I am a US veteran
Nothing makes me cringe harder than someone thanking me for my service
Even though I personally didn't do anything horrible, it's still making me remember one of the worst experiences of my life
this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2025
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It only seems to be a US only thing. I assume it's because the military is such a big thing for the US where other countries just see having a military almost as a chore.
As a nurse who graduated in the middle of COVID (and was working in hospitals leading up to it), A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher was surprisingly healing read.
“You expect heroes to survive terrible things. If you give them a medal, then you don't ever have to ask why the terrible thing happened in the first place. Or try to fix it.”
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There is absolutely no reason to blindly respect someone just because they’ve “served their country.” We don’t know what they’ve done. We have so many examples of soldiers doing horrible things to civilians around the world that blind respect is simply not warranted.
Agreed. A friend of mine is a veteran, and did something that he regrets every day of his life. Guilt's been eating the guy. He told some people, and they cut off contact with him. Which he understands and agrees with. He told me too, and yet I can't blame him for doing something objectively wrong.
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This might get a lot of down votes but I want to say I don't think it's fair to blame the soldiers in the field for the choices of the decision makers in the office. Those horrible events were unwanted 'byproducts' of the goal of men with evil plans, they were not veterans going off-book. In other words, these veterans did what was asked of them. I'm not saying they didn't do some very bad things, but they aren't the people that should be 'thanked'.
You are literally arguing the same as all Nazis did. "I was just following orders". US military decided to join an organisation that constantly attacks other countries.
This was exactly the take I was looking for. "I was just following orders" is, and has always been, a bad take. Grow a pair and accept the consequences of your poor decision making.
In German penal law there were discussions on how to treat those that act under orders. Many Germans did act under orders and even in accordance to law in WW2 but also in regard to the Mauerschützen (the soldiers that shot dissidents at the inner German border)- meaning that there were difficulties persecuting them as it was technically legal. There were way too few persecutions, however something called the Radebrechtsche formula was developed. Paraphrasing it says, something that is morally wrong to every morally thinking being cannot be legalized or excused. It is simply illegal to act on orders that are naturally wrong.
Sure, but how many 18 year old boys were convicted for being conscripted into the Wehrmacht?
The US uses economic coercion to force poor kids into joining. They give veterans a massive priority bump for public sector jobs and the GI Bill is often the only way poor kids can afford college.
Also, the US military uses far more obfuscation than the Nazis used. When I was in the Air Force, I worked in geo-spatial intelligence which was mostly extracting heat signatures from satellite collected data. They kept us in the dark on what our intel was being used for. All I knew was that our intel was helping to save the lives of our fellow soldiers somehow and that the government would pay for my college when I was done.
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Ahh, yes, the mindless drone argument.
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“Protecting freedom” by torturing and bombing people halfway across the world
FYI: top right is prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib
done by American genociders and murderers.
The prisoner appears to be hooked up to mains power in the high res version of that photo.
The mods at non credible defence aren't going to like this.
What even is the purpose of that sub?
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The amount of cope in this thread is astonishing. I never thought I'd see an actual person justifying killing hundreds of thousands of civilians with a straight face. But here we are
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I wish I could post this here in Australia without getting rocks from every white Australian. You can search my post history to see their reaction to questioning this.
Australia was involved in every one of those crimes. And the celebration for those meaningless murders are everywhere. Questioning this is questioning the sacrifice of Jesus.
Though by order of our north american overlords the US should not be alone in that title.
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People got mad at this one streamer for saying American soldiers deserve PTSD. When you consider that most interventions by the US are not justified or just imperial power plays, and that many soldiers commit war crimes, you realize she has a point.
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reminds me of how they always try to justify the nuking of japan cities that had hundreds of thousands of civillians (twice even)
Yup, the mental gymnastics they use to justify war crimes. No other country has nuked a civilian population. They’ve nuked 2
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ACAB includes the troops. Going to foreign countries to shoot brown kids doesn't make you any less of a bastard than doing it at home.
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No no no. None of this should be acknowledged, because Whataboutism.
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