3,500 of the dumbest and dimmest.
Or the most easily exploited. I don’t have much sympathy for the US military on a macro scale, but I also accept that conditions in the US are intentionally set up to pressure impressionable high schoolers into enlisting, advertised as their only chance of escape from poverty because college was never on the table for them. I can feel bad about that.
As one of the former enlisted you speak of, I say feel bad for the individual that didn’t see any other way out, but still call them the easily exploited idiot they are for agreeing to go die for the current regime.
They heavily police what enlisted personnel can watch and who they interact with when on base and everything, so it’s a little easier to understand why one of them who doesn’t have many left leaning friends might not see “the other side” of the conflict, but I would argue you cannot be an adult in modern day and see things the administration gleefully admits to, and then think any conflict they desire would be justified.
I would happily sit my ass in a prison cell for refusing to go to war in the middle east, but then again there’s a reason I didn’t last long in the military. Not even long enough for them to make an “honorable vs dishonorable” determination lmao.
So yeah, sorry for rambling a bit but to point :
Feel sorry the individual couldn’t see any other way out, but know they collectively had many opportunities to not be there.
I grew up in poverty and I didn’t sell my soul for 70k in order to fight a war for genocidal white supremacists and pedophiles.
Maybe the career military personnel can be forgiven, maybe some of them think they morally have to be there in order to represent the few responsible adults of this nation and minimize harm, but for the most part they have all been given a gun and told to go shoot some brown people and said “ok, let’s go”.
