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One thing that really struck me on my US (and Canadian) travels was the respect given to the armed forces past and present. Not the silly over the top devotion

by ErrantX 17y ago

One thing that really struck me on my US (and Canadian) travels was the respect given to the armed forces past and present. Not the silly over the top devotion some people exhibit (I actually dislike that) but the silent respect and appreciation exhibited (like, for example signs announcing uniformed service men get into XYX free/cheap or the way uniformed people were generally treated or the seriousness devoted to days like today) If there is one thing I could bring back here to the UK and instill it would be that.

jgrahamc 17y ago
One thing you could do is actually thank a member of the armed forces in person. I have done this in the past. A few months ago I saw a uniformed RAF man standing at Green Park tube waiting for the train: I simply walked up to him and asked him he was returning from a deployment overseas. He told me that he was returning from Afghanistan and I simply said "Thank you" to him.
- DanielBMarkham 17y ago
  I can't endorse this habit highly enough. I do it every chance I get. You can't imagine the morale-boosting effect it has to simply have strangers come up and say "thank you?"
- raganwald 17y ago
  One night this past summer I was driving home after midnight and I saw a very inebriated older man waiting for a streetcar. Something about his bearing struck me, so I stopped and gave him a lift home. We chatted, and he was indeed a veteran. When he tried to thank me for the lift, I told him that I owed him the debt of gratitude.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
  - ErrantX 17y ago
    This is the hang up I have too; I dont personally do things like that. Though I do try and take time to talk politely to service men in situations like that (but I dont think I would directly thank him/her) (edit: the [deleted] was someone asking, basically, why "thank you" specifically).
- jasongullickson 17y ago
  I've considered doing this, but I've always wondered how it would be received. Any veterans/service folks care to comment?
  - DanielBMarkham 17y ago
    As both a veteran and somebody who does it, I will. It's really tough, I won't lie to you. Walking up to a total stranger and saying something from the heart, to me at least, is very unnatural. Usually I ask them a bit about where they are stationed, what they've been doing, whether or not they've been deployed. Just small talk. But before I leave I try to make physical contact -- patting them on the shoulder usually -- and say something like "Hey, I just wanted to say thank you. You guys are doing an awesome job." Every time I've done it I get the weirdest reaction. At first they're totally convinced I am going to say something ugly right afterwards. Then they look confused for a couple of seconds. Then it's like the sun opens up from behind clouds: it's really, really cool. Makes you feel good the rest of the day (and I'm sure it makes their day as well)
- pcestrada 17y ago
  I was at the Dallas airport recently waiting for my flight to board when a large group of soldiers dressed in desert camoflauge debarked from their plane. As the walked by every single person in the terminal stood up and applauded until the last of them had left. It was great to see everyone honor the soldiers in this way.
- uhiubiv 17y ago
  Or go upto a physics teacher and thank them. The reason the Russian army isn't in western europe is not due to the heroic effort of the Queen's Cavalry - it's due to the ability to knock two pieces of Plutonium together. It's the nerds/geeks at Aldermaston/LLNL/Los Alamos/ Sarov/Zheleznogorsk that have kept the world safe for you.
jlees 17y ago
I wouldn't have said the UK lacked it. Every year when I was a kid I would take part in the Remembrance Sunday parades as a Girl Guide, and there was definitely a massive feeling of respect and admiration for these brave men. I'd always get tears in my eyes when an octogenarian bent double under the weight of his medals recited Wilfred Owen. I guess less so with the current armed forces, since the threat was further away, and fewer of us were touched by it personally (most people I know have grandparents who were involved in one of the Great Wars; not everyone knows a modern-day serviceman). Plus the issue of the war itself; I believe anti-war sentiment about the recent wars is higher than it was for WWI and WWII, and what there was then is very much blurred by time, victory and countless readings of war poetry in high school. Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori.
- ErrantX 17y ago
  I never meant to suggest it wasn't exhibited at all. But if you've ever been the to states you'd get what I mean.
  - jlees 17y ago
    I've just got back from the States and lived there for a while. I prefer the way the UK does it. (Apart from The Sun.)
Tichy 17y ago
I wonder if that is just a trick played by society to make more people assume bad jobs? The emphasis of heroism and personal sacrifice just makes the rest of society become freeloaders. Sorry that I can not formulate it better. I hope the pay for soldiers in the US is OK - maybe the height of the pay correlates with the "solemness"? Like suppose every soldier would get 1000000$ per year, would they still be solemnly thanked?
- mseebach 17y ago
  It's not possible to pay soldiers a reasonable amount of money. If you pay them too much, you basically get an army of mercenaries, while the personal sacrifice any soldier send into harms way endures is impossible to truly translate to money. We entrepreneurs often talk of our way of life as something we choose quite explicitly over financial security. I'm pretty sure the success of an army depends a lot on it's soldiers thinking roughly the same way about their chosen path. Finally, my impression is that the United States is build on a certain mentality that's difficult for us Europeans to fully grasp. The country was founded by people fleeing from prosecution and suppression, and it's first war was fought against that same suppression trying to catch up. That mentality lies pretty deep in Americans, as I understand. It has nothing to do with cheating people into collecting our garbage and manning 24-hour convenience stores. It's a shame that thankfulness to esp. US and UK troops isn't better founded in western European minds, and that it's only brought up when trying to justify a new war. Fact is that 400.000 Americans died in WWII, without whom my German would probably be a lot better. There's a D-day burial ground in Normandy. Any European should make a point of visiting it sometime (I haven't yet) -- especially before making high-brow intellectual rants against war.
  - oiubhn 17y ago
    As long as you remember that it's a mentality of sacrifice that led to 183,000 Americans dying in Europe, but it's facist totalitarianism that led to 10.7M Russians doing the same. 4 out of the 5million German military casualties were on the Eastern Front, The Russian army had a not insignificant role in Germany's defeat.
uhiubiv 17y ago
The US and Canada don't have troops on their streets recently shooting at their own population (or at least that sector that believe in transubstantiation)

by ErrantX 17y ago

jgrahamc 17y ago

One thing you could do is actually thank a member of the armed forces in person. I have done this in the past. A few months ago I saw a uniformed RAF man standing at Green Park tube waiting for the train: I simply walked up to him and asked him he was returning from a deployment overseas. He told me that he was returning from Afghanistan and I simply said "Thank you" to him.

