I am a Veteran....
I don't need to be thanked for my service....
 |
| Viet-nam...Chu Lai....1968-70 |
every turn of the hat.
I did MY duty....I'm proud of THAT...
When woman do their duty giving birth to a child....not aborting a child.....
thank her everyday.....
Duty needs NO reward
DUTY is what WE Men do in protection of society...
Duty is what Woman do in the procreation of society....
PS...the MEDIA...when you compel the government to raise the pay and health benefits for VETERANS....
then I just may ACCEPT your repeated "thanks for your service."...
I don't NEED your thanks...
I need to be PAID, I need HealthCare...
and to all the Moms out there.....
your job is NOT taken for granted by warriors
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A great article from a warrior
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/sunday-review/please-dont-thank-me-for-my-service.html?_r=0
Please Don’t Thank Me for My Service
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 15 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’m going to die here with my best friends,” he recalled thinking.
I
didn’t know any of this — nor the remarkable story of his survival that
day — when I met him two months ago in Colorado while reporting for an
article about the marijuana industry, 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 problem,” he said.
It wasn’t true. There was
a problem. I could see it from the way he looked down. And I could see
it on the faces of some of the other vets who work with Mr. Garth when I
thanked them too. What gives, I asked? Who doesn’t want to be thanked
for their military service?
Many
people, it turns out. Mike Freedman, a Green Beret, calls it the “thank
you for your service phenomenon.” To some recent vets — by no stretch
all of them — the thanks comes across as shallow, disconnected, a
reflexive offering from people who, while meaning well, have no clue
what soldiers did over there or what motivated them to go, 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. It 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 it can feel self-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 it 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 express dread over people rushing to offer thanks,
pregnant with obligation and blood lust and “their voices throbbing like
lovers.”
The issue has also surfaced, at least tangentially, with Brian Williams’s admission
that he’d exaggerated about being in a Chinook helicopter hit by enemy
fire. In explaining his failed memory, 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
idea of giving thanks while not participating themselves is one of the
core vet quibbles, said Mr. Freedman, the Green Beret. The joke has
become 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 skin 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.”
“Thank you for your service,” he said, is almost the equivalent of “I haven’t thought about any of this.”
For
most of us, I suspect, offering thanks reflects genuine appreciation —
even if ill-defined. It was a dirty job and someone had to do 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, find that “something in
the stomach tumbles” from expressions of appreciation that are so
disconnected from the “evil, nasty stuff you do in war.”
The
more so, he said, “when your war turns out to have feet of clay” —
whether fighting peasants in Vietnam or in the name of eradicating
weapons of mass destruction that never materialized.
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