War & Peace Quote by Mike Thompson

Patriotism gets reframed here as customer service: you can keep your political receipt, Thompson implies, and still tip the people doing the dangerous work. The line is engineered to lower the temperature around a polarizing war by offering a third lane between flag-waving and dissent. In a country where “support the troops” has often been used as a conversational chokehold, Thompson’s phrasing tries to decouple moral care from policy endorsement.

The intent is pragmatic and protective. By insisting you “don’t need to be for or against the war,” he’s carving out permission for skeptics to participate in a civic ritual without feeling co-opted. That’s not just empathy; it’s political insulation. If opposition to the war is rising, the most effective way to blunt it is to reroute the argument away from strategy and toward individual sacrifice. Support becomes the lowest-common-denominator virtue, the one position least likely to get you yelled at.

The subtext is also a quiet rebuke: refusing morale is positioned as a failure of basic humanity. “These are human beings” sounds obvious, which is exactly why it lands. It yanks the discussion from abstractions like geopolitics and turns it into a face-to-face moral test: can you separate your anger at leaders from your obligations to people in uniform?

Contextually, it fits the post-Vietnam, post-9/11 American pattern where the military is sacralized even as wars become contested. Thompson isn’t defending a war so much as defending a social norm: dissent is allowed, but not at the expense of those asked to carry it out.