Ah, The Troops

Many, many times on Xmastime I've wondered about our paradox when it comes to the troops; our insistence that there is no more holy a duty than to proclaim our "support" of the troops while at the same time insisting they're locked in a series of never-ending wars (to the point that we've fooled ourselves into believing that questioning if they should one day come home "hurts their feelings" and therein morale), ripped away from their families for an unprecedented number of tours (including Reservists), re-electing Congressmen who gleefully cut their benefits every chance they get or use the troops' sexuality as a political weapon, and then not really wanting to be bothered to hear about it whenever someone points out the disturbingly steep incline of suicides.  We go on and on, every jerkoff with a camera or Facebook account desperately trying to out-do each other in an effort to BREAK THE RECORD!!! for showing how much they love the troops, numbed to any thoughts of even asking is it really worth it? - XMASTIME

Interesting Fallows article HERE re: our whole brainlessly-worship-the-troops-without-really-giving-a-shit:

This reverent but disengaged attitude toward the military—we love the troops, but we’d rather not think about them—has become so familiar that we assume it is the American norm. But it is not. When Dwight D. Eisenhower, as a five-star general and the supreme commander, led what may have in fact been the finest fighting force in the history of the world, he did not describe it in that puffed-up way. On the eve of the D-Day invasion, he warned his troops, “Your task will not be an easy one,” because “your enemy is well-trained, well-equipped, and battle-hardened.” As president, Eisenhower’s most famous statement about the military was his warning in his farewell address of what could happen if its political influence grew unchecked.

Further interesting note:

From Mister Roberts to South Pacific to Catch-22, from The Caine Mutiny to The Naked and the Dead to From Here to Eternity, American popular and high culture treated our last mass-mobilization war as an effort deserving deep respect and pride, but not above criticism and lampooning. The collective achievement of the military was heroic, but its members and leaders were still real people, with all the foibles of real life. A decade after that war ended, the most popular military-themed TV program was The Phil Silvers Show, about a con man in uniform named Sgt. Bilko. As Bilko, Phil Silvers was that stock American sitcom figure, the lovable blowhard—a role familiar from the time of Jackie Gleason in The Honeymooners to Homer Simpson in The Simpsons today. Gomer Pyle, USMC; Hogan’s Heroes; McHale’s Navy; and even the anachronistic frontier show F Troop were sitcoms whose settings were U.S. military units and whose villains—and schemers, and stooges, and occasional idealists—were people in uniform. American culture was sufficiently at ease with the military to make fun of it, a stance now hard to imagine outside the military itself.