DanielBMarkham 17y ago
I can't endorse this habit highly enough. I do it every chance I get. You can't imagine the morale-boosting effect it has to simply have strangers come up and say "thank you?"
raganwald 17y ago
One night this past summer I was driving home after midnight and I saw a very inebriated older man waiting for a streetcar. Something about his bearing struck me, so I stopped and gave him a lift home. We chatted, and he was indeed a veteran. When he tried to thank me for the lift, I told him that I owed him the debt of gratitude.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
- ErrantX 17y ago
  This is the hang up I have too; I dont personally do things like that. Though I do try and take time to talk politely to service men in situations like that (but I dont think I would directly thank him/her) (edit: the [deleted] was someone asking, basically, why "thank you" specifically).
jasongullickson 17y ago
I've considered doing this, but I've always wondered how it would be received. Any veterans/service folks care to comment?
- DanielBMarkham 17y ago
  As both a veteran and somebody who does it, I will. It's really tough, I won't lie to you. Walking up to a total stranger and saying something from the heart, to me at least, is very unnatural. Usually I ask them a bit about where they are stationed, what they've been doing, whether or not they've been deployed. Just small talk. But before I leave I try to make physical contact -- patting them on the shoulder usually -- and say something like "Hey, I just wanted to say thank you. You guys are doing an awesome job." Every time I've done it I get the weirdest reaction. At first they're totally convinced I am going to say something ugly right afterwards. Then they look confused for a couple of seconds. Then it's like the sun opens up from behind clouds: it's really, really cool. Makes you feel good the rest of the day (and I'm sure it makes their day as well)
pcestrada 17y ago
I was at the Dallas airport recently waiting for my flight to board when a large group of soldiers dressed in desert camoflauge debarked from their plane. As the walked by every single person in the terminal stood up and applauded until the last of them had left. It was great to see everyone honor the soldiers in this way.
uhiubiv 17y ago
Or go upto a physics teacher and thank them. The reason the Russian army isn't in western europe is not due to the heroic effort of the Queen's Cavalry - it's due to the ability to knock two pieces of Plutonium together. It's the nerds/geeks at Aldermaston/LLNL/Los Alamos/ Sarov/Zheleznogorsk that have kept the world safe for you.

jlees 17y ago

I wouldn't have said the UK lacked it. Every year when I was a kid I would take part in the Remembrance Sunday parades as a Girl Guide, and there was definitely a massive feeling of respect and admiration for these brave men. I'd always get tears in my eyes when an octogenarian bent double under the weight of his medals recited Wilfred Owen. I guess less so with the current armed forces, since the threat was further away, and fewer of us were touched by it personally (most people I know have grandparents who were involved in one of the Great Wars; not everyone knows a modern-day serviceman). Plus the issue of the war itself; I believe anti-war sentiment about the recent wars is higher than it was for WWI and WWII, and what there was then is very much blurred by time, victory and countless readings of war poetry in high school. Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori.

ErrantX 17y ago
I never meant to suggest it wasn't exhibited at all. But if you've ever been the to states you'd get what I mean.
- jlees 17y ago
  I've just got back from the States and lived there for a while. I prefer the way the UK does it. (Apart from The Sun.)

Tichy 17y ago

I wonder if that is just a trick played by society to make more people assume bad jobs? The emphasis of heroism and personal sacrifice just makes the rest of society become freeloaders. Sorry that I can not formulate it better. I hope the pay for soldiers in the US is OK - maybe the height of the pay correlates with the "solemness"? Like suppose every soldier would get 1000000$ per year, would they still be solemnly thanked?

mseebach 17y ago
It's not possible to pay soldiers a reasonable amount of money. If you pay them too much, you basically get an army of mercenaries, while the personal sacrifice any soldier send into harms way endures is impossible to truly translate to money. We entrepreneurs often talk of our way of life as something we choose quite explicitly over financial security. I'm pretty sure the success of an army depends a lot on it's soldiers thinking roughly the same way about their chosen path. Finally, my impression is that the United States is build on a certain mentality that's difficult for us Europeans to fully grasp. The country was founded by people fleeing from prosecution and suppression, and it's first war was fought against that same suppression trying to catch up. That mentality lies pretty deep in Americans, as I understand. It has nothing to do with cheating people into collecting our garbage and manning 24-hour convenience stores. It's a shame that thankfulness to esp. US and UK troops isn't better founded in western European minds, and that it's only brought up when trying to justify a new war. Fact is that 400.000 Americans died in WWII, without whom my German would probably be a lot better. There's a D-day burial ground in Normandy. Any European should make a point of visiting it sometime (I haven't yet) -- especially before making high-brow intellectual rants against war.
- oiubhn 17y ago
  As long as you remember that it's a mentality of sacrifice that led to 183,000 Americans dying in Europe, but it's facist totalitarianism that led to 10.7M Russians doing the same. 4 out of the 5million German military casualties were on the Eastern Front, The Russian army had a not insignificant role in Germany's defeat.

uhiubiv 17y ago

The US and Canada don't have troops on their streets recently shooting at their own population (or at least that sector that believe in transubstantiation)