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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsVeterans days always make me feel weird.
Especially when someone says "Thank you for your service." You see, I was an infantryman in Vietnam, but I did not serve willingly. I was drafted, forced into a deadly form of involuntary servitude, and whatever illusions I might originally have had about the rightness of the war were quickly torn from me when I saw what we were doing to the innocent people, the sacred soils, the beautiful waters and jungles and mountains of that tormented land.
"No, don't thank me," I want to say. "Forgive me. Forgive me for participating in that awful event in your name. If you must thank me for something, then thank me for joining the movement to stop the war when I got home. Maybe thank me for the things I have tried to do for the castoffs of society--the mentally ill, the developmentally disabled, the emotionally damaged products of chaotic and abusive homes who have gone on to fill our jails and prisons. But don't thank me for going off to participate in the destruction of a foreign land whose residents never intended any harm to you or me."
(This is a re-run of something I wrote a few years ago.)
bvf
(6,604 posts)HereSince1628
(36,063 posts)You filled a slot in a quota and didn't pass that slot on to someone else to fill. Somebody's son, brother, father, or uncle, maybe even grandfather owes you thanks for lives that got lived. Even if that guy, his children and grand children felt like thanking you personally, how would they find you?
Maybe you could think of all those thank-you's as proxies for those.
ohheckyeah
(9,314 posts)to thank him for his service - he doesn't accept it well. He sort of laughed and said thanks and then changed the subject. He, too, is a Vietnam veteran.
I couldn't reach my dad today but he fought in WWII in both Germany and the Philippines.
Autumn
(45,097 posts)my Husband just looked at him and said I sure as hell wouldn't do it again. I know where you are coming from.