How much gratitude is appropriate for people who have belonged to the military? It seems some members of the armed forces are as greedy for praise and honour as the Great God Jehovah, they want it all day every day, every tongue in unison praise be unto thee in the highest, praise unceasing from our unworthy lips to the ears of the great ones. Sorry, but fuck that.

I will criticize farmers with my mouth full and I will criticize people who have been in the military. The whole point about the armed forces of democracies is to defend the people and their rights. To have old soldiers immune from criticism would be to throw away everything that they had fought for. Old soldiers get glory under tyrannies. Dictators never tire of heaping praise on those who fought alongside them in revolutions and wars which put them in power. Unless they are a threat in which case they get a bullet in the back of the head and the bill sent to their widows.

Praising veterans and giving them special honours is very common in tyrannies and military dictatorships. I don’t think people who live in democracies should feel too guilty that there are some old soldiers who get the impression that they fought for the wrong side and they would have been treated better if they had been fighting for a tyrannical regime rather than against it.

Some veterans’ thirst for glory and honour is bottomless and could never be sated, these are the military bores who constantly try to bring the topic of any conversation around to their own experiences. Yes Uncle Albert, you fought in the war, and won, thanks, you have mentioned this before. You were a Desert Rat Percy? Why didn’t you say? Oh yes, you did, didn’t you? Every day for the last sixty-odd years without fail.

People do care and they are grateful but being expected to keep saying thank you is very draining. People quickly come to resent being asked to be grateful and to show gratitude. When somebody you are grateful to challenges you to tell them that you are grateful there is a strong and natural desire not to do so. Gratitude should be expressed freely and not forced on cue. Saying thank you spontaneously feels good, having a show of gratitude expected of you generates resentment.

Can you actually imagine anybody in the military being under fire and ducking behind a wall and thinking to themselves the pay could be better, it’s bloody dangerous, it’s not quite what the recruiting sergeant described but never mind all of that because in twenty years time people will show their gratitude to me when I remind them to and that will make it all worthwhile. I don’t think so.

I am grateful to the military and the police. I am also grateful to farmers, lorry drivers, merchant seamen, traffic wardens, sewer workers, air traffic controllers, warehousemen, teachers, bankers and sales assistants. The world we experience and rely on depends on many people. Some jobs call for great hardships and sacrifices and others do not. Some get special holidays, medals and monuments, others do not. Some people get their service rewarded with tips that soon cease to be particularly voluntary and spontaneous, for others accepting a gratuity would be an insult or gross professional misconduct. Some people have fame and glamour, others are seen as everyday, commonplace and dull.

Servicemen are cogs in a machine, to a large degree they are interchangeable. If one soldier hadn’t joined up the tank would not have driven off with that seat empty. If another man sat in that same seat he would probably do a similar job, the chance that he would act less courageously is matched by the chance that he could have acted more courageously, or been more effective in some other way, such as being less reckless and endangering his colleagues. Exactly the same goes for most people and most jobs, if you hadn’t become a teacher somebody else would be taking your students and the odds that they would be better at it than you are only marginally less than the odds that they would be worse. Everybody is a lot more replaceable than we ever like to think for the simple and obvious point that when we are present our organizations move our presence to the point at which it does most good and they will do something similar with our absence, move things around so that the absence is barely noticed at all. James Bond is shot, the talent is rearranged and the next week there is a vacancy for a fitter on a minesweeper. The world’s graveyards are full of irreplaceable people. Most of them are replaced in practice.

Being gratuitously offensive to servicemen is wrong but there is nothing wrong in standing up for the rights and dignity of those who don’t have such obvious and automatic calls to the respect of their peers. It does no good for ex-servicemen greedy for honour and glory to bad-mouth the civilians they supposedly risked their lives for.

Civilians do not owe servicemen a pint every time they see them, nor do they owe shows of gratitude on demand or the gift of their daughters’ hymens. What civilians owe servicemen is:-

1] A fair rate of pay.

2] Reasonable equipment. Not a bottomless pit of “nothing’s too good for our brave boys” which is simply creating a huge pork barrel for suppliers but sensible assessments of what works in realistic battle conditions, what offers protection and what is reasonable to spend. They don’t need designer label boots but boots that fit comfortably and do the job are reasonable. Soldiers buying body armour from internet sites that supply drug dealers is a scandal.

3] Fair pensions and compensation packages for injury and death in service.

4] The right to be treated as a person and not the avatar of an unpopular foreign policy, militarism or the horrors of war.

What servicemen should not expect:

1] Their widows never be expected to do a hand’s turn for the rest of their natural lives.

2] That their deaths anywhere outside their training grounds and home barracks automatically earn them medals and the status of hero. People can die of accidents on battlefields too, accident victims are not heroes even if they are casualties of war. Heroes need to do something heroic, is joining up really all that is required to become a hero?

3] People to listen to their stories of courage and hardship with rapt attention and express gratitude on demand.

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