https://original.antiwar.com/reed/2024/04/08/enlisting-in-the-military-a-very-very-bad-idea/?utm_source=FFF+Daily&utm_campaign=a0137181c7-FFF+Daily+2024-04-13&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1139d80dff-a0137181c7-318090255

by Fred Reed Posted on April 09, 2024

If you are a young man wondering what to do with your life, you may consider enlisting in the military. Don’t. Yes, the military has its appeal, or seems to. You may need a job. The uniform looks good. There can be adventure. You might get laid by Asian lovelies in foreign countries. These things have their appeal. They did for me as a young Marine. But they aren’t worth being mutilated, blinded, or spending the rest of your years in a wheel chair. This can happen. It does happen. And Washington doesn’t give a damn.

Recruiters won’t tell you of this. They are liars. They lied to me. They will lie to you. At the very least, they will talk only about good things that might happen, about college money and job training you might get but probably won’t. They will make you feel welcome. You are joining a team of brothers, they will say. You are a patriot. You are defending your country.

Don’t believe it. The US military does not defend America. The last time it did this was in 1945, at the end of World War Two. Since then, American soldiers were sent for twenty years to Afghanistan. Is Afghanistan America? No. Was it, is it, important to America? No. Then Iraq, Syria, Iraq again,and Serbia, bombing helpless cities. Iraq isn’t America. In my day – I’m an old guy – it was Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, where 63,000 Americans died, and killed huge numbers of peasants who did nothing wrong–for no reason. Washington is now getting ready to start a war with China. China is on the other side of the world.

Let me tell you what the military does to young men, what Washington does. Long ago I was driving a truck near the Marine base in Danang, Vietnam. A bullet came through the windshield. The glass spatter went into my eyes, filling them with blood and blinding me for, as it turned out, several months. I lay for maybe an hour beside the road until a chopper finally came to take me to the Naval Support Activity hospital. For a couple of weeks a Viet nurse gave me a large injection of penicillin every few hours because if the blood got infected, that would be it for my vision.

Across the corridor from me were two Marines whose tank had been hit by an RPG, rocket-propelled grenade. It ruptured the hydraulic lines and the hydraulic fluid had exploded into flames. The two crewmen across from me had gotten out somehow, though horribly burned. I was told they were covered with a plastic sheet that dripped with evaporation from their burns, but I don’t know. The other too had cooked alive, burning, burning, in agony, skin sloughing off, unable to breathe in the flames, desperately trying to find the hatch. The two across from me said they could hear them screaming. It is what the military did to them. It is what the military will do to you.

end snip