Virgin Australia’s latest announcement that it will offer priority boarding and on-board acknowledgment of veterans who fly with them has all the subtlety of an undergraduate marketing essay.

It is zero cost and from what we know will mean that a veteran (an undefined concept) will be able to leap ahead of the elderly, parents with babies or people with disabilities to take their full fare seat and then be publicly acknowledged by the aircraft captain, while the paramedic who has spent the last month attending to attempted suicides and drug overdoses, and saved the lives of three people suffering heart attacks sits anonymously at the back, having had to wait for the very special veteran to board first.

I think we are now in danger of reaching “peak veteran”.

Brendan Nelson has recently called for people to publicly thank the military and veteran community and their families for their service, a campaign backed by News Corp along with its own hashtag #thanksforserving. This is unerringly similar to the US tradition of publicly saying “thank you for your service” to military and veterans. It has even been the title of a movie, a book, and commentary from psychologists. The term is deeply embedded in the American psyche.

But the idea of importing it and (barely) adapting it to the Australian environment is something that bears much closer examination. To begin with, talking about the veteran community is a difficult topic because it is a very broad church. People for whom it is their defining identity, others for whom it isn’t. Others who loved their time in the military, others who loathed it. Some who were exposed to a range of traumatic experiences in challenging and hostile environments, many who weren’t.

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So the first problem relates to who your target audience is. For every veteran (howsoever defined) that thinks it is a good idea, there are others who would find it trite and embarrassing. You could include me in that. I gave more than a quarter of a century to military service, enjoyed my time and left on good terms. The ledger was square. I completely understand this doesn’t apply to everyone, but by the same token I know a lot who would share my view.

The next, and bigger problem is the problem of putting defence personnel on an impossibly tall pedestal while ignoring those who provide service to the community more continually, and are exposed to more trauma on a much more regular basis than the average ADF member. What about police and emergency services who have to attend car crashes, or fish bodies out of rivers ? Or paramedics who attend countless overdoses, suicide attempts and related traumatic events ? Or staff in emergency departments in hospitals who have to make life-saving decisions every day?

Add in aged care and disability workers, or special-needs teachers who have to plug away anonymously every day and the idea of a community thanking military or ex-military people for their service leaves me very uneasy. I have a Department of Veteran’s Affairs to look after me and if necessary my family because of my service, a national public holiday that commemorates my and others’ service along with Armistice Day where we can wear a poppy to commemorate the war dead. There are advocacy groups like the RSL, Legacy and others to lobby governments for service-related causes, the military gets a separate allocation of medals and awards in the Australia Day and Queen’s Birthday honours’ lists, and the Invictus Games has been created to further raise awareness of the cost of military service.

All of these are worthwhile groups and activities, but they point to the fact that regardless of what people may think or the media might portray, the military and ex-military communities are pretty well catered for on the whole. A large part of the reason for the vast improvement since I first joined the military has been because of the work of advocates and the higher profile of the ADF due to the high operational tempo this century.

So rather than sanctifying military service, the media and politicians should devote more of their energies to recognising those who work on behalf of the greater good in often traumatic, and always difficult circumstances at home. They do work that I could never have contemplated doing, but are providing more of a service to more people than I ever did.

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A better approach by Virgin (and something that Qantas could also support) would be to offer very heavily discounted fares for the grandparents of families with physically or intellectually disabled children. Call it the Anzac fare, or Saluting the Veteran fare or whatever marketers think is good. But make it open to anyone in the country based simply on need. That is a better way of honouring veterans’ service – by helping others in society. Sure it will cost the airlines, but perhaps some of the almost $500 million being spent on the Australian War Memorial could be diverted to the program.

We as veterans should consider being somewhat counter-cultural. Rather than accepting acknowledgment from random strangers with no idea of what we did, perhaps highlight what a unique honour it was to do things in pursuit of the national interest, building on the work of generations of service personnel who had preceded us and hopefully handing over an institution that is being bettered by those that follow.

In a globalised world where humility is in increasingly short supply, a better hashtag for veterans groups might actually be #thanksforlettingmeserve.