Quote Originally Posted by Brenus View Post
I was a professional soldier and I find this funny.

The difference is you can recover being a junky; you never recover having been a soldier.

The sheer arrogance, the pride, the sense to be better, to be part of an elite (feelings shared by others professions) to be part of a team never really vanish after you take the uniform off.

When I was a soldier we had in France a campaign by anti-militarists stating that soldiers are not aiming at targets in wood but are killing people. They were right. They are right.

Where they and I disagree is sometimes you have to kill.

And they take the superior moral ground because they won’t, and no matter what dangers vulnerable others can face, they still think they are right. They think it is better to let others you don’t know being killed, raped, their houses destroyed and to kill the ones who do this is bad.

Confronted to the reality, like look at Rwanda, Hitler’s Germany, Yugoslavia, theirs answers are basically, it can’t happened any more. Even in this thread it was said.
“If somebody come to kill me and my family, I don’t fight I go to another country”. Well, right, you can flee until the Northern Pole and pretend it is the moral thing to do; some others will have to stop the barbarians.

They also ignore the reality. Did you see how welcome in our countries refugees are welcome? How much warm is the welcome? Did they ever saw a refugee, in the “alternative” accommodations, camps, or shelters? Did they ever think of the smell of tired, wet, hungry, angry, miserable refugees gathered in an icy, smelly, dark hotel corridor in a dark, snowy, extremely cold night? Do they know what is the lost of all you had, not the car, not the work, not even the new washing machine, no, the lost of what makes you, what matters to you. The black and white picture of you parents or grand parents, the diary of your teen-age daughter, your pictures (me and my then girlfriend at the sea side in Toulon) spread on your abandoned and now looted former home…
Do you they even imagine the shame and the despair of grow-up adults loading their parents and their kids in buses with only one plastic bag in each hand, the feeling it gives because you failed to protect them?
No. This is because they speak without knowing, acknowledging the reality, only in theory. They think; they are not.

So, the difference is if some soldiers will do bad things, a junkie will never do good things. A soldier think (if they can, of course) in term of collectively (within a reasonable expectation for himself, but same thing can be said for working in Charities/NGO), the junkie is per definition self-centred and selfish…
Very well said.

Now, I think some of you "defensive" types are mixing up the OPs specific opinion about his military with that of military in general. For example, unless I am missing something, nothing yet has been said to rail the US military, yet US people chime in and act like they are "OMGZ" affronted Glenn Beck style. I realize he made some tacky comments about the UK military in response to others....but really....he is from a small country with different needs, different ideals, and different lifestyles that I for one do not understand -- for example, the idea of involuntary conscription -- which we obviously don't have here in the US. Look at his post from the perspective of his nationality and his country's history and maybe, just maybe, it will fall into context, without the need for all the retarded "cut ur social programs lolz" comments.

Now, if I were in his neck of the woods, I would be for a strong military due to certain religious/immigration considerations I won't mention here because it may get me a warning. But as a US citizen, and a member of the US armed forces, I am not offended by his post in the least.