Growing up playing cod and bf games doesnt prepare you for any reality

Americans in particular are clueless, war is a game to them and it’s always fought on somebody else’s soil. They need it to come to them for once, maybe if it’s their homes on fire they will finally get it

I'm a veteran with combat experience and people look at me like i'm a crazy person when I advocate against wars. It's really hard to get people to realize that someone who's been to war (and isn't a psychopath) doesn't want anyone to have to go to war. It breaks everything and everyone.

This is why the US ditched the draft after the Vietnam War.

The only time we ever had a meaningful anti-war movement was when people were forced to send their own kids to die. Having a "volunteer" force eliminates that. The excuse is always that people signed up for it, and people just ignore that it's the poor and minorities who are still effectively pressed into military duty due to manufactured lack of opportunity.

I have a brother who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, and while he's always been an absolute chud, it was a very radicalizing experience. He came back with PTSD and then started "self-medicating" with meth. He made our family's lives a living hell, like we were 24/7 911 operators, always waiting for the day he was going to act on his paranoid delusions. He finally went out to some innocent family's house with a gun and pulled on the cops who'd followed him and got shot in the arm. He's recovered somewhat, but still has relapses.

These experiences are the most traumatic thing that has ever happened to me or any of my family. Still it pales in comparison to what he experienced, which in turn pales in comparison to what the people living in those countries experienced. My dumbass brother chose to go over there, but they didn't choose to be born there, and the casualty rates were so much higher for them.

People look at casualty rates (if they bother to) and imagine that that's the full price of war. But my brother isn't on any of those casualty lists, because his wounds were "only" psychological. The true scale of harm is literally incomprehensible.

I remember one night that I had come to visit and I went out to eat with my parents, thinking, hoping, that for one night things could be peaceful. Then the texts started coming in. Another crisis, more schizophrenic accusations, veiled threats, reading into every little thing. I remember the tears streaming down my mother's face as she tried not to make a scene at the restaurant.

Whenever I think about any of the people responsible for those wars, I take what I felt in that moment and multiply by a hundred, a thousand, a hundred thousand, by as much as I'm capable of, and it's still not enough.

The government and media do such a good job sheltering the public from what war really means. So many people just treat it like a movie or a video game because they know that more than they know about reality. The media rarely covers the human cost, especially of the other side. And so when I come on to Lemmy and vent about how war is bad and we should build schools and hospitals instead of tanks and bombs, people call me a tankie and accuse me of having some secret agenda. Because real life action movies are so cool, who could possibly have a problem with them?

US just haven't suffered any big wars on their soil for too long and lost the touch of true misery replacing it with trans issues and shit.

When the Germans invaded my country in 1940, someone in the street I currently live in was standing behind the window, looking at the approaching soldiers. (I live real close to the border). The Germans, upon seeing him, shot him and he died right there. There's no memorial, no history book where this guy is mentioned. I only know about this through oral history, my grandfather told my dad and he told me. History is always about the leaders and the armies, never about the civilians.

R/combatfootage is where I sent the blow hards yelling for a US civil war last year.

And if we do war, the first to go are the young and poor.

People always think stuff is just fairy tales and sing along songs until they're hit with it.

There are exceptions though. But for most it's true.

"You people of the South don't know what you are doing! This country will be drenched in blood and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war, you don't know what you're talking about. War is a terrible thing!"

An oddly prescient quote for our time, I would say.

It’s easy to think that people in the past were just different. That they could handle the brutalities of the past in a way we don’t.

The truth is that they were all humans just like us. They were just born in a different age.

You can spend your life learning from all kinds of directions and still have it throttle your heart some days.

The more you know, and the better something is presented in ways of your understanding and feeling, the better the effect.

I'd argue that a movie could be crafted in two ways (and even more). Could you feel sorry for both parties, if you watched them both?
I've seen comments like "Yeah I know X is bad, but I'm confused should I feel bad for them or not" before.

To institute a draft, Congress would have to update the Military Selective Service Act with specific references to the current conflict, and then the president would have to sign it...

Or, apparently, Trump could just bypass all of that with an Executive Order, because why bother with following the law? Also, it seems, he could make the ages anything he wants, whereas now it's ages 18 to 25.