"I extend my deepest gratitude to our Armed Forces and first responders serving both at home and abroad in the war against terrorism"
About this Quote
Patriotism is doing a lot of quiet work in this sentence, and that is exactly the point. Doolittle’s line isn’t designed to inform; it’s designed to align. By leading with “deepest gratitude,” he claims the emotional high ground first, making disagreement feel less like a policy dispute and more like a breach of manners. Gratitude becomes a shield.
The phrase “our Armed Forces and first responders” is a deliberate coalition. It sutures the soldier abroad to the firefighter at home, collapsing two different kinds of risk into one moral category. That’s rhetorically efficient: it creates a single, unified constituency of “heroes” and invites the public to treat foreign military operations and domestic security measures as parts of the same project.
“Serving both at home and abroad” widens the theater of war to everywhere. Paired with “the war against terrorism,” it draws on post-9/11 political language where the enemy is not a nation but a method, a specter, something that can appear anywhere. That vagueness is useful: if the battlefield is global and the threat is elastic, then the response can be, too.
The subtext is a familiar political bargain: honor and protection in exchange for trust and latitude. By framing counterterrorism as a shared war effort, the statement nudges listeners toward unity, deference, and continued support for expansive security policies, while pre-emptively casting skeptics as people who failed to properly appreciate sacrifice.
The phrase “our Armed Forces and first responders” is a deliberate coalition. It sutures the soldier abroad to the firefighter at home, collapsing two different kinds of risk into one moral category. That’s rhetorically efficient: it creates a single, unified constituency of “heroes” and invites the public to treat foreign military operations and domestic security measures as parts of the same project.
“Serving both at home and abroad” widens the theater of war to everywhere. Paired with “the war against terrorism,” it draws on post-9/11 political language where the enemy is not a nation but a method, a specter, something that can appear anywhere. That vagueness is useful: if the battlefield is global and the threat is elastic, then the response can be, too.
The subtext is a familiar political bargain: honor and protection in exchange for trust and latitude. By framing counterterrorism as a shared war effort, the statement nudges listeners toward unity, deference, and continued support for expansive security policies, while pre-emptively casting skeptics as people who failed to properly appreciate sacrifice.
Quote Details
| Topic | Military & Soldier |
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