My intent isn’t to glamorize war. The purpose of this thread was to see whether there’s some kind of “warrior soul” in men.
Now all you atheists, don’t jump all over me for using the word “soul”; it’s just the best way I can think of to describe it.
I’m a pretty simple pacifist. I believe that one of my primary duties in life is not to kill anyone. It’s glosses over a lot of complexities, but it’s an easy promise to keep and one that no one can say we wouldn’t be better off if everyone followed.
I extend it to helping the military in general, as much as I can and not get in trouble for tax evasion, because I’m not comfortable supporting an organization who’s function is death.
Let’s talk about women and childbirth for a minute. Childbirth is or can be:
- painful
- horrible
- able to mess up your mind
- disfiguring
- fatal
But most women want to have kids. Some have one and say “never again”. Some women become activists against pregnancy. Some have as many as they are physically able to have. Some find out they are not able to have children and are devastated. Some reach a certain age and feel their opportunity slipping away. Some are perfectly happy never to have had any.
Is it the same way with men and war?
As I suspected you weren’t listening. :rolleyes:
When I turned 18 during the Vietnam war, I was sure that getting drafted would be the worst possible waste of 3 years of my life (if I survived.) Fortunately, the doctor at my draft physical said I was unfit for the military. I have never regretted it for a second.
I’m 55 now, and I know some people whose sons are risking their lives for another unnecessary war, and one woman whose son died in Iraq. I don’t think any of them are happy about it.
As I suspected, you are more interested in your own ideology than listening to other people’s answer to the OP :rolleyes: :rolleyes:
The military may cause there to be more peace than not (although frankly in the last, say, two thousand years of human history I havn’t seen it work too well) but they don’t do that by handing out puppies. The military relies on deadly force or the strong enforceable threat of deadly force to achieve it’s means, however noble they may be. I respect this, but it is something I feel personally called not to be involved with.
Anyway, I don’t want to hijack this thread. We can debate somewhere else if you wish.
I enlisted soon after my 17th birthday and served my four years. I’ve always been glad that I did.
I regret that I DID serve. Not for political reasons or anything but just because I sucked at it and I was miserable. I joined the Navy right out of high school and I wasn’t ready for it.
I have a brother the same age as you and he did serve during the Vietnam war. In Berlin.
Having a cause you’re willing to fight for is totally tangential to joining the military. When I was an adolescent, I attending protests, got myself arrested, got myself badly injured in the course of actions that (in retrospect) carried a not insignificant risk to my life. I was willing to get myself badly hurt in order to promote these causes.
I was not willing to kill anyone, much less kill anyone at someone else’s command.
Being willing to sacrifice yourself for a cause is noble. Being wiling to kill someone else for your cause–I have a lot of trouble seeing that as noble.
Daniel
For years during and after high school I said, “I’ll never join the military” no matter how many times the recruiters called or how much my mom tried to talk me into it.
Then my life went into the shitter and, not having any better choice (besides becoming a bum or a lifelong McWorker) I joined anyway.
My paternal grandparents had both served in their respective countries in WWII and my dad served in the 80s, so it was a family thing, but I didn’t want regimentation and I hate taking orders.
All in all though, despite a lot of parts being crappy, it was a good four years before I got medically discharged from the Army.
My biggest regret is not having joined the Navy instead, doing the same job (journalist) as it would have actually taken me all over the world enjoying the seas. Instead, I was a Pennsylvanian who spent four years in New York.
I guess that’s not too bad either, since I was able to get hitched and settle down.
So - I served in the US Army for four years during which we were attecked by terrorists and went storming (stupidly) through the Middle East, but I just sat in an office overlooking the Hudson sipping on coffee.
Take my glorious experience as you will.
My father was in Vietnam and it was a disaster for him and my family (not to mention Vietnam!). The line of generations serving in the US military has stopped with me, and I’m not only happy about that but proud.
I don’t regret it one tiny little bit. Both my grandfathers were too young for WWI and too old for WWII, and that didn’t hurt them any.
I don’t regret not going into the U.S. military. I do regret not doing anything about the genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda, but our military didn’t do anything to stop them.
I considered going over to Bosnia personally, but even if they wanted me, what they really needed was weapons, which I didn’t have the money for and no means of getting it to them. They didn’t need more warm bodies.
I guess I could have given money to organizations that funneled arms to Bosnia, but who knows how much of that would have been funneled to Islamicist warriors rather than Bosnian warriors? (Yes, many of the groups that funneled arms to Bosnia were themselves Islamicist, but the recipients were not, and the Islamicist groups did not gain much of a foothold in Bosnia despite their contributions.)
I thought long and hard about going into the military, went around to a lot fo recruiters’ officers, scored high on the ASVAB; and got told by more than one recruiter that I’d be a “prime catch” due to language ability, coding/crypto, etc. I actually got offered a scholarship to do USMC OCS, but it wasn’t compatible with my choice of university.
So I went to school and joined the Foreign Service instead. We have uniforms (suits), traditions, rules, codes of conduct, they give us medals, etc. Plus no marching or close-order drill. And the pay is a lot better, as is the housing, and I’m an 0-4 equivalent having served almost three years. I don’t know any other service that I could be making the salary that I am, getting the perks I do, and getting to travel to the places I get to go.
So on the whole, I think I got a pretty good deal, got out of university in four years, and I get to serve my country in my own way. As tough as it can be at times, we have it a lot easier than other officers, and I don’t forget that.