by W.D. Ehrhart
For the past two decades, I’ve been patient with this ridiculous insistence by my fellow Americans on thanking me for my service. I have tried to imagine that they mean well and are sincere in their thanks, however misdirected the sentiment may be, however oblivious to reality the well-wishers may be. For two decades, whenever someone has thanked me for my service, I’ve simply said, “You’re welcome,” and let it go at that.
But I have finally run out of patience. I just can’t keep my mouth shut anymore. I’m tired of their stupidity and ignorance, and the utter emptiness of their words. I’m tired of letting them feel like they’ve made me feel appreciated or whatever the heck they think they’re making me feel by thanking me. I’m tired of letting them feel good about themselves for doing what they seem to think is the right thing.
The fact is that I am ashamed of what I did while serving in the military of the United States. I went halfway around the world to kill, maim, and make miserable people who had never done me or my country any harm, nor ever would or could. Do you really think I want your thanks for that? I think you ought to go have a long talk with a member of the clergy.
What really sent me over the edge was a few nights ago when I was watching The Daily Show. This is a program that is highly critical of the current administration, but also has a history of criticizing the stupidity and foibles of whoever is in charge of our government. Michael Costa was interviewing some former Navy SEAL who discovered that dropping LSD helped with his PTSD, or something like that. But the first thing Costa did was to thank this guy for his service and for what he’d done for our country.
I have no idea what the details of this man’s “service” are because I turned the TV off as soon as Costa said that. But I do know that no member of the U.S. military has done a damned thing to protect our country or defend our freedoms since the end of the Second World War.
During the Korean War, 37,000 Americans died to make sure that a dictator named Singman Rhee remained in power in South Korea instead of being displaced by a dictator name Kim Il Sung.
We lost the war in Vietnam—“my war”—the Vietnamese finally defeating the bogus government we’d installed twenty years earlier and sending us packing, yet Americans can still worship at the church of their choice and buy whatever brand of toothpaste we want, so our freedoms clearly weren’t at stake in that war.
Hundreds of Americans died in Lebanon in the early 1980s, so that wasn’t exactly a win, but again we lost none of our freedoms. We did win the war in Grenada, preventing the expansion of an airfield that might have accommodated Soviet bombers, but then we turned around and finished the airport so that Grenada could accommodate more tourism, an idea that surely never would have occurred to the Grenadians without our help and guidance.
In 1989, our military invaded Panama and kidnapped Manuel Noriega, who had been on the CIA payroll for a couple of decades, and represented zero threat to American freedoms. In 1991, our military invaded Iraq to put the Emir of Kuwait back on his gold-plated toilet (think I’m kidding?) and ensure that we Americans retained the freedom to burn as much Middle Eastern petroleum as our hearts and our gas-guzzling cars desired.
In 1993, American soldiers died in Mogadishu, maybe trying—however ineptly—to help the people of Somalia, but certainly not defending American freedoms. And of the two big wars in this century—Afghanistan and Iraq—we eventually left Afghanistan to its fate with no detrimental impact on our own freedoms, and it turns out U.S. government knew all along that Saddam Hussein never did have weapons of mass destruction that could threaten the U.S.
And now we’re told that Venezuela poses a grave threat to the United States, so we must hijack Venezuelan oil tankers, destroy small boats on the high seas, and kidnap that country’s head of state to protect our nation, even as this president pardons former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was convicted in U.S. federal court of facilitating the importation of 400 tons of cocaine into the U.S.
Over the past 80-plus years, this is what the U.S. military has been doing in the service of our country. Not to mention now being deployed in the streets of our cities against Americans exercising their constitutional rights to free speech and to petition the government for redress of grievances.
None of this has anything to do with defending our nation or protecting our freedoms.
Less than a week ago, I was sitting in the waiting room of my vascular surgeon, and I happened to mention to another man there that I had been in the Marines sixty years ago. He was not a veteran, he said, having gotten a high draft lottery number, but his father had been a Marine on Iwo Jima. And then he thanked me for my service.
I said that I appreciated his sincerity, but that if he knew what I had done in my “service” to the country, he would realize that thanks were not in order.
He immediately replied that while the Vietnam War might have been a bad war, that wasn’t my fault; I had nevertheless answered the call and done my duty.
At that point, I couldn’t help myself. I said, “You’re not listening. I went halfway around the world to kill, maim, and make miserable people who had never done me or my country any harm. I am ashamed of what I did. I certainly don’t want your thanks.”
The guy clearly didn’t know what to say. He looked at me like I’d just asked him what color panties his wife wore. I then said, “You ought to think twice before you thank somebody for their service. Maybe not all of us want to be thanked. Frankly, being thanked for what I did makes my skin crawl.”
At that point, a nurse called my name and I got up and left. By the time my appointment ended, the man was gone. But I’m done being polite about this. If people want to shove their heads up their backsides and parrot nonsensical drivel, that’s their prerogative. But if they insist on laying that crap on me, from now on they’re going to get an earful.
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W.D. Ehrhart is a retired Master Teacher of History & English, and author of a Vietnam War memoir trilogy published by McFarland.