You don’t protect my freedom Our Childish Insistence on Calling Soldiers Heroes

[HereSince1628]

22. As a vet, it's my experience that vet's shun hero worship

and a large fraction are made uncomfortable by the increasingly pre-recorded quality of the mantra 'thank-you for your service', that emerges anytime experience in the military is mentioned.

To those who say bring back the draft. I say no. If you look at conscripted military service from WWII to Vietnam it was, at its best, a diversion of two years of life at poverty wages. At its worst it was being put into meat grinders to prevent imagined 'domino' disasters for capital interests which knew no loyalty or allegiance to soldier or country.

The notion that it was 'character building' or provided a sense of 'citizenship' is bad propaganda. Mostly it created a bunch of people with disrupted lives looking to survive bullets or boredom until their discharge. We recognize the carnage of combat as bad, but the consequences of boredom wrecked a lot of lives with substance abuse and behavioral problems.

The idea of using military service as a political tool to build anti-war concern, is just another version of using forced labor for political purpose.