If you worked at a military base or an airport you’d never get anything done.
What if you just live in a regular neighborhood? Is it bad manners to not thank them?
Hardly. I don’t thank police officers or firefighters for doing their jobs when I see them. In any case, your own comments notwithstanding, the majority of soldiers and ex-soldiers in the last thread we had about these found being thanked by strangers to be more awkward than anything (though obviously they preferred it to being spat upon.)
Nobody ever got spat on.
It’s funny…most of the thankers are military or ex-military themselves. I’d say 20% of the thankers are regular civilians.
IIRC, you live in family housing on a base. That would suggest that only 10% of the people you interact with are civilians, no?
Apologies if I’m thinking of somebody else.
missed the edit window: By the way, I’m not a thanker. I think it’s nice if someone feels the urge to just go with it, but it’s becoming rather trendy these days, and that’s a bit annoying.
You’re thinking of someone else. My husband is a Vietnam combat vet.
(I changed my percentage to 20%…but it’s just a wild guess.)
You and I both know that he’s a broken record. But sometimes the stars and planets align in a particular way and that continual “Bullshit…click…bullshit…click” gets really, really annoying and you have to throw a shoe at the record player. 
How many “brats” are on the Boards, I wonder? I think we constitute a pretty large but inchoate and ill-defined demographic. I know that when I find out that someone else I know is a brat, we recognize there are certain vague similarities, like living in base housing, like the vaguely strained relationships between officer’s kids and non-comm’s kids. I think it does something to us, but for the life of me, can’t quite put my finger on what that “something” is.
As for “thanks”, I don’t recall perzackly, but my impression is that it didn’t come up, really. Civilian disdain for the military (the real military, not guys who are drafted, do their time and forget about it as quickly as possible…) was a given, and heartily returned, civilians were fuzzy brained, protected from the knowledge of how awful the real world was. You couldn’t expect meaningful appreciation from people ignorant of the facts. And you couldn’t let them know about some of the unsavory things done on their behalf, the wimps wouldn’t get it.
That was all a very long time ago, as through a glass, darkly, so perhaps my memories are outdated. I hope so. But I doubt it.
IIRC, you were a Navy cook, in which case this would be definitionally true.
Then how is it an attack on the troops to disagree with the government’s war policy?
Correct on both counts. It did happen a few times that civilians would see me in uniform and want to give me a pat on the back or buy me a beer. It always made me feel like a fraud. There were no wars going on, I never left the shore and I wasn’t doing anything important or dangerous. I still drank the beers, though.
Then people like my HS sophomore year English teacher should stop claiming that they went down to the airport and did the spitting.
Don’t believe anything anybody says they did in the 60’s.
Maybe not literally, but often metaphorically. Certainly vets were treated like shit – wasn’t that the whole premise of “Born in the U.S.A.?”
Oh, please…you’re my age, you don’t know any more about what really happened in the 60s than I do.
The premise was how poorly the government treated them, not how poorly people in general did.
I think it was more by omission than by active hostility. I remember my dad coming home from SE Asia in '72, but, as far as I know, he never encountered any open hostility. Vets certainly did get screwed in some ways, and were underapprciated. They didn’t get the heroes welcome and the parades, but the image of hippie war protesters crowding around them at airports, calling them babykillers and spitting on them is pretty much urban legend (though I obviously can’t swear that none of them ever did it ever). A lot of the problem wasn’t hostility from war protesters, but indifference from war supporters who saw them as losers.
Definitely don’t trust anyone under 30.