“I reminded her that most of the soldiers and sailors were 18-20 year old men.”
That was typical of the draft era and when patriotic young men just simply enlisted as soon as they could. This pretty much ended with the draft. The sandbox wars had soldiers averaging a few years older, but not by much.
My first thoughts in reading your remark is the sad bunch of young men today. A good portion of them are afraid of anything and everything. They are over emotional spineless girly boys, just pathetic. My daughter works at a convenience store and related a story about one. She found him crying at the cash register. A customer had triggered him over something, he wouldn’t say what. He was so pathetic he had to be sent home.
I’m willing to bet less than 50% of our young are emotionally fit for a war.
I would bet that a lot of those emotional spineless girly boys were raised by women and didn’t have a man around to kick their asses a couple of times to grow them up.