Absolution doesn't exist. You've done a hell of a lot more than most of the people here who can only pretend to have moral purity because they do nearly nothing at all. You've actually helped the world and many people in your life in what for them was likely to be a life-defining way.

I know I'll never talk you out of your guilt, but I think you should feel proud.

That's more or less how I see it. Leaving with a full understanding that war is a racket, the empire is irredeemably evil, and that anyone who joins is probably setting themselves up for something terrible. It's a point of commonality I can use as a weapon against flag-fuckers and little big men to undermine both their nationalism and masculinity. My skillset as a combat medic is practical elsewhere and I can teach really specialised concepts to comrades in left militias. If someone says they're considering joining I start with a conversation about my old patients' medical records. The environmental poisoning and the dysfunction of the VA after you're exposed to XX carcinogens the military will lie about until most of the victims are dead. Then it's the statistics for SA and suicide. Then it's the reality of those statistics and how corrupt NCIS and Big Navy are. I finish it with detailing how threadbare it is, how incapable it is as a result of that, and how it can't hope to win a war in any kind of meaningful way. There are countless veterans watching the retreats from their wheelchairs and they all have to ask if it was worth their injuries to hand over Afghanistan to the Taliban as if nothing happened.