cgraven
Literotica Guru
- Joined
- Sep 6, 2001
- Posts
- 62,567
I have met a surprisingly increasing number of soldiers that do not serve. Even after all of the troops lost to Iraq and Afghanistan. A large number of people are still joining the armed forces to pay for college. With no intention of doing a single thing more than absolutely necessary to achieve their goals. Last week one of these lovely people had the nerve to ask me how much I had to fuck up at a collage to be stuck in the army for 23 years.
CG is absolutely right.
Service is about freely giving of yourself for the good of others. Not about carrying a rifle. Firemen don't do it for the money, I know a handful of crazy EMTs that don't make any more than i do. And I work in a warehouse. But they are just a few examples of organized service. There are still teachers out there that want to open the eyes of youth to help them understand the world they will inherit. Sometime service is simply the one cashier who know every customer that comes thro8their line and is always happy to see the next one, even when their personal day has been crap. They make sure you day was better for at least the few minutes it took to go through their line at the store. I know a hairstylist who can read your body language so well that not only can she tell if you want to or need to talk but she opens the conversation pretty close to where you need to be. I asked her about it she didn't even know she was doing it and a month later when I went back in she was still doing it. She said she had been looking for "it" and still had no clue how it worked but as long as it did she was going to use it, "because people need a pick me up".
A good hand shake, eye contact, and just the words "thank you" to a Veteran means a lot.
Please don't thank us for our service, please don't look away first. There are a few diffrent things here that would probably take a whole book to break down. But "thank you" cincearly spoken means you would rather us not have to do what we do. To a lot of PTSD vets the "for your service" means one of two things we were only good when we were of use to you, or my only value is the pain that you would bare. I understand that it's a language that most people just don't know. I personally have never been diagnosed with PTSD but I don't know anyone who has put more that ten years in that is untouched. So ya I probably got some of that. But i digress.
Well said Raven