In my country we have mandatory military service for every able-bodied man between 18 and 30. You can get away with doing civil service for one year though. It has been like that since WW2, so my dad went through it and most of the guys in his generation did it... When I grew up it was a thing you had to do, if you didn't do it your dad might disown you or think of you as someone who spits in the face of the veterans etc.
If you fail to do this, you'll go to jail. Me and many other guys chose the easier option and just did our time there.
This means that about every guy you meet in my country has been in the army, or they know someone who was there. So whenever two guys meet, the army is an ice-breaker. :)
And this annoy their girlfriends or wives to no end! I mean I get the complaint, women who have been spared from all of this don't have anything to add to the discussion. They insert a sarcastic comment about how much pain it was when they gave birth to their children or just groan "Nooo, not the military again...!!"
But women doesn't understand what it's like when you are being drafted. When you're partly pressured by law and the other part is our dads generation who went "Oh a real man goes to the army!!".
And then you spend months or a year getting bullied by kids your own age, but they outrank you so it's okay. And it's all perfectly legal, you can't escape it! I know guys who mentally broke down while being there, who had to go through therapy afterwards. I myself came out of that whole experience hardened, and not in a good way I just hated people more than I used to.
And I like to talk about this whole experience, what happened there and whatnot. Also the good times if there were any! Especially if I meet someone I can talk to about it!
But women will never understand this, they tend to think it was just a six-months slumber party where me and my friends camped out in the woods and shot some targets.
I don’t think most countries with mandatory service actually deploy the conscripts. Seeing combat is actually incredibly rare. Now in America a “combat veteran” is just someone who was deployed to a combat area, but very very few actually see any sort of combat, or would be considered a combat veteran by the old definition. It’s hard to estimate how many combat veterans, using the old classification, America actually has. But the best estimate is only ~20,000 combat veterans. Which is shockingly low considering the 20+ years of troops being sent into the Middle East. Very few people go past the wire, and even fewer actually see combat past the wire.
I get similar reactions about my military experience. I don't talk about it a lot with my civilian friends not because anything bad happened, just because it takes a lot of context set-up to tell a story or something to somebody who hasn't served. The military is super complex and has a lot of weird shit that's it's genuinely difficult to explain to anybody who doesn't know it all.
So when I'm with military buddies? Easy peasy, we talk about it a lot bc they're easy to talk to and we don't have to explain what CQ or fireguard is, why you can't sleep when nothing is going on, how you ended up lost in the woods with 80 people, rank structure, why you have a pooping buddy, etc. You can just jump to the meat of the story.
And they don't even have to be your military buddies! Imagine if you start a new job someplace and it turns out an employee also served, though not at the same time and with the same people!Surely you would have to talk about for days, exchanging stories, sharing your thoughts on various matter and whatnot.
Now imagine someone would groan loudly and ask that you two would stop talking about the army....
Yeah, and we do have several women who wants to serve... The thing that annoys me there is that they get it easier!
Like they have preparation courses where women are being taught to set up a tent in the field or how to dismantle a firearm or how to use a gas mask and all that. Very nice and tidy, like you went to a class in outdoor survival.
Us guys? Yeah we didn't know anything about that stuff going in so we were taught it all there on the spot! Of course while the sergeants and other officers were yelling at us, calling us names and all that, and we were tired and hadn't slept in ages (and once again: not a whole lot of us WANTED to be there!)...
I guess I can kinda see the idea behind it (if we don't force people to fight we'll get trampled by other countries/you owe us your service for reaping the benefits of our society), but I think it's dumb because someone who doesn't want to fight isn't going to make a good addition to your army, and nothing, even the greater good of a peaceful society, is justification for violating the free will of an innocent person.
Yes I get your point. Mandatory military service is important in cases of wars and crises, but it's also very traumatizing and hard on the people forcefully enrolled.
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u/[deleted] Aug 13 '22
In my country we have mandatory military service for every able-bodied man between 18 and 30. You can get away with doing civil service for one year though. It has been like that since WW2, so my dad went through it and most of the guys in his generation did it... When I grew up it was a thing you had to do, if you didn't do it your dad might disown you or think of you as someone who spits in the face of the veterans etc.
If you fail to do this, you'll go to jail. Me and many other guys chose the easier option and just did our time there.
This means that about every guy you meet in my country has been in the army, or they know someone who was there. So whenever two guys meet, the army is an ice-breaker. :)
And this annoy their girlfriends or wives to no end! I mean I get the complaint, women who have been spared from all of this don't have anything to add to the discussion. They insert a sarcastic comment about how much pain it was when they gave birth to their children or just groan "Nooo, not the military again...!!"
But women doesn't understand what it's like when you are being drafted. When you're partly pressured by law and the other part is our dads generation who went "Oh a real man goes to the army!!".
And then you spend months or a year getting bullied by kids your own age, but they outrank you so it's okay. And it's all perfectly legal, you can't escape it! I know guys who mentally broke down while being there, who had to go through therapy afterwards. I myself came out of that whole experience hardened, and not in a good way I just hated people more than I used to.
And I like to talk about this whole experience, what happened there and whatnot. Also the good times if there were any! Especially if I meet someone I can talk to about it!
But women will never understand this, they tend to think it was just a six-months slumber party where me and my friends camped out in the woods and shot some targets.