Why We "Support the Troops": Rhetorical Evolutions

This essay tracks the genealogy of the contemporary call to "support the troops," a rhetoric that includes but goes beyond the strategic and argumentative use of the phrase itself. Support-the-troops rhetoric has two major functions: deflection and dissociation. Deflection involves discursive trends in play since Vietnam that have redefined war as a fight to save our own soldiers—especially the captive soldier—rather than as a struggle for policy goals external to the military. As such, this discourse directs civic attention away from the question of whether the particular war policy is just. The essay explicates these trends through an examination of the POW/MIA, war film, and the symbol of the yellow ribbon. The second trope, dissociation, quarantines the citizen from questions of military action by manufacturing distance between citizen and soldier. Dissociation often goes further to define civic deliberation and dissent as an attack on the soldier body and thus an ultimate immoral act. This essay explores this trope through executive rhetoric, an analysis of the particular phrase "support the troops," metaphor for war, and John Kerry's run for the presidency in 2004. Both deflection and dissociation work to discipline and mute public deliberation in matters of war. The essay concludes by considering strategies for reopening spaces for democratic deliberation.