I think that I may need to work harder at getting you to understand. Combat experience is limited to just a few because that's the way it works. For every person who serves his or her country in uniform, only a few actually are sent to the combat area. Of those, only about 10% are involved in the actual fighting and they are almost all infantry or armor.
Of those, many are casualties because the direct exposure to small arms, mortars, rockets, artillery, mines (lately IEDs) has a high probability of affecting them. All who are there see death: the death of fellow soldiers, the death of enemy combatants, the deaths of civilians. The see people injured horribly, sometimes for the first time in their lives and everyone experiences fear, day and night, week after week.
These events have effects on all of these veterans that last all of their lives. Some of these effects are the "flinches" every time you hear a loud bang and some of these effects are horrible dreams, sleeplessness, failed marriages, distrust of others, a phobia of being in crowds, maybe drinking to excess, and other effects.
We have all learned to live with it plus any residuals we have from injuries but being an item of status? You have to be kidding! During "my war" we had the older veterans asking us "why aren't you winning your war? - we won ours". We had antiwar/pro-enemy demonstrator calling us "murderers". and we had friends and family that didn't want hear about anything at all from us.
No, you miss the point completely. Being a combat veteran is a little like having polio: you either have it or you don't and it's not considered an asset to your life.
My best and basically my only friends are those guys who served with me and made it. Do you think that being a combat veteran was a help in my career? You underestimate the effects of jealousy among your fellow officers and reporting seniors when you have certain ribbons and they don't.
The only thing that surviving combat did for me is to give me experience. Experience in what happens to people in war, experience in knowing what conditions will have to endured, experience in what works and what doesn't.
Things that no one, no matter how smart they think they are can derive by sitting at a desk.
It's just the way it is.
“I think that I may need to work harder at getting you to understand....only about 10% are involved in the actual fighting and they are almost all infantry or armor. ... an item of status? You have to be kidding! ... Do you think that being a combat veteran was a help in my career? You underestimate the effects of jealousy ...” [Chainmail, post 26]
“”Military service is about ego and one-upmanship, not about service to the country”. “ [Chainmail, post 25, expressing vexation over my earlier summary of reasons to serve in post 22]
I must apologize to Chainmail and the rest of the forum for lack of clarity. The Post 22 comment was not intended to reflect any universal truths (though if Chainmail is all he claims, he might have noticed my later comments on the large variety of motivations people have for signing up).
Chainmail’s implication is difficult to accept: that combat veterans do not engage in one-upmanship concerning their experiences, exploits, wounds, and endurance through privation and miserable conditions. I’ve watched and listened while they do it. And it happens with everyone: one-hitchers, lifers, active duty, you name it. Every service, every branch. Not everybody does it every minute, but they do it.
All humans do it. Most do it about less dire events and actions. To maintain otherwise is to confess to a degree of blindness about the human condition that is unprecedented, or an experience of life that is so far outside of any expected value - probabilistically speaking - that it borders on the miraculous. Workable policy cannot be based on miracles.
Most especially, combat veterans that later rise to exalted rank play the game with a vengeance and tenacity, a single-mindedness, that is dizzying. And it’s these giant egoes who make the decisions on systems acquisition, on design and development, on elements of strategy, on force organization and tactical development, that mean the difference between life and death: for many otherwise-blameless troops, sometimes years down the line.
If Chainmail really has found refuge in a circle of friends that has avoided all that, I salute him on good fortune.
“...they are almost all infantry or armor ...” [Chainmail, post 26]
This bears repeating: it expresses a conceit that ranges more widely than any belief within the American military, and has gained higher credibility than any other notion among enthusiasts, and millions upon millions who have not served. Namely, the belief that only ground combat has any reality or meaning, and that the footsoldier exceeds all other branches, every other application of armed force, all other systems, both in effectiveness and efficiency.
From there, it is only a tiny step to the assumption that footsoldiers, and they alone, can be granted moral authority. And from there, it’s a tinier step still, to the conviction that they are the only people capable and worthy, to lead or make decisions.
Against such solidity of belief, no rational argument can contend; numbers and real-life observations do not matter; conclusions reached through the application of professional judgment to experience are as nothing; science and engineering are pale ghosts; reality does not exist.