A military grave knows no distinction.
[QUOTE=Little Nemo]
My personal opinion is that yes, members of the military are entitled to respect from the general public. They volunteered to face danger in order to protect society. I don’t distinguish between those who actually go into combat and those who don’t because all members of the military agree to go where they’re assigned.
[/quote]
The way I look at it, some people make a choice to spend several years of their late teens/early 20s joining a highly disciplined, results-oriented organization where they will have little choice in where they go or what they do, performing dangerous and possibly tedious work, far away from everyone they know, with a real possibility of getting killed or seriously injured.
Other people choose to sit around on their couch in their college dorm or their parents basement, doing jack shit.
And the majority of people chose a third option. Don’t fetishize the military. Plenty of people have meaningful lives that don’t include military service.
I’d venture to say that most people with meaningful lives have no affiliation with the military and that many people who were in the military wind up with terribly meaningless lives.
At best, I am indifferent to whether or not someone has prior military service. At worst it raises some suspicion in me, as I’ve met a few service members who have very interesting ideas about the role of the US in the international sphere and the need for military intervention to further those goals.
You realize that it’s possible to love your country, act in service of that country, and not be in the armed forces, right? In fact, within the past few decades, a person who truly loved their country would have done a great deal more service to it as a part of Teach for America, Americorps, or any number of other service organizations looking to better the lives of Americans.
In frank, I don’t believe people who say they were motivated to join the military because they “Love their country”, and suspect a better explanation is that they love their country being the biggest, baddest, military force on earth.
One would hope that people would, by and large, hold off on joining their country’s military until those bad people want to do bad things to people in their own country.
What I realize is that this is a very polarizing topic. I don’t have to debate to either side to know that. I also know that it’s extremely easy to trivialize someone elses life.
Someone joins up. Someone provides a service. That someone dies.
That’s a pretty big sacrifice. And there aren’t many people that do it willingly. The ones that do deserve a modicum of respect.
In this case, yes, pretty much. You did a difficult job well. I see no advantage in second-guessing your motivations.
My son joined the military partly to get money for college. What difference does that make?
Put it this way - he served a tour in Iraq, where people tried to kill him (and did succeed in killing his best friend). It didn’t make any difference to them why he joined up. Therefore, I don’t see why it should make any difference to the rest of us.
Regards,
Shodan
It makes a difference because putting your life on the line for personal gain is not generally recognized as an altruistic act that makes you worthy of more respect than is deserved by the average person. There are lots of people who do difficult jobs well. They do not, however, have people debating whether they should be treated differently from everyone else.
I work as a contractor for the military, but my views probably different from most people who work with or as part of the military when I say no. Just being a part of the military does mean anything other than a career path and, in fact, the large majority of people that I work with have never been deployed or been involved in anything dangerous at all. The only real difference between me and them is that they have a few restrictions that I don’t. As such, someone who does computers in the military deserves exactly the same amount of repsect as someone who does that line of work in the private sector.
Despite what I said above, I do think that those in the military that do jobs that we as a society believe are both necessary and dangerous without the kind of pay that a non-military person might expect for the same are making a sacrifice and deserve a level of respect for that. But I would think the same of anyone who does a necessary but very difficult or dangerous job at low compensation.
I don’t think there’s a qualitative difference between military and civilian paper pushers, but there really isn’t much in the way of civilians in combat other than mercenaries, who are generally very well paid, so there is a qualitative difference there.
It depends on what your job is. I would say that the guy at the mall picking up trash is providing a valuable service, even if it is unskilled and unglamorous, but I’m far from convinced that every job in the military serves a useful purpose. Hell, there are plenty of people I see every day where I think we’d actually be better off if they weren’t here. For me, it all depends upon what kind of value the work you do adds to your community and the country.
Policemen and firemen are similar to military in my view. I have a lot of respect for police who actively make an effort to prevent crime, justly enforce it, or otherwise make life safer and fairer. I don’t have much respect, and in some cases harbor some contempt, for cops that I think add no value or, in some cases, actually make places less safe through their actions.
