Nobody’s perfect. That’s a central tenet of Christianity.
Nobody’s perfect, and contrary to the facile show-praise offered by every politician, neither are veterans. So says Marine and Iraq War veteran Matt Young, talking about his new Iraq War memoir Eat the Apple with Air Force veteran Sean Illing:
Illing: You also make the argument in the book that it’s dangerous to reinforce the idea that every veteran is a hero. Why is that?
Young: I think we’re creating an army of fanatics that feel like they can’t be questioned. We have to have the ability to question people, even if we think they’re fighting for our freedom. Labeling every veteran a hero just widens the gap between civilians and soldiers because it creates a mythology that isn’t true, and that most soldiers can’t come close to living up to.
When you come back from war and you’ve done and seen horrible stuff and you’ve been part of a machine you didn’t really understand and you have people calling you heroic, I think that just keeps soldiers at an arm’s distance, because you’re not letting them tell the truth about their experience. We’re imposing an expectation on them that is unrealistic and false [Sean Illing, “An Iraq War Vet Makes the Case Against Shallow Patriotism,” Vox, 2018.04.10].
Like everyone else you meet on the street, soldiers and veterans are not gods who can do no wrong. They are fellow Americans, fellow sinners, who can be led into evil by a nation that hollowly apes “patriotism” instead of clearly thinking about the proper role of the military in foreign and domestic policy.
Great post, Cory.
I think it also ties into how they are paid/taken care of. Like teachers and similar public service jobs, the heaping of praise and hero talk seems to justify poor pay/care.
A friend of mine who is a veteran and who was deployed to the middle east on 2 or 3 occasions told me recently he hates when strangers say “Thank you for your service.” He says he joined as a career choice alone; he didn’t want to go to college and was sick of the jobs like working at McDonald’s or being a telemarketer, and he knew he could at least earn a paycheck in the army. I would imagine a lot of military folks did the same thing – joined up because it was better than the alternatives, but not simply to “serve their country” or “defend our freedoms” or any other similar catchphrase used by “patriots” with a motive.
“Shallow patriotism” indeed. There seems to be a lot of that going around and I find it sickening. In my years at the VA hospital, I learned more about patriotism from the old boys in long term care, nearly all WW II vets, than the people, –especially politicians and ammosexuals, who love to voice pious, platitudinous, pseudo-patriotic crap– will ever, Ever know.
Ryan’s comment reminds me: Over the course of a few days at Sanford in Sioux Falls, I heard multiple employees, all lobby/front desk/office folks, say to a variety of customers, upon learning that the customers were veterans in the midst of their medical/business transaction, “Thank you for your service.”
Ben Cerwinkse writes:
A typical soldier gets much less pay/care than a typical teacher, for much more demanding work, but each of those occupations is vulnerable to creating “an army of fanatics that feel like they can’t be questioned.”