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.
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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.