Let’s just get to heaven so we don’t have to deal with the piece of shit earth is.

Why not just get to heaven quickly and kill yourself?

and you can’t be older than dirt- i know you ain;t older than me and i remember when dust was just a mote in that yawah’s eye

yet i always like seeing my spelling blunders corrected – gives me hope that the next generation is actually learning

The only filter that separates them from the general population is income and education: minorities in particular and the poor in general are over-represented in our military. There are some people of means who choose to serve their country, but they aren’t represented in the same #’s they are in our population in general.

you can get through training and get a gun in your hand and kill someone before they evaluate you.

I heard a quote once that will always stick with me:

“Freedom isn’t free, but don’t worry, the Marines will cover your share.”

Replace Marines with whatever branch. It all applies.
People like Mens Rae piss me off. They condemn the military for doing their job yet they take the benefits they enjoy from it for granted.

I wish they would understand but that is a futile wish.

The majority of the soldiers and Marines that come back from combat have at least a minor stress disorder. If not properly treated it could cause them to commit some kind of violence or crime.

While they are responsible for anything they do, part of it is out of their control.

We need to ramp up the medical community’s research on ways to fight combat related stress disorders so we can get our fathers, brothers, sons, cousins, nephews, and otherwise back to normal.

There are few war declarations I would support in history. As a European I am happy that the USA declared war to Germany and saved us from Hitler. I’m disappointed my country did not stand up against Hitler (that should tell you where I’m from). My country did not stand a chance of winning, but could had held until the end of the war and at least the world would had known that we don’t bend to tyranny. The French Resistance did exactly that: they never gave up and though they could not win, they could not loose either.

When it comes to wars that I don’t support, I blame the politicians, and those who elected them, but I don’t blame the soldiers, unless when things clearly go out of hand (such as direct orders to murder civilians). Soldiers have to stand up against authority when nobody else can, but we have not reached this point with the war in Iraq. You and me can still act against this war (we always could) and we can do much more than making protests in the streets. But we don’t do it.
So I’ll blame the soldiers when they will stop me from acting, until then, they have no more reasons than I do to act.

If we’re going to blame the soldiers who fight this war, we should blame the doctor who heals Bush, the taxpayers, the food makers who feed Bush and his administration, and so on…

However, I think in any war violence should remain at a minimal level. I don’t support useless killing of enemies. We have to show that we are worth much more than the people we are fighting. And that’s where soldiers often deceive me.

I heard a lot of soldiers (or pretending to be soldiers) say things such as “We should nuke Iraq, who cares about their kids, they train them to be terrorists anyway”, “10 dead Iraqi children are better than one dead American adult”, “Let’s execute Iraqi POWs, cause they execute us too”, “They shouldn’t complain if we torture them, they do worse to us”, etc.
That just breaks all the pride and admiration I have for the U.S. soldiers.
I only have respect for soldiers such as General Patton, who would not allow any soldier to harm a German prisoner (there is a quote about this).
I like soldiers who kill efficiently when they have to, but who don’t become murdering psychos who would choose to execute an enemy rendered harmless rather than making him a prisoner. For me, soldiers must be wise enough to realize what violence means, what consequences it leads to, and they must be able to make minimal use of it as to remain good people. They have to know that revenge is never the right thing.

So I want to ask this here, because the comments I heard so far seem better than what I read anywhere else:
What are the U.S. soldiers on the field really like?
- Would they kill as little enemies as possible and take as much prisoners as they can, or would they rather should as many enemies as they can?
- Do they think the people they fight in the middle-east are evil, or do they think that their enemies are uneducated people who are brainwashed and used like puppets by their leaders?
- Would they nuke the entire country, killing innocent civilians including children, or would they risk their lives fighting the enemy face to face in order to spare innocent lives?

I realize there are different opinions in the military, but for those here who have been in contact with soldiers, what amount (in %) of soldiers do you think would give which answer to those questions?
So far, based on what I read on Internet forums, I feel like 80% of the soldiers would choose the “evil” way. I’d like to know if my feeling reflects reality, or if things are actually more optimistic in the military. Hopefully I just heard from the few bad people, or, even better, from people who are not really soldiers (contrary to what they claim).
Thanks to all who answer my question.

So far, it seems I am right about you. Especially with the sending children to die bit. You do realize that nobody under 18 can go right and that is technically adult and thus they can make up their own damn mind.

However, this discourse is making me actually be serious and I won’t have any of that. Carry on, we need amusement.

The doctors, vets and dentists in the military actually spend a lot of time in the developing countries doing what are called “medcaps”, “dentcaps” and “vetcaps” where they go out and give medical and dental care to locals (I saw this personally in the Philippines) and veterinary care to their pets and livestock. Also, doctors and medics are non-combatants just like chaplains. There’s a LOT more to being in the military than killing people.

The same principle of hunting applies to killing people. We don’t go mortal kombat with deer and lions because they would kick our ass in hand to paw/hoof. So we developed spears and then guns. We want to hunt/kill but not die from it.

When you kill people, you don’t pick out a target that has the advantage over you, unless you are some competition nut in which case, you’ll be dead before you can muddy my example anyway.

So you are correct about gun control. As my gun nut friends say, take away all the legal guns and the only people with guns will be criminals.

And I like coming here beacuse it gives me a chance to provoke fools.

Why should the two be mutually exclusive?

Hmmmmm???

Typical mindless blather.

Look, hon-my husband is a survivor of the nightmare that was Bosnia. So many people were slaughtered precisely because they HAD NO GUNS.

When I first met my husband, he went along with the whole Euro gun-control nonsense. But when I asked him what would have happened in Bosnia if the civilians had guns as they do here in the American South, he thought for a while, gave me a huge evil grin, and changed his mind permanently on the question of gun control.

You see, dear, civilians were slaughtered pretty much at random and en masse because:

1. They weren’t allowed to own guns under the old Communist totalitarian regime.

2. Bosnia wasn’t allowed to buy weapons to defend itself from anyone else in the world because of the idiotic pacifist UN.

3. The Serbs had all the big and small guns left over from the former Yugoslavia.

And, in closing, let me just write this: “Generalizations are generally wrong”.