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The ‘by-the book’ fellows never bothered me. You knew where they came from and what they expected. Unimaginative pluggers with some OCD tendencies to be sure but not that hard to work with. The careerist milicrats who i call ‘pseudo-soldiers’ were the ones I truly loathed. Angle playing wiseguys who practiced (as one colonel stated) ‘tell those below you what you want them to believe and those above you what they want to hear’ then you will go far. Being a commissioned officer is, or should be, almost a sacred calling unlike anything other than the priesthood because in both one deals with existential issues for the real meaning of an army or navy is not all the rock painting regulations and game playing manipulations but the gist of life and death itself and very possibly the life and death of one’s nation and people. Most American military men have only a very limited grasp of that. Oddly two female officer I knew understood this idea perfectly. One, the mother of twin boys, simply told me ‘Any woman who has carried and birthed a child knows instinctively what existential issues are. After the childbirth bed the battlefield can offer few terrors.’

And that's why the Mayans sent mothers who died in childbirth to the same heaven reserved for warriors who died in battle.

Wrt the career @$$-kissers . . . I was trying to be polite. My father and father-in-law met more than their fair share of them - both of them refused promotions (my f-i-l to brigadier general) because they loathed the politics and lies. As RLS's David Balfour said, "I had seen it from behind, where it was all bones and blackness."

I must say though that an easy childbirth doesn't call into question those existential issues. I went 'natural', and my experience was that labor and delivery were quick, easy, and (relatively) painless. My ACL tear hurt a lot worse . . . but I don't think that is typical, at least not listening to the women tell Delivery Horror Stories!