“Thank you for your service.” It’s a sentence I have spoken many times to veterans and people in military uniform. The ideals in which the United States military is ostensibly rooted—honor, duty, bravery, transcendence of self—are ideals to which all men ought to aspire.
But that’s precisely why I stopped thanking American military men for their service. Because, truth be told, they often act contrary to those universal ideals, as well as to the United States, which is greatly harmed by their actions. I also stopped thanking military men for their service because, after all, I’m the one paying for the boondoggles abroad. If anything, people in uniform ought to be thanking me.
If anything, “Thank you for your service” now sounds like a tone-deaf faux pas. During the latest round of state violence against Iran, many Americans have watched in disbelief as their countrymen did things that would be prosecuted as heinous crimes had anyone not in a military uniform carried them out. Double-tapping a girls’ elementary school with two Tomahawk missiles is one example, but there are many more.
If you met them on your evening walk, would you thank Leigh Tate and Jeffrey York, officers on board the USS Spruance from which the missiles were launched? Added to the wanton violence is genocidal rhetoric from Tate’s and York’s commander-in-chief, the malice of which is compounded by his getting marching orders from the leader of a foreign country also perpetuating a genocide. If you would have a hard time thanking an IDF member for his service after strolling through post-apocalyptic Gaza, then you might also struggle to find words of gratitude for Americans who have long been helping Ukraine commit ethnic cleansing against Russians in the east. “Thank you for your service” assumes a pro-American military that simply has not existed for decades and probably never has.
Like most Americans, though, the opposite message has been my educational pablum. I have been told more times than I can count, especially after 9/11, that the job of the United States military is to fight terrorism so that I can be safe and free at home. But what the United States military does, not just in Iran but elsewhere, could itself be called a form of terrorism. It takes a lot of ahistorical editing to make it seem as though Osama bin Laden was a sui generis actor and that there was no American imperialism behind his stratagems. This kind of pro-military propaganda, in which our side is always put-upon and just, is not unique to the post-9/11 United States, but began at least as far back as the 1860s, when the northern states undertook a scorched earth campaign of rape, rapine, and slaughter against peaceful Southerners, and did so to please a dictator. The South, in that war, fought in self-defense.
The North, by contrast, acted as the American armed forces do today, namely, with impunity. Impunity is the watchword of the lawless, trigger-happy Americans. With the exception of the United States Coast Guard—whose day-to-day interdictions of illicit shipments and general patrolling of America’s territorial waters are, in theory at least, close to ideals of non-aggressive self-defense—the American military (including the Coast Guard) has been on one bloody rampage after another, often on false pretenses, for at least as long as the constitutional republic has existed.
To be sure, the men who serve in the American military are not necessarily themselves murderous and mad. It takes guts and daring to do a lot of what military men do. The rescue mission of a downed weapons systems officer in the Iranian mountains recently was bold (although probably also carried out under false pretenses). There are many other instances like this, in which military men act with great valor under enemy fire. The battlefield heroism of many old soldier legends is oftentimes very real. The problem is that no matter how brave and high-minded one is, such work is done on behalf of a corrupt corporation. The Nuremberg defense won’t cut it.
Big picture, all of the sacrifice that American military members make is for worse than nothing. They train, and kill, as the armed guard of globalism and the Deep State. They put their lives on the line, and take the lives of others, to cover up sex crimes, among other less than noble ends. They run drugs—all the time. They wage war for a racket, lay waste for a fraud. The ideals that many American military men surely bring to their line of work are eclipsed by the structural evil of the military and the government that controls it.
And we, the taxpayers, fund the moveable feast of the American killing fields. The US military will soak up well over a trillion dollars Federal Reserve notes in 2026, some 3.5 percent of GDP. But the truth is that the Pentagon is impossible to audit and nobody knows exactly where taxpayer money goes. Well, that’s not quite true. We know where some of it goes—torture, surveillance of American citizens, long-distance death in proxy wars: people who work for the openly-violent wings of the federal government kill and maim abroad, spy at home, and send us the bill for it. And then ask us to believe that it’s all for our benefit.
There was a time when I tried to look past the military to see the good that it did in protecting the country. I can no longer do that. Aircraft carriers make no sense if one loves one’s country—not one’s statist overlords—and wants peace and prosperity for everyone. There is no patriotism in nationalism. There is no benefit to America in visiting death and misery on foreign populations. Those in the military do a disservice to the country and to humanity.
So, sorry, but I’m not in the mood to thank any more uniformed servicemembers or veterans. I’m going to tip my hat to the militias instead.
