Thank you for your service. God bless you for your bravery. We all appreciate your courage. Now storm through that door and die in a hail of AK-47 rounds to the face and chest, since your cut-rate, cheapo, lowest-bidder flak vest will only stop the first bullet and not the subsequent ones.
Oh yeah, by the way, forgot to mention the other high-caliber 7.62 rounds will pierce under your helmet, perforating your skull and brain as well. Make sure to hold on long enough so your battle buddy can tie a tourniquet and assure you that everything is going to be okay, that you’re going to make it home okay, that everything’s going to be okay for your wife and your kids, that he won’t have to personally deliver a final message to your mom so he can be scarred for life too when you go limp, piss your pants and evacuate your bowels as the last spark of light fades from your eyes.
You’re a troop. We support you. We support you by deploying you abroad to get mowed down in a burst of assault weapon fire in an ill-conceived raid based on bad info.
Look, we’ve got your back. We promise to get you killed for no legitimate national security objective, for the flimsiest of pretexts, and for radically misconstrued and sloppy intelligence grossly manipulated in a shameless and blatantly transparent “wag the dog” situation that even a mangy dog in a cone of shame who barks at car alarms or neighbors dropping paper grocery bags full of recyclables off in the garage would question and scrutinize.
Have you heard the one about how military intelligence is a contradiction in terms like jumbo shrimp, virtual reality or old news? Ha ha! We can assure you your near-certain death will serve short-term political interests and the profit margins of mutinational corporations in the next quarter and nothing else. Your death will almost certainly ultimately be in vain. Bro, brah, my dude, what better way to support you?
We support the troops. That’s why we want to make sure you get ripped apart by an IED, blasted to bits by a landmine, or completely incinerated by a VBIED so that there’s not even enough charred remains for a proper burial. We want to ensure your mother breaks down and weeps in the middle of a fluorescent-lit Target until her tear ducts dry out after a mortar round wipes you off the face of the earth for no coherent foreign policy goal whatsoever.
Oh, you’ve got kids of your own? Screw them, succumb to the mortal wounds you suffered from that rocket blast and scar them for the remainder of their days on this earthly plane. You enlisted for the GI Bill and a vague promise of a better life? We’ll put a boot in your ass; it’s the American way.
If you do somehow make it home alive, expect to suffer the rest of your miserable life with post-traumatic stress disorder, a traumatic brain injury, alcoholism, drug abuse, protracted drawn-out recovery from a reckless motorcycle or snowmobile accident as you futilely seek to recreate the fleeting adrenaline rush of war in a self-destructive way, or survivor’s guilt that has you constantly questioning why better men died over there instead of you. Oh, you might try to shoot yourself in the temple in the cab of your pickup truck, drop enough opioids to kill a cow that weighs more than a small sedan, or suffer from third-degree burns everywhere for seemingly all eternity at the Walter Reed Medical Center. Have fun!
We support you. It’s like when we got married and our spouses vowed they would love and support us for the rest of time. By support, they clearly meant they wanted to deploy us to the Middle East so incoming mortar rounds could tear us limb from limb or disfigure and disable us so we could never walk to the restroom again to simply take a leak without the help of futuristic lightweight prosthetics.
Look troop, we know you’re a teenager fresh out of high school with few options in life and an idealistic sense of overwrought patriotism and outsized duty. We support you so much we want you to get killed over there for no real reason so we can eventually donate to build a vague memorial to you after we support the GoFundMe campaigns to heal Uncle Carl’s cancer, save that mini-golf place on Route 84, and bring back yet another cursed, doomed reboot of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles that will bomb at the box office like a popcorn flick B-52.
If you do somehow make it home alive after the Ayatollah declares a bounty on your head, you can enjoy a 10% discount at J.C. Penney on Veterans Day for the rest of your days. Just imagine the savings on slacks! We know no one has ever even heard of this guy and everyone had to Wikipedia him but what is jingoism if not blind faith in bad-faith saber-rattling that serves only one’s naked self-interest? Why even bother if there’s no point to anything at all?
If you don’t want to senselessly kill off every man and woman brave enough to serve in uniform, do you even support the troops? Do you even care about America? Get the hell out of here and move to Terrorismstanistan if you hate bad-faith irrational mindless drivel so much.
There’s literally only one real way to support the troops and that’s by sending them to die while doing a job you would never have the flintiness or fortitude to do yourself.
