“Meme them until they cry… then make memes about them crying.” – Classic Sun Tzu meme
I love a good meme in the morning. It smells like… victory.
At some point during the halcyon days of the Global War on Terror, I found myself addicted to memes. I was already knee deep in the world of Doctrine Man and enjoying the explosion of humor around me from other creators. But the memes scratched an itch I didn’t realize existed.
My favorites among those memes are probably unrepeatable, at least in a safe for work short article. They range from the sublime to the absolutely glorious. Some spur you to spit coffee at the screen before you while others just cause you to stop and shake your head. But they are all brilliant in their own right.
GALLOWS HUMOR GOES VIRAL
Soldiers have been joking about their own wars since long before anyone called it content. During World War II, GIs scrawled “Kilroy Was Here” on half of occupied Europe; cartoonist Bill Mauldin’s mud-caked infantrymen Willie and Joe griped their way through Stars and Stripes while actual shells fell nearby. The instinct was never disrespect — it was pressure release, a way to metabolize fear and boredom into something survivable.
By the time the Forever Wars arrived, what changed wasn’t the impulse but the delivery system. The internet-era version arguably began in 2003, when Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf stood in front of cameras insisting there were no American troops in Baghdad as tanks rolled past behind him. “Baghdad Bob” became a global punchline within days, spreading through early message boards and chain emails before the term meme was even common vocabulary — a preview of how fast war humor could now travel.
Two decades later, that same reflex runs through platforms built for exactly this kind of speed. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok collapsed the distance between event and joke to nearly nothing; a missile strike and its corresponding meme can now trend in the same afternoon. Commentators have described this pattern across each recent Iran flashpoint as dark humor functioning as a coping mechanism, not callousness — a release valve running alongside real grief and real casualties, not a replacement for either. The war meme, in other words, is the oldest trench joke in uniform, just running at broadband speed and with a much bigger audience watching it happen live.
THE LONG WAR’S PUNCHLINES
If Baghdad Bob was the spark, Iraq and Afghanistan fueled the genre — and for a long stretch of that era, three outlets ran in parallel, each working its own corner of the same joke. In 2008, I debuted Doctrine Man, an online comic that spread like an insidious virus, drawing both the annoyance of some senior leaders as well as comparisons to Mauldin’s eye for minutiae. In 2010, Marine veteran Maximilian Uriarte launched the webcomic Terminal Lance, telling his own war stories from the lance corporal’s boots-on-ground perspective, with jokes ranging from chow hall line and Fobbits who never left the wire to NCOs who invented their own physics. And in 2012, Marine veteran Paul Szoldra founded the Duffel Blog, the military’s answer to The Onion, staffed by roughly 20 volunteers who transformed real absurdities — endless paperwork, contractor waste, redeployment limbo — into fake headlines so plausible that a senator’s office once opened a real Pentagon inquiry over one.
The three of us drew from the same well without much overlap: Doctrine Man mocked the institution from inside the wire, Terminal Lance mocked it from the jarhead’s cot, and the Duffel Blog mocked it with a straight-faced byline. The humor traveled off-base too: Chuck Norris jokes rode along in care packages, MRE Charms superstitions became gospel, and the “Duffel Blog double-take” made the war briefly feel less remote to everyone watching back home. None of it made the deployments any shorter, and none of it was aimed at the enemy so much as at the bureaucracy running the war. It made those deployments bearable, and it gave a generation of veterans a shared vocabulary for describing what the nightly news rarely captured.
THE UNFINISHED PUNCHLINE
The jokes were just getting started. The January 2020 killing of Qassem Soleimani produced the template: “World War 3” trended worldwide within hours, and the crying-Michael-Jordan meme (“me laughing at WW3 memes vs. me getting the draft letter”) became that news cycle’s defining joke. The launch of Operation Midnight Hammer in June 2025 – part of the Twelve-Day War – added its own entries, many of which reflect a more adult nature. But when the war reignited in February 2026 — touched off by strikes that killed Iran’s Supreme Leader — the meme wars were on.
Sorting through those memes over the past several months has become a morning ritual. Get a cup of coffee, surf Reddit, and enjoy a good chuckle before the day gets started. That ritual has produced some memorable moments, five of which have stood the test of time, all tightly aimed at the absurdity of the war itself.
1. The Fake Draft-Text Panic, Round Two.
The same hoax that hit in 2020 came back in 2026 — texts claiming recipients had been “selected,” the Army again publicly denying it recruits by text, and a fresh wave of “wait, am I actually getting drafted” jokes.
2. Strait of Hormuz Bypass Solutions.
When Iran closed the strait to shipping, the internet proposed its own fixes — giant eagles borrowed from Middle-earth, oil tankers on a Slip ‘N Slide — more interested in out-absurding each other than in solving anything. My personal favorite was a serious – albeit stupid – idea: cut a canal across the mountainous Musandam Peninsula.
3. The Surprise Mediator.
Nobody’s bingo card had Pakistan brokering the ceasefire talks, and the internet noticed, casting Islamabad as the reluctant hero stepping between two exhausted fighters.
4. Gen Z vs. the Recruiter.
A side-by-side format pitting what the military says it needs against an actual Gen Z résumé — video editing, latte art, a personal-best count of open browser tabs. The 2026 update to 2020’s draft-anxiety joke, same nervous laugh.
5. The Operation Name Problem.
Every new codename — Rough Rider, Midnight Hammer, Epic Fury, Roaring Lion — hit the internet before the ink dried on the press release, parodied faster than the Pentagon could brief what it meant. When your operations all sound like adult films from the 1980s, you’re asking to be mocked.
None of these will make a Pentagon press briefing. But after seven months of on-again, off-again fighting, they’re as much a record of how this unfinished war has actually reached the public as any headline.
