Well intentioned, but for me they become empty platitudes.  “Jai Yen”—a cool heart—is a Thai value that can bring out some of the best in Thai culture.  Staying calm under duress, maintaining a flow on a busy day in a bustling town.  But when my electric is out for the second time in a week, I have a language class to get to in a few minutes, and I not only don’t have hot water for a shower, I have no water at all, a cool heart will not get the power back on.  It will not give me a way to contact an electrician.  And it will not get my absentee landlord in the hipster town of Pye (in the sky?) to get off his butt and do anything for me.  I suspect he has interpreted Jai Yen as not getting too excited as you count your money.  And calmly ignoring an entreaty to spend any of it on maintenance.

“Thank You for Your Service” was equally irritating for me when it turned up in American vernacular.  A Pentagon PR-man’s bright idea?  Or did a Boy Scout Troop think it up?  It could be so irritating that in a New Yorker short story a few years back a combat veteran fresh home from the Mideast goes postal when he hears it from his mindless family one time too many.  A family of what a Marine would call Mall Rats.   Mall Rats, who had grown up in suburban America and never left, thanking someone who had been on active duty in wartime for sacrifices they could never imagine.  Having your head shaved and giving up your identity is just the beginning.  It might be as simple as giving up the most productive years of your life, bored to death with a stateside assignment.  It might mean the desperate loneliness of living thousands of miles from home dropped into another culture, unable to speak the language, to engage in any meaningful way, which means living like a Mall Rat, confined to a little patch of American suburbia on a foreign military installation.  But for the men and women at the “point of the spear” and the medics, morgue techs and others just a step behind, it means the potential of having your new best friend die in your arms in Vietnam—and just picking up the body parts in modern wars on terror….

I finally heard “thank you for your service” mean something when I really needed it.  I had lost a job after moving across the country to be closer to my ailing father.  My wife could not understand at all this sudden loss of income and health benefits.  I swore I would never set foot in a VA facility again after seeing the zoo that passed for a hospital in Westwood, CA, in 1973, just after I had started grad school and still had some free dental benefits left from four years of active duty.  But now it was 2009.  The VA had changed.  So when I had to eat humble pie and go to the clinic in Brick, NJ, to get treatment for depression that had dogged me for years, the first words I heard from the woman at the reception counter, a fellow Vietnam veteran it turned out, were “Thank you for your service.”  And she meant it.  (6/9/15)