This Friday, David Ellis will wear red.

He’ll wear the color for soldiers and sailors everywhere, hoping it will signal to them how much Americans appreciate their sacrifices.

He’ll also wear the red for his own son, who has served in the U.S. Air Force for nearly a decade in places such as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

Plus, the Lawrence man said, he’ll wear the red to honor Vietnam-era servicemen who came home from southeast Asia more than 30 years ago but whose efforts weren’t duly honored.

“Soldiers are neither political or the reason the war started,” Ellis said. “We need to support them.”

Ellis is joining the ranks of those trying to make Red Fridays a national symbol of solidarity with U.S. troops overseas.

The Red Fridays movement has spread through e-mails and word of mouth but has mysterious beginnings. The first mass e-mailings apparently went out in 2003, just as bombings ushered in the war in Iraq.

The movement has even spread to Canada with information about Red Friday appearing on some Canadian blogs.

Donna and Dave Ellis, Lawrence, will begin wearing red on Fridays as a growing trend in support of troops abroad. Their son, Dan Ellis, 28, is now stationed at Laughlin Air Force base in Del Rio, Texas, but has served in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

The movement – not to be confused with National Wear Red Day held yearly in February to promote awareness of heart disease in women – has no known national headquarters, and it is impossible to know how many people wear red on Friday because of it instead of, say, a Chiefs game or because that’s what stands out in their closet.

Ellis said he got involved recently, when he and his wife, Donna, received an e-mail encouraging the wearing of red.

This Friday will mark the first time Ellis and his wife will dress with the cause in mind. He said he will slip into a red T-shirt and go someplace public, probably a restaurant to eat, and then Wal-Mart.

“I won’t necessarily say anything, it’s just making a statement” that the public should support men and women in harm’s way overseas, Ellis said.

Some critics of the movement say the red symbolizes blood or signals support with the conservative “red” states.

Don Haider-Markel, a Kansas University political science professor specializing in public policy and opinion, said he thought the choice of red was a strange one.

“Red does seem like an odd choice because of the connotations with blood,” Haider-Markel said.

Historically, he said, there have been more obvious ways to support a war.

During the world wars, there were government propaganda machines instructing citizens to support troops and buy bonds.

Since Vietnam, however, Haider-Markel said, much of that rallying has been done by citizen groups, not the government.

But the citizen groups haven’t been very effective in engaging masses of people, he said.

“It speaks to how difficult it is to get people to realize that we’re actually at war,” he said.