Duty and Honor: Service Members Tell Their Stories

Freshmen and sophomores at the United States Naval Academy must wear their uniforms when they go out in Annapolis, Maryland, the historical town that houses the campus. For Thomas Krasnican and Nicholas Paraiso, both MPP Class of 2020, those rules led to some awkward interactions.

“People would say, ‘Thank you for your service,’” Paraiso said, “To me, that was always really strange to hear because I hadn’t really done anything of service.”

Four years later, as University of Chicago graduate students, the two military men have found an outlet for bridging this disconnect through their podcast, “Thank You For Your Service.” The first season, which has been featured by media outlets including CNN, was their attempt to provide “an educational exploration of the dynamics of American civil-military affairs.”

Now studying at the Harris School of Public Policy, Krasnican and Paraiso have covered topics ranging from the politicization of the military to the ways in which defense policy is reported in the news. They have done this while snagging big names on their show, securing interviews with guests like Gen. Stanley McChrystal, former Sen. Claire McCaskill, David Axelrod, now the director of UChicago’s Institute of Politics, and Jake Tapper, CNN’s Chief Washington Correspondent, whom the hosts interviewed for their season finale episode. 

Krasnican and Paraiso hope “Thank You For Your Service” will reach their fellow students—future policymakers who could one day have a role in correcting the issues rooted in the civil-military gap.

“There are people who write about this very eloquently and are much more of subject matter experts in it than Nick and I,” Krasnican said. “Usually their work shows up in like very wonkish media outlets or even just academic journals. We knew that for most of our classmates, who this podcast was really targeted to, they just weren't going to come across this subject or this material unless it was in a medium that it's easily consumable.”

The questions Krasnican and Paraiso wanted to ask began brewing long before they arrived at UChicago. As freshmen at the Naval Academy, they came across an article in The Atlantic that analyzed the American public’s understanding of the military. In it, journalist James Fallows noted his fellow Americans’ general disinterest in a televised speech by President Obama about the war in Iraq.

“This reverent but disengaged attitude toward the military—we love the troops, but we’d rather not think about them—has become so familiar that we assume it is the American norm,” Fallows wrote. 

Fallows’ article provided a framework through which Krasnican and Paraiso were able to continue assessing their shared military identity, as well as the ways in which policy creation affects the American public’s perception of the military.  

When they came to UChicago, Paraiso and Krasnican found it difficult to converse easily with their Harris peers about their military background.

“Anytime I said, ‘I'm a Naval officer,’ the dynamic kind of shifted,” Krasnican recalled. “People would say, ‘Wow. Thank you for your service.’ Or they would get weird about it—like, ‘Oh, OK. Yeah, my uncle was in the Air Force,’ or something. There is a struggle to connect. Nick and I both feel that that is unnecessary.”

The podcast, done in collaboration with UC3P, a student-run organization at Harris that publishes podcasts through an interdisciplinary lens, served as the perfect conduit for continuing the conversation.

Krasnican said the podcast “helps make sense of what we’re doing, what our profession is about, what it's place and true value in our society is.

“Obviously, I'm somebody who respects the military enough to join it,” he added, “but this research has given me a true respect for what we do and a belief in its values as society. Also the inclination to question it and interrogate it a little bit and be accountable to society.”

Haz Yano MPP Class of 2020  was involved with UC3P as an assistant production manager during his first year at Harris when Krasnican and Paraiso asked him to get more involved with TYFYS’s programming specifically. 

As the TYFYS hosts prepare for their second season this summer, Yano is taking on more responsibility within the umbrella UC3P organization. As the student organization’s newest publisher, he's focusing on expanding programming into niche policy subjects, while still appealing to a broad audience. He said he believes TYFYS has been so successful, in part, because of the hosts' mastery of a niche area of policy with an engaged following, that also garners interest from the general public.

“Our intent ultimately is to enhance academic discourse on policy issues that hopefully are important and interesting to the general public,” Yano said. “The key to gaining traction is for us to find topics that maintain a general appeal, but are not already saturated by other, more mainstream podcasts.”

Yano says he would like to help UC3P podcast hosts utilize Harris’s data-driven approach to policy to their podcast content. Next year, programs on feminism and policy, tech policy and conflict studies will all hit the air. 

“[Podcasts are] a way to disseminate conversations beyond the campus border,” he said. “We have a lot of interesting people who come to Harris, or are doing research at Harris, and they might give a talk or a lecture, but you only reach the number of people in that room. When you start recording these conversations and putting them out on a podcast platform that anyone has access to download…it’s just a way for us to expand outreach and expand that conversation.” 

The "Thank You For Your Service" podcast and comments by Krasnican and Paraiso for this article are in no way intended to reflect the official positions of the Department of Defense or any other military entity.