Confessions of A DICK - Troop Worship

If you're an Airborne Dedicated Individual Combat Killer (ADICK), chances are you've experienced the troop worship effect first-hand.

Complete strangers walk up to you and give you heartfelt thank-yous. Certain businesses will insist that you don't pay full price (or get stuff for free). If a kid sees you in uniform, their parents might take a picture with you two. If you're really lucky, you can get laid with some BS small talk and a flash of your dog tags, or you can get out of a ticket if the cop that pulled you over happens to be a vet. It's a sort of weird, Twilight Zone of human behavior, where your particular label commands you more respect than most people ever enjoy in their day-to-day lives. And I don't understand it.

Image via PixaBay

I understand the instant camaraderie that takes effect when I run into an older veteran and we identify each other. The thing about the Suck is that once you've experienced the Suck, you have something in common with everyone else who's ever experienced the Suck, no matter how much worse one's experience was over the other's. The other thing that the Suck exposes you to is a fundamental truth: the recruiting posters and videos are bullshit. If you're not spending your time cleaning floors, picking up trash, and cutting grass with your scissors, you're practicing to kill trees and waiting for Private Soup-Sandwich to qualify at the range on his tenth try.

If you're really unlucky, the Big Green Weenie sends you to some faraway country to get shot at and to kill other people that you'd never run into otherwise. I didn't have that level of misfortune, but I know a few guys that have and I've read stories from people who actually fought the Global War on Terror. Killing another human being, or seeing people you care about be killed, is a traumatic event (unless you're a sociopath, in which case, it's another day at the office) that forces you to confront your conscience. Responses vary wildly, but they generally fall into two categories: either you rationalize it to yourself somehow and soldier on, or you can't find a good enough rationalization that overcomes the overwhelming horror at what you've just done. Either way, there's no changing what you've done. Sooner or later, it catches up with you.

Civilians don't have that, though. Even military families don't have that sort of common thread. So why the hell are they thanking me for my service? Do they even realize what my service is? I'm not going to pretend to know what people think, because I don't, but I imagine they have this idealized notion in their minds that soldiers are these superhumans who have achieved the ultimately level of altruism: laying down their lives for their common man without any thought of reward. They do it because they want to protect their people; they're sheepdogs, as the slogans go.

Image via Cornerstone UMC
Don't even get me started on the weird religious worship of soldiers.

Yeah, okay, except that's a load of horseshit on two counts.

First, practically all soldiers aren't these fantastically altruistic people. True, they do sign on the dotted line to "uphold and defend the Constitution against enemies both foreign and domestic," but if that's all it took, why are there countless ways that recruiters ply poor saps that walk into the office? From tuition reimbursement, to the GI Bill, to sign-on bonuses for understrength fields, there are a ton of ways to convince people who aren't all that interested in "dying for liberty" to go off and "die for liberty". That's not to say there aren't people who take selfless service to heart; I was one. I actually turned down a bonus when I signed up. Stupid me, I know, but I haven't met anyone else like me in the time I've been in or since I've been out. Just about every single person I met went in for something other than just "serving their country."

The second reason this is a load of malarkey is because soldiers don't defend a damn thing, and that's really the worst part about it. A soldier is an individual who has sworn an oath to obey the orders of those appointed over him or her, and to defend the Constitution if it is ever attacked. Since those that are appointed over them ultimately are politicians (the President, who initiates the orders, and Congress, who authorizes those orders), they are tasked with carrying out the political directives of a bunch of people that virtually no one in the United States trusts to add numbers together. There's also the fact that we've been fighting foreign wars to keep the dollar from collapsing and keep people trading oil in dollars. Soldiers don't defend shit. They're little better than paid mercenaries for the ruling elite.

It's this weird deification that I cannot, for the life of me, comprehend. It's probably because practically all civilians have no clue what actually goes on in the Army. Most of them will never understand that soldiers are a cross-section of society, and a good portion of them are shitbags that their own units would love to get rid of. More than that, though, soldiers are just humans, and really they're in the worst kind of profession; they're paid to go out and kill other people or help other soldiers kill other people.

No amount of pride in arbitrary lines on a map drawn by men and women who use violence to make others obey their rules is going to change that fact.