bitchologist-deactivated2016090:

Uh, that doesn’t really make me respect war movies more. I have… not your conventional American attitude towards the military? I understand that there are complex reasons why someone would enlist. It can be an economic thing—I know that’s why my brother joined the Navy. He didn’t have the grades to get scholarships to college, so he joined the Navy and they paid for him to get a degree in engineering. Or, maybe you have a family and the military is supposed to take care of your family if you join. Or maybe you were kind of a fuck up and you didn’t have much direction in your life so you joined for the structure and the prestige.

So I get the sometimes desperate situations that lead people to sign up.

However…

None of us are naive about war, the realities of war, the suffering that the civilians in the battleground country endure. You sign up knowing full well that there is a significant likelihood that you are going to kill other people. Maybe a couple of them are unambiguously bad, but a lot of them are people in the same situation as you who just happened to be born someone else and think they are doing the right thing, and a lot of them are going to be children and women and men who have nothing to do with the fighting, they are just geographically unlucky.

I understand being obligated to take care of your family and being between a rock and a hard place, but it’s unethical to say, “Yeah okay, I’ll murder people if you tell me to,” to alleviate your stress.

I also believe that the military conditions people to be racist, and this is just from my own experience—almost everyone I know who has come back from Iraq or Afghanistan has a serious hatred of brown people, even those who have nothing to do with the war. I was once at the grocery store with a vet who became literally purple in the face muttering slurs in English and Arabic at a SIKH. Whom he accused of looking at him and threatened. The Army conditioned him to see all brown people as a threat, and he does. It worked.

One of my sisters also was abused by two different Marine ex-boyfriends. I just believe that military service teaches you to be hateful and solve problems with violence and be out of tune with your emotions.

So my sympathy for soldiers who are in danger because they chose to endanger themselves—remember that the draft is not currently in use—is limited.

All of bitchologist’s points above are valid and important but CAN WE PLEASE ESTABLISH THAT THIS GUY’S LIKE “women weren’t there back then.”

As if women were just like invented fairly recently and before then dudes had to vigorously rub their dicks together to make another person.