Time and time again (especially following the recent responses to Tom Walker’s article in the Iowa State Daily) I hear my fellow Americans tout the long-held belief that our troops are fighting for our freedoms. By listening to the campus respond to Tom Walker, one would think that this is an undisputed fact: our troops “risk their lives day in and day out so that we may enjoy the taste of freedom.” They “put their lives on the line every single day so that we can enjoy and live our everyday lives.” They “risk their lives so we can be safe and enjoy our liberties.” As an American, hearing all this may fill you with warmth, pride, or gratitude. However, have you ever stopped and asked yourself what that really means? What our troops are actually doing? What it means to fight for freedom? The death of a friend in Iraq forced me to ask these questions.

For starters, what are troops? The term has been used loosely to mean the collective mass of individual soldiers, of any rank or branch, in the United States military. I have many friends in the military and they are often good people, of good standing. Some of them didn’t have a clear option after high school, and because, among other reasons, the military had better access to students there than colleges, they signed up before graduation. They got the free pencil, the t-shirt, and the water bottle. They saw the cool marketing video and they didn’t have to look further. They were told their college would be funded, to a degree, afterwards, so there was no need to sign up to listen to a college recruiter during class. Why bother, when you could step into the hallway after lunch and get free stuff and promises, from recruiters, of a rewarding career and education, with lasting benefits upon return?

Others signed up because they supported the ideas associated with the phrase “support our troops,” the idea that the military fought for freedom and to serve is an honor. In an idealistic way it is. In a practical sense, I am not always so sure. Over two years ago, I watched the reports on the news that a dear friend died in a truck bombing in Iraq, before he turned 21. He had enlisted for this same reason. In an idealistic way we were proud of him. In a practical sense we had no idea what he had truly been fighting for. We had no clear idea why he was actually there and what he was actually being ordered to do. We had no clue why it was necessary for him to be in that specific space, doing what he was doing, and how this was helping our neighbors, the world, or us. And we were hurt deeply, just as many military families are when their loved ones are removed from their lives.

There will always be information asymmetry at home. We cannot know what the troops are doing at all times. Our knowledge is reduced to reports by a debatably trustworthy media, questionably motivated politicians, and stories from veterans or those on active duty. Overseas, there too will be information asymmetry. The military is highly hierarchical; any given soldier only knows a fraction of the whole. They trust in their comrades and the direction of their superiors. This is what they are trained to do. Questioning the true importance of your work or the actual motives of those at the very top of the hierarchy will not serve you well in a combat situation. You must close them off; you must trust and focus on the moment. They do. And they are incredibly successful at accomplishing their objectives, in relative terms.

When Jason Pautsch died in 2009, we didn’t really know for what cause it was. The best answer we had was that he was doing it for our “freedom.” But what the hell is freedom? Do any of us really know?

We like to act and speak like we do, though I imagine it is a superficial appearance. It is an easy concept to appeal to when rationalizing why your loved one was taken away. No one wants their child or friend to die before them, and if it does happen, we’d like to know it was for a reason. And that reason, we tell ourselves, is for freedom. The dictionary says that freedom is “the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants without hindrance or restraint.” However, we often use the term loosely, when speaking in this context, to mean the “natural rights” guaranteed, in a de jure sense, in the Bill of Rights. The extent to which we possess these rights, in a de facto sense, is debatable. Though both uses have some weight in describing what the U.S. military does, as well as defining our practical understanding of the term.

When thinking about this idea of freedom, and our troops preservation of it, we view it through the lens of our most prided example: American farmers and colonists fighting as volunteer soldiers to gain independence from the British. As we learn in our history textbooks, though their accuracy is sometimes called into question, the enemy seemed clear and the goal was widely understood. The troops were literally, in the eyes of many, fighting for independence. Here “independence” could be used interchangeably with our definition of freedom: they were fighting to secure the power to act, speak, or think as one wants without hindrance or restraint, to create and choose to live by documents such as the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. But it is not so clear today.

What are our troops fighting for today? What is a war on terror? Terror is an emotion, one that has been criticized, and rightly so, as one that cannot be won by military efforts. Emotion is something that we all have in us and terror is something we all can experience. A war on terror is a war on ourselves. A war on the things that have the possibility to cause us terror is a war with our entire world; it is the destruction of ourselves. Surely, we cannot be fighting an emotion. Then what is the “terror” rhetoric hiding or labeling? What kind of war are we fighting right now? The politicians who okayed the war said it’s for terror, or for ending the organized use of terror as a political weapon, but we have no way of truly knowing what lies behind that label, in the quiet offices of men with authority. So now we are back to the asymmetry argument; we lack sufficient information.

The recent and continued evidence available to a common citizen suggests that we are not fighting purely for the abstract concept of freedom. You still could eat and breathe and do plenty of other things if we were not in Iraq or Afghanistan right now. Maybe immediately after 9/11 it was for revenge, maybe, you could argue, for crippling those who had used terror for political ends, or even for freedom, but what about today?

Generally speaking, you still could read a book, you still could argue your opinions, within reason, without fear of being beaten, killed or imprisoned; you still could go to whatever church you choose on Sunday. So what are we protecting now? What interests are we trying to preserve? What ends are we trying to achieve now in the Middle East and across the globe? Is it about freedom any more? Is it about the Bill of Rights? Or, is it about resources and commodities, economic or political power? These are questions that deserve serious and critical attention from an active citizenry that is continually evaluating its public and military policies. In a global economy where so many nations are linked by common economic bonds, could the ends we are trying to reach militarily now be reached through diplomacy? Perhaps.

Our soldiers are not fighting invading armies any more; among others, they are fighting fierce defenders of their homeland. Some young men, and even children, in Afghanistan surely believe they are fighting America, in the same way we once fought the British, defending their homeland from foreigners who are destroying business, homes, and killing unarmed civilians in the process. Many trust their commanders blindly, and we kill them for it. Ironically, we support our troops for the same reason. With US motives aside, can you really blame someone for being tired with an often-destructive foreign presence? Maybe we need a more holistic context for viewing our troops and what they are fighting. Maybe we need deeper arguments than they are ‘fighting for our freedoms.’

We can, and perhaps morally should, as I do, support the individuals who are putting their lives on the line for our interests. They often make great sacrifices and endure great hardship. However, we should always question what those interests are and be constantly evaluating what they are ordered to do for the world, for our neighbors, allies, enemies, and for us. The real answer is not as simple, clean, or easy as fighting for freedom, and it rarely will be. Saying, let alone believing, that our troops are doing so is naïve and dangerous.

Maybe the time spent collecting donations for our troops, as the ISU College Republicans recently did, and that Tom Walker publicly criticized, should be matched equally by time spent discussing how to give more Americans, on both sides of the aisles, a say in defining our interests—not leave it up to the whim of corporate or moneyed interests. Maybe supporting our troops is not blindly touting the age old adage of “protecting freedoms” but, through holistic and critical analysis, and reasoned public consensus, to fight peacefully at home to insure that we have a healthy and active democracy that does not allow them to ever be sent abroad for anything less than that ideal. As the highest bidder or largest super-PAC donor is increasingly buying our elections, media and politicians, it seems that few of us are successfully giving our troops the support they deserve. We all need to step up our game.

Korovilas is a 2011 alumnus of Iowa State University.