Teachers, for me, are a profession that, in many cases add a significant value in a necessary but difficult profession for not much compensation, so I have a great deal of respect for a number of teachers, particularly those who truly love the profession and make the kids they’re teaching love learning. I defintely have more respect for even a mediocre teacher than I do for a person doing a normal job, just in a uniform.
TLDR: You don’t deserve any additional respect just for wearing the uniform, people deserve respect for what they do whether or not it is in a uniform.
In a good cause, I think they do deserve more respect.
There are a lot easier ways to earn college money. And my son sure got a lot more than just tuition, good and bad.
Regards,
Shodan
This is in line with the example George Washington set and every combat veteran I’ve ever known echoes that sentiment. We Americans by tradition are most proud of our citizenship, of which military service is one aspect.
Regardless if I agree or disagree with the policies that send our best into harm’s way, I feel strongly that we need to do all we can as a society to help our returning veterans.
Bri2k
In order to deserve respect members of the military must do the following few things.
First of all, they must recognise and acknowledge the fact that they are killers. For example, someone in a desk job thousands of miles away from the action might fill in the paperwork to buy missiles from a defence contractor, and see that they get delivered to the war zone. That person IS morally responsible for every death caused by those missiles, whether he admits it or not. And any attempt to claim that he isn’t a killer instantly loses respect.
This is true of every job in the military, no exceptions.
Secondly, unless they are conscripted, they must believe in what they are fighting for, and be prepared to justify why the cauase is a just one. Anyone who says that going to war is “just doing a job” is a prostitute. If someone goes to a war without a sincere belief in what they are fighting for, they are not worthy of respect.
Third, they must take responsibility for their own actions. Anything they do is their own fault and no-one else. The fact that their superiors told them to do it doesn’t change that. If they try to claim that they “don’t have a choice” then they don’t desrve respect.
Fourth, they must refrain from spouting clichés, unless they stop to think about what they actually mean, and then follow through on it. Example: soldiers often claim to be “risking their lives to protect mine.”
But:
- he’s actually got an office job thousands of miles from the action, not actually risking his life.
- the war he’s fighting doesn’t threaten my life in the first place.
- he’s doing it for college tuition money, and doesn’t even care about protecting me.
That’s just one example among dozens.
Consider the doper named Paul In Qatar. I understand that he’s serving in the U.S. military in some sort of desk job, I’m not sure exactly what. When he was younger he was in a combat role. I’ve seen Paul engage in debates about the Afghanistan war, in which he justified at length the U.S. involvement. Everyone was disagreeing with him but he stuck to his own beliefs. And when someone asked him if he personally would shed his own blood in the war, he asserted his willingness to go back into combat, adding as a joke that they would have to find extra large combat gear to fit his current weight.
Paul In Quatar earned my respect when he posted that. I don’t agree with him, but I respect his willingness to fight for a cause that he believes in.
But then there are others on this board. I hope you will understand if I don’t name them. Identifying them would earn me a warning for personal insult. You probably know who they are. These people participate in the Iraq war, while openly stating that they don’t agree with it. This makes them prostitutes. They have desk jobs thousands of miles from the action, and claim that they don’t kill people. Yes they do, they are just too scared to admit it. They tell me that they don’t get to choose which wars they fight. They blame their own actions on their superiors. And they spout clichés.
These people deserve no respect, and shall get none from me.
You can recognize that choosing a life in the military comes with particular hardships without “fetishizing” the military.
And I’m not talking about “meaningful lives”. Schoolteachers lead “meaningful lives”. You don’t have to sacrifice much to be a schoolteacher.
I apologize if I misread your post. When you said essentially that some people join the military and some people waste their lives, I thought you were implying those were the only two choices and anyone who didn’t join the military was wasting their life.
Because, of course, NOBODY in the military ever wastes their own lives, let alone the lives of the people they kill.