Thank you for your....

More than a week in the hospital with MOPP (My Old Pal, Pneumonia) has reminded me vividly of something I’ve been arguing for years: Instead of saying “Thank you for your service” to someone who “served” in the military, an organization whose core competence is mass murder, say it to someone who saves lives, like nurses—or enhances lives, like teachers.

A few days into my latest pneumonia visit, I went through a coughing fit so bad that multiple nurses and doctors had to join my wife Judy and daughter Rachel in pounding on my back, to stop the coughing. It was so bad that one of the staff asked Judy if it would be OK if they intubated me. That didn’t happen, but the question was a scary indication that I had come close to the end of my time on the planet.

So nurses at Stony Brook University Hospital helped save my life. Throughout my stay, nurses took good care of me. They measured my blood pressure, temperature, and blood oxygen. They took blood samples, administered antibiotics and other medications, and cleaned up the mess when I had to use a bedpan, because I was too multiply connected to the bed to go to the bathroom. Those acts felt like real service to me. So I made sure to thank them sincerely for their service and offer a brief rant about the madness of using that ubiquitous five-word mantra reflexively to thank veterans.

When people say those words to me, after learning I was once briefly and involuntarily a member of the military, I usually refrain from a full rant. Even though people who utter that five-word mantra are perpetuating a mistaken idolatry, they don’t really mean any harm. If I could explain to them why I feel the way I do about those misdirected five words, I’d offer a brief synopsis of what I explored at length in my book, Sacred Soldier: The Dangers of Worshiping Warriors. As a Mets fan, my favorite sentence is “Mets win; Yanks lose.” As a manufacturer of paragraphs, my favorite sentence is “Don’t worry about the length.” But here I’ll restrain myself and offer a brief summary.

First of all, the word “service.” I associate that word with Jesus, who told his disciples in Matthew 20:24-28 that he had not come to be served, but to serve. So I associate the word service with the unselfish, self-emptying love of Jesus, our great brother—not with war or warriors. When I write about the military, I manage to find a way of avoiding the phrase “military service.”

Then there’s Vietnam. In the Sixties, many young Americans did their best to avoid membership in the military. (Stupidly, I did not. So, I received a letter from President Lyndon Baines Johnson inviting me to the armed forces induction station on Whitehall Street in Lower Manhattan, made famous by Arlo Guthrie in the film Alice’s Restaurant.) It was a wicked war that this country had no business entering and no chance of winning. But I was lucky: They sent me to Korea, not Vietnam.

Not long before his death by assassination, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy had set in motion a process of removing the still small numbers of American troops from Vietnam. But when the assassination made Lyndon Johnson president, he did not want to be seen as the American president who lost Vietnam to the forces of communism. So, he vastly increased the number of American troops there. The result of that assassination, perpetrated by a Marine Corps veteran, was that more than 58,000 young Americans died in combat in Vietnam. Many others died afterward from suicide and a variety of Vietnam-related ailments, such as exposure to dioxin, a toxic contaminant found in the herbicide Agent Orange in Vietnam. (My brother Richie died after returning from the war, and I’ll always believe that the cause of his death was exposure to Agent Orange during his time in Vietnam.)

Unsurprisingly, the loss of a war did not inspire massive victory parades for the returning troops. But it did not lead to a tsunami of spit aimed at Vietnam veterans, either. This myth of frequent spitting at Vietnam veterans is part of the rationale for treating today’s troops with near-idolatrous respect. But Jerry Lembcke, a Vietnam veteran and an emeritus associate professor of sociology at the College of the Holy Cross, explored that myth in this book, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam. He concluded that the mass spitting attacks did not happen. But making up for the insufficient adulation shown to Vietnam veterans is still a key reason for the pervasive “Thank you for your service” attitude.

The near-worship of the military doesn’t exactly fit the attitude of the first followers of Jesus. He had chosen not to align himself with those who wanted to use violence to overthrow the Roman occupation. He urged his followers to love their enemies and react nonviolently to oppression. An early Christian leader, Hippolytus, taught that no one who has embraced state-sponsored killing could become a Christian, and no Christian should volunteer for the military. Three centuries after Jesus, though, Christianity won the approval of the empire, and the poisonous embrace of the state gradually wore away Christian rejection of war.

It’s true that, even in this era of the all-volunteer military, many end up in uniform as the result of what is known as the “economic draft.” They need the enlistment bonus money for a variety of reasons. So they join and only later learn that the military is not about bonuses or learning skills that will help them when they become civilians again, but about “lethality,” as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth likes to put it. It’s also about rampant soldier-on-soldier sexual abuse. I interviewed one woman who enlisted because she needed money for college. Later, just a few days before she was to return from Afghanistan, another soldier raped her. Whatever their experience in the military has been, thanking them for their service is not really helping them. Veterans I’ve interviewed simply don’t know what to say when someone pronounces that nearly mandatory five-word mantra.

So let’s save Thank-you-for-your-service for people who save lives, like nurses and doctors; who enhance life, like teachers; or those whose jobs are difficult but necessary to our daily lives. One example: I think often of the people who have to ride garbage trucks and recycling trucks through our streets and lift a seemingly endless array of heavy cans containing the remnants of our lives.

As we head into Memorial Day weekend, we should remember those who died in previous wars and those they left behind, but we should also push back against the militarization of the nation. If you run across an active-duty soldier or a veteran, don’t feel obligated to say, “Thank you for your service.” Instead, ask them how their experience in the military has affected them. Ask them how they are doing. But when a nurse or a doctor helps you to remain healthy, or a teacher inspires and uplifts your children or grandchildren, feel free to thank them for their service, using that five-word mantra.