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After I left active duty Navy I went into the Naval Reserves. There I joined the Funeral Honors Team, where I conducted more than 300 military honors over several years. What I wanted was to give each family a lasting impression of sharp, crisp, military theater. The reality is unless you’re on an honors team you rarely use military drill and ceremony outside of boot camp.

Dave Kerpen writes in his book, Likable Social Media, “Many large companies have a hard time being authentic in their interactions with customers. As organizations get larger, it becomes difficult to manage higher volumes of staff and clients. To deal with this growth, managers models and processes, and customer service and sales centers create scripts. These attempts at efficiency might cause some aspects of the organization to run smoothly, but in dealing with customers and prospects, they often miss the mark. Models, processes, and scripts will not help you better connect with your consumer. Instead, such impersonal devices create a division between your service or product and your customer because there is a loss of valuable human interaction.”

Today there are so many conflicting views on the military and how they should move,, how they should look, and how they behave. This will always be with the military branches, because in my over 20 years those views haven’t changed. 

What can be done is how we are perceived. We are humans. We are sometimes asked to do inhumane things, but not too often. Are we not supposed to talk about that? Military service and war exist together, yet the conversations start about money for college. Granted not every job in the military is a war fighting job, but we should never shy away from that conversation.

Times, they are changing. Post-Vietnam was not very military friendly. Pre and Post-Gulf War was very military friendly. That support lasted us through the Global War on Terror. Is the pendulum of support swinging back? To maintain the support of a grateful nation requires open and honest communication. When we are dishonest we lose trust, and then we lose support.