third peak in public confidence in the US military according to Gallup, the war in Iraq was ending. American troops were being withdrawn, resulting in the lowest casualty rate since the war’s beginning six years earlier.  Though combat operations did not formally end until 2010 and the war itself was not formally declared ended until 2011, Americans were exultant.  President Obama earned his highest job approval rating of both terms in 2009: 69%.  “Support the troops” and “Thank you for your service” were prominent, demonstrated by their showing up in award-winning books.  

One book about the war in Iraq is called Thank You For Your Service (2014), a non-fiction book written by Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist David Finkel as his follow-on to another non-fiction book, The Good Soldiers (2009).  Thank You was also made into a 2017 film.  Both books follow an Army Infantry unit that first, deployed to Iraq during the 2007 “surge,” and second, returned to the United States after a 15-month deployment.  In the first book the very young men arrive in Iraq with high hopes, good intentions, and dreams of glory, and they leave after more than a year with many of their comrades dead and thankful only to have survived, albeit morally and psychically injured.  The 2014 book follows the irrevocably damaged men on their return to the US, and “raises two essential questions: When we ask young men and women to go to war, what are we asking of them? And when they return, what are we thanking them for?”

A novel, Billy Lynn’s Long Half-Time Walk (2012), asks similar questions as it features the adulation soldier-celebrities face. The 2012 National Book Award winner casts:

the eight surviving men of Bravo Squad into America’s most sought-after heroes. For the past two weeks, the Bush administration has sent them on a media-intensive nationwide Victory Tour to reinvigorate public support for the war. Now, on this chilly and rainy [2004] Thanksgiving, the Bravos are guests of America’s Team, the Dallas Cowboys, slated to be part of the halftime show alongside the superstar pop group Destiny’s Child.

The eight young men awkwardly respond to the “thanks” issued to them, expecting drugs and sex will be their payment.  Their commodification at a 2004, Thanksgiving Day NFL football game is epitomized by their dread “over people rushing to offer thanks, pregnant with obligation and blood lust and ‘their voices throbbing like lovers’.”  Ironically, though, the troops are useful only as gladiator-like spectacles, because immediately after their performance as “soldier-celebrity” at the football game, they are returned to fight the war in Iraq.

Some veterans apparently appreciate the thanks, alleging that “they just don’t want to be anonymous,” that they want civilian Americans to at least acknowledge the country has been at war.  The myth is that veterans returning from Vietnam were spat upon, so veterans from more recent wars who have been steeped in that lore say at least spitting indicated civilians acknowledged the war in Vietnam.  A psychologist who counsels veterans, Michael B. Brennan, says in a 2017 op-ed that those who have not served should say to veterans “thank you for your service.”

In my view, regardless of a veteran’s era of service, branch of service, active or non-active status or deployment area of operation, etc., you should thank a veteran or service member for their service by specifically stating: “thank you for your service.” In general, I recommend going “over” rather than “under”: acknowledging someone’s service rather than not doing so for fear of what the response might be. It is a blanket statement that can be applied to a large number of those who have served or who are currently serving in any capacity.

Shockingly, though, Brennan suggests that if the veteran being thanked doesn’t appreciate the thanks, it is the veteran who needs therapy, not the thanker:

If a veteran is triggered, has a negative reaction, or has an “issue” with someone that says “thank you for your service,” it could be helpful for that person to seek therapy so that they could work toward a place to where they would be able to receive such a statement and see it as an acknowledgment of their service.

This recommendation, then, should prompt us to ask: whom do the support and thanks benefit, the veteran or the supporter/thanker?

So what?

