Again, I'm not defending the States, but I don't think someone from the U.K. should be criticizing anyone for imperialism. :P

And the attack on the U. S. S. Cole. But hey. Murica are always the aggressors.

You probably thought it was the infamous balkan death squads. Understandable.

Next time, please remember to thank us for not murdering you.

To be fair, quite a few European countries had imperialist tendencies, but much of that disappeared a long time ago. :-)

For Germany it's mostly indifference towards members of the armed forces. Certainly never witnessed anyone randomly approaching a soldier and thanking him. You'd be hard pressed to find them in any case. I can't remember the last time I've actually seen somebody in uniform.

There was 1812...

...but after that little bonfire you chaps had I'm not sure we can exactly count that one as a "success."

There is also March 19th 2010, a day which will live in infamy, when we were ruthlessly and without provocation [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_World_2.0#/media/File:Myworld2.jpg]attacked by Canada[/url].

I haven't been in the army myself, but I think something like this is pretty uncommon in Germany. It would have been more likely back during the Cold war when there was conscription and the Bundeswehr (back then fairly large, at about 500 000 men iirc) served as a deterrent against the Eastern bloc....though there was also a very large pacifist movement back in the 1980s (some of that pretty militant with slogans like "Soldaten sind Mörder" = "soldiers are murderers").
Nowadays the army is badly underfunded, quite small, its materiel rotting away and there's no prestige to it; conscription has ended and because of this links to the wider public have decreased; and what remains of the military is engaged in unpopular no-win interventions like Afghanistan that politicans have never properly explained to the public (and for which the more deranged lefties regard soldiers as war criminals).
So no, I can't imagine German soldiers being thanked by members of the public...it must be a very frustrating job, I don't envy them. Pretty bad situation imo.

Not that long ago: from 1945-1949 the Netherlands waged war on the new independent state of Indonesia.

It's kinda weird. What I see is people going all rah-rah-rah for recently returned soldiers or recently discharged vets, or old people who are about to die. If you're in the middle ground - that is, a vet but out for a while - nobody seems to give a crap.

Well, I did say "much", and I guess "a long time" can be relative -- almost 70 years isn't that recent by my standards, but I guess some people might regard it as such. :-)

Only sweet mustard, please!

What service? We have a compulsory military service here (or one can choose to serve also outside the army in civil service). I became a second lieutenant ("vänrikki") during the year I was there in an arm that I don't think exists anymore (coastal artillery; they've been replaced with some kind of missile and rocket systems now I think).

It is not like I have been abroad fighting commies or nazis or kinks or yanks, in fact I've never got to shoot anybody. However, those old farts who were fighting during the WWII (against Russia) are generally highly regarded in here, there's an annual nation-wide money collection for them etc., but they must be like 90 years old by now and getting fewer and fewer in numbers. We haven't been in any war after that, no Vietnam or Afghanistan.

Ketchup and Mayo for Pommes.