Steven H. Newton is a professional military historian and a retired U.S. Army master sergeant. He lives in Wilmington.
“Thank you for your service.”
I cringe when I hear that, even as I cast around for a suitably polite reply.
Despite having served for 21 years and being deployed overseas multiple times between 1980 and 2001, I was never in battle and don’t want to be mistaken for one of America’s true combat veterans.
Part of me also has to resist saying, “If you’re really thankful, please pressure your elected officials to fund PTSD treatment and veterans’ housing and to support our soldiers’ families so they can live above the poverty line.”
But the most overwhelming urge I have to fight is asking, “In service to what?”
When our nation was founded, men like James Madison, Thomas Jefferson and even George Washington believed that large “standing armies” represented a threat to a free society. They considered, beyond defense against invasion, that the use of America’s Army and Navy on foreign adventures represented a failure of democracy. Military power was intended to be the last resort when all else failed.
Thus, most of the wars fought by the United States before 1941 tended to be events. A crisis loomed — in the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Civil War and even World War I — and we mobilized our professional soldiers and citizen levies to master it. When the war was over, we demobilized, the veterans went home, and our armed forces shrunk back to the vicinity of prewar numbers.
No “defense budget” prior to 1940 constituted much more than a rounding error in federal spending, unless America was actually at war.
After World War II, however, the U.S. never again demobilized: War became a condition of our ongoing lives.
The “Cold War” lasted until the early 1990s, when the Soviet Union collapsed under its own weight from economic exhaustion and ethnic strife. Korea, Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, intervention in the Congo, the invasion of Grenada, the invasion of Panama and the Suez crisis were incidents within that larger war.
I spent my elementary school years in Virginia, huddled under my desk for civil defense drills in case the Russians nuked the civilian microwave transmission tower on Afton Mountain. I watched my brother’s draft number get closer and closer to him being hauled off to fight in southeast Asia.
I saw Muhammed Ali excoriated for refusing so steadfastly to fight that he went to prison instead. It was only when that action made Ali a hero in much of the rest of the world that I began to think about what had changed in American history, even as I voluntarily joined the Army in 1980.
The Cold War ended halfway through my military career, but it took less than a decade for the “War on Terror” to replace it as a defining element in American life, politics and the economy.
We have apparently so restructured our nation over the past 70 years that we have become a nation that cannot live without war.
During that time, we have established a defense budget larger than the world’s next 10 largest military forces combined (eight of whom are our allies) and become the world’s largest exporter of the weapons of war. By 2000, wrote Robert Kaplan in his groundbreaking book “Imperial Grunts: On the Ground with the American Military, From Mongolia to the Philippines to Iraq and Beyond,” “the United States military had already appropriated the entire earth, and was ready to flood the most obscure areas of it with troops at a moment’s notice.”
That changed what we expect from, and how we treat, our service members — those “imperial grunts.” Between 2001and 2018, 2.77 million service members have served 5.4 million tours of combat duty abroad. About 1.8 million of them came home partly or completely disabled, and more than 30,000 have committed suicide since the Department of Veterans Affairs belatedly started keeping track in 2008.
Seventeen combat deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq were personal brothers and sisters that I served with, just as three were U.S. Marines who died in the mass bombing in Lebanon in 1983 and one was a casualty in Desert Storm. Six have come home severely disabled, and at least one ended her own life.
Soldiers in the Civil War and both World Wars knew exactly why they were fighting. Today, that question is considerably murkier.
“Thank you for your service.” But service to what end?
Marine Corps Gen. Smedley Butler nearly lost his reputation in 1935 for declaring, “War is a racket. It always has been. … A few profit — and the many pay. … It can be smashed effectively only by taking the profit out of war.”
Yet in 1961, outgoing Republican president and former general of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower put forth a similar warning: “We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted.”
The best way to thank a veteran today is to make a personal priority of ensuring that we keep our promises to those who have been broken (and their families) and start demanding that the policies of our profiteering elite leaders return to the fundamental principles of our Founders.
War should no longer be considered a casual tool of statecraft, and American citizens should never be viewed as expendable cannon fodder.
