Whenever I see a bumper sticker or a window sticker, I try to imagine what aspect of that idea would be so powerful as to impel someone to deface their vehicle in order to display it. For me one of the most puzzling is the very common one: “Support Our Troops.” It is difficult, at least for me, to understand exactly what behavior the sticker is supposed to promote or suppress.

I was a “troop” in the early 1970’s, and I do not recall anyone campaigning to support us. In those days, a large percentage of the men in the military were draftees, and a large percentage of the others had only volunteered to avoid being drafted.

If “support” means provision of material goods, we certainly needed it more than today’s well-paid men and women in uniform. I remember making $125 per month, and I was heavily pressured by the brass to spend part of that on insurance and part on savings bonds. Of course, the army did subsidize the price of cigarettes and alcohol. The former cost a quarter a pack, and you could buy a six-pack of Lone Star at the PX for ninety cents.

The salaries of today’s soldiers, especially the ones deployed abroad, are many times as much as we received. Maybe mercenaries make more, but the amount paid to enlisted men and women today is enough for a family to live on comfortably. It therefore stands to reason that the verb “support” must refer not to monetary support but to some kind of psychological support. On the other hand, I have never heard anyone denigrate people who are serving in the military just because they are wearing uniforms. Nobody calls them “dog faces” or “Gomers” any more. So, what do the people with these bumper stickers want the rest of us to do? I suppose that what they mean is that members of the armed forces should be treated with respect, maybe even with deference. That idea resonates within the National Football League, which seems intent on paying tribute to the military as often as possible, and the airlines, which allow soldiers to board the aircraft before the civilians and sometimes proudly announce their presence.

Some people take this concept to the point of actively seeking out people in uniform and thanking them for their service. When I was actually in the military absolutely no one thanked me. The first person who did was the guy who was assigned the task of introducing me to the rest of the tour group in Italy in 2011. I was taken aback because I certainly would not have joined the military if I had not been forced to, and I have always considered my eighteen months in uniform as one long joke of which I was the butt.

When did all of this change? It changed on September 11, 2001, the day on which nineteen Saudis and Egyptians executed their plan to take advantage of massive holes in airline security in order to hijack four commercial airliners and fly them into buildings. “9/11 changed everything.” Somehow the president came to the conclusion that the proper response to this incident was to mobilize the armed forces in order to invade Iraq, which had been openly hostile to the perpetrators, and Afghanistan, which had indeed harbored people who supported them. Why anyone would consider the armed services as the appropriate tool for dealing with this problem has always been a mystery to me. It calls to mind Maslow’s Hammer: “When your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” In this case, the military wasn’t our only tool, of course, but it was the one that we had proudly spent over $500 billion per year on, and the vice-president was the former Secretary of Defense.

Over the next two or three years Americans really bought into the notion that military action was not only appropriate, but also necessary and, well, good. They were evil; we were good. Yellow ribbons bearing the famous phrase appeared on cars everywhere. There were almost as many stickers with the phrase “United We Stand.” Every man who appeared on television in a suit proudly displayed a pin with flag on his lapel. Dissent was not tolerated. It was considered almost criminal even to ask of the government how much all of this was going to cost, and how would we know if we had won the war.

Central to all of this was what I have called The Big Lie, which was the oft-repeated tale that the military deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan were somehow defending the United States. At first this was phrased as “We are fighting them there, so we do not need to fight them here.” Long after their leaders dropped this catch-phrase many Americans still clung to the notion that it was not just important but necessary for the United States to deploy hundreds of thousands of troops in these two remote locations. To them the idea that this approach might be counterproductive — creating more terrorists than it eliminated — was, in Condoleeza Rice’s words, “grotesque.” They had invested a lot in this venture, and they were unwilling to accept that it had been a mistake.

Ten years have now passed since we invaded Iraq. What does it mean to “Support Our Troops?” I admit that I have not had the temerity to ask anyone who bears one of these stickers what they intend it to mean. My impression is that it really means: “I and my family have bought into The Big Lie. Don’t you dare say anything to question it.” I might be wrong, but I honestly cannot think of any other reason why someone would promulgate such a sentiment. I mean, it is not really about the troops, is it?