A Veteran’s Day Salute to Military Chumps and Spouses

I had a very long habit of automatically thanking veterans, firefighters, police whenever I saw them. I am sad to report that because of reading here for about four years, I no longer do so.

Protect and Serve begins at home.

Unit cohesion begins at home.

All the principals characteristic of those service positions BEGIN AT HOME.

Principles are to be practiced in all our affairs, no pun intended. Not selectively.
Otherwise, they are just manipulation and image management.

I am so angry at hypocrites in uniform. A hero to me is someone who shows up in the same way for their family in private as they do in public.

I have a dear phone buddy who I met here. We call her ex LTC Fuckface. We gave him a dishonorable discharge from their so-called marriage. Yesterday she signed the papers on a little farm, a life dream she can now have. We have tentatively named it Cheater Free Ranch.

I will hang my giant American flag today. It REALLY upsets me to now have an asterisk after my thank you.

*unless you’re a cheater.

So with my whole heart, my thanks and gratitude go out today to military chumps everywhere. I sincerely thank YOU for your service. No asterisk.

❤️

I recently read Thank You For Your Service by David Finkel. I understand there is also a movie based on this book, but haven’t seen it.
I highly recommend it. Having been chumped by a former member of the military, and been privy to all his disgusting stories of cheating while serving, Thank You For Your Service allowed me to learn and understand more about the service members who do deserve our respect and empathy.

My FW was ex-marine corps and also liked peacocking around and mouthing off about honour and integrity! I’ve written this before but after he buggered off I was getting rid of his books and a psychiatric evaluation fell out of a book on fishing!!! Can you imagne if I’d just dumped it in the book exchange without looking – his name, address everything!!! When I read it the lying bastard had told the psychiatrist how “all the women in his life had left him”, “how he was traumatised by seeing people killed in front of him”!!! Ha ha, he was NEVER in a war zone and other than San Diego his most traumatic event was getting caught by the Swiss police driving in the bus lane! Cos yeah, Geneva, Switzerland is so traumatic! This evaluation is where I first saw in writing that he (the shrink) considered FW to be a covert narc (as well as a drunk)! I got a domestic violence conviction against him and given that he’d already had four DUIs (rolled three cars), the French were going to put him in jail. He always talked about how as a marine you put on your suit and tie and take your punishment – and then as soon as there was a possibility of a French jail he was going to skidaddle back to the US – so I reminded him about his suit and tie statement! He’ll get no “thank you for your service” from me – frankly he was an embarrassment to all the other decent veterans out there!

I have no military experience as a chump, but my heart goes out to those that do. Today, though, is D-day for me. I read that sociopaths (covert narcissist in my case) pick times or dates that hurt the victim & it happens to be Remembrance Day here in Canada. While I was eagerly looking forward to spending the long weekend with him & our kids, I truly believe he picked Remembrance day to drop kick my world so that it would stick out in my head forever & unfortunately it still does. I’m getting better at fading that memory though & after the initially thought of “oh yeah it’s that day”, I’m able to carry on nicely not caught up in a play-by-play anymore of D-day. Wishing all military chumps & D-day chumps a very good day -that while these cheaters may get extra kibbles today – we get the satisfaction of knowing that they were the people that couldn’t keep their shit together enough not to implode their families & marriages. My hope is deep down they know they’re fraudsters & posers, no heroes whatsoever.

I’m wary of tales of glory from war and I’m wary of pity traps. My late dad was a partially disabled combat vet who refused to attend veterans events. He didn’t drink, didn’t cheat, didn’t peacock, didn’t brag about the war and couldn’t stand other vets who did. When he was recovering in a veterans hospital, one of the attendants– usually rich kids who’d never been shipped out– stole his purple heart, which was apparently very common. He understood that a certain percentage of vets telling glorious tales of heroism had never seen a day of combat and were walking around with stolen medals.

He had a few friends who’d served in the same war but they were the same as him. If people asked them for war stories, they would get leery and shut down. My dad explained that it was typical for civilians to thank returning veterans for their service and then, as if extracting goods and services for the thanks, would excitedly pry for gory details. He could never understand how people got vicarious thrills out of tragedy and horror and he learned that most didn’t want to know what it was really like. I sensed this was part of the post-trauma– feeling as if one’s real experience was being rejected and feeling one had to “put out” for acceptance by adjusting one’s narrative.

It’s unsettling to think that the social context almost trains veterans to do this but my dad had no respect for anyone who would do the little dance as entertainment. He developed a lifelong friendship with a fellow vet while in college on the GI bill because, when they were being grilled for thrill stories by other students, they both grumpily tossed off a few vignettes that were so horrific and tragic that the students quizzing them turned pale and shrank away. I guess you could call it a kind of war bonding. Neither would truss up their realities to get laid. I also never heard any details about the war until I was an adult. My dad never played up glory or plied for pity but later in life he expressed sadness over some of the things he witnessed. There was one story in particular that stuck with him all his life. He saw the teenage corpse of an enemy soldier “blooming” out of the top of a tank like a charred, bloody flower and realized that some woman had tended and fed that child into perfect health only to be blown to bits. There were even a few tales of heroism in there but he would never tell them to people who got off on that sort of thing.

Not all tales of glory are lies but you have to question the character of someone who trades that in for kibble while forsaking memories that, if told as they really happened, are sure to be drenched in conversation-stopping, libido-squelching meaninglessness and horror. After college I worked with a guy whose father had fought in the same war and loved to tell thrilling war stories. His father was famously decorated and the stories were apparently real. But his dad was also a violent alcoholic whose second and third marriages began as affairs and who didn’t even bother to call his adult daughter as she went through cancer treatment. The guy I worked with had been in AA since his late teens and hated his father but his own first marriage later crashed and burned when he was caught cheating on his wife.

My dad’s warning about braggarts stayed with me all my life but I think it took me longer to develop wariness towards pity traps, particularly if someone genuinely suffered a particular trauma. But just like romanticized tales of glory in war aren’t always totally fabricated, there’s something messed up about someone who can detach themselves enough from any part of a traumatic experience in order to spin the stories in some expedient way. They’re trading on something that can’t be traded on. It seems like a kind of emotional prostitution. My dad used to say that everyone applies the golden rule but not always in a good way. When you see someone exploiting others, you have to consider that they also exploit themselves.