But the most vocal veterans ask the question above.  They are skeptical about the earnestness of the support and thanks, seeing them more as “a hollow gesture that avoids the gravity of war and its effects,” that, “is a way for civilians to massage away some of the guilt at not participating themselves.”  In a 2015 New York Times article that featured interviews with three veterans, Mike Freedman, a Green Beret in the GWOT wars, calls the thanks version of “support the troops” the “thank you for your service phenomenon” that “’alleviates some of the civilian guilt’, adding: ‘They have no skin in the game with these wars. There’s no draft’. No real opinions either, he said.” The second interviewed veteran, Hunter Garth, also a veteran of the GWOT wars, says the thanks “feel self-serving for the thankers, suggesting that he [Garth] did it for them, and that they somehow understand the sacrifice, night terrors, feelings of loss and bewilderment. Or don’t think about it at all.” The third interviewed veteran is Tim O’Brien, the Vietnam War veteran who wrote The Things They Carried, the single book about the Vietnam War most often read by my college students in high school AP classes.  O’Brien says in the interview that some of the veterans from his war like to be thanked, though he finds “‘something in the stomach tumbles’ from expressions of appreciation that are so disconnected from the ‘evil, nasty stuff you do in war’.”  He terms the thanks “patriotic gloss”: “thanking without having the courage to ask whether the mission is even right.” And a scholar researching veterans on college campuses found the vets experienced the thanks as a “platitude…like something civilians thought they were supposed to say,” and as a way to avoid deeper discussions of war and their complicity in it. 

The increasingly negative attitude by veterans toward “thank you for your service” precipitated a 2023 survey conducted by USAA, an insurance company that for more than 100 years has exclusively served the military community.  (Full disclosure: I have been a member for more than forty years.) With Endeavor Analytics and YouGov, the November 2023 USAA survey found that at least half of the surveyed servicemembers and veterans are uncomfortable with “thank you for your service,” and the percentage of those expressing discomfort rises to 70% with younger servicepeople and veterans under the age of 65.  It’s not that the servicepeople and veterans don’t want to be supported.  Instead, they want civilians to “go beyond small talk to connect with them on a deeper level, including learning more about their service,” said retired Army Maj. Gen. Robert F. Whittle, Jr., SVP, chief of staff at USAA.  “Thank you for your service” “sounds like a canned phrase” designed to avoid inconvenient conversation, says former Marine Maj. Kyleanne Hunter, who deployed multiple times to Iraq as a combat helicopter pilot and now researches military and veterans’ issues for the RAND Corporation.

But I would say that’s the point of declaring one supports the troops and thanks them for their service: to avoid inconvenient and difficult conversations.  Just as my college students wanted me, a veteran, to proclaim to them the proper and true interpretation of all war narratives, so do, I think, American civilians—the vast majority of whom have not served—want to be told what to think about war and our armed forces. 

It is simple to say one supports the troops and to thank veterans and servicepeople for their service.  It is more complex and maybe even threatening to do otherwise. 

I think we Americans mostly don’t want to know how veterans may view us, as people who wouldn’t and don’t have to do what they have done by joining the armed forces.  I think we Americans mostly are overwhelmed by the complexities of geopolitics but we also choose not to understand them in favor of an easier, binaristic, black-and-white view of the world.  I think we Americans mostly don’t want to know about what Tim O’Brien calls above the “evil, nasty stuff you do in war.” And I think we most of all don’t want to see our own hands bloodied by what we ask our servicepeople to do.

So if the charms of Support the Troops and Thank You For Your Service don’t perform their magic to make the blood disappear, we are not so different from the infamous Lady Macbeth of Shakespeare’s early-17^th century play, Macbeth.  She and her husband both are ambitious, but it is she who ruthlessly goads Macbeth into killing the king, Duncan.  Her guilt builds throughout the play, and by the final, fifth act, she cannot rid herself of what she psychotically imagines is blood on her hands, delivering her most famous line: “Out, damned spot; out, I say” (Act 5, Scene 1).  Ultimately, the guilt drives her mad.

In that latter sense, we are unlike the lady.  In supporting our troops and thanking them for their service, we ask our troops to kill and we ask them to suffer the moral injury of that deadly deed.  But with support and thanks, we imagine our hands are clean.