Seriously.

You had to score ridiculously high on your initial Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, You had to do well on the Defense Language Proficiency Test (The hardest test I've ever taken in my life, bar none), You had to be able to pass background checks, Airborne physical, and psych screenings.....just to get your foot in the door. The requirements got much more stringent after that.

The other job I had would take anyone with a pulse and a trigger finger.

Recruiter: "Could you spell your name for me please son?"

Potential Soldier: "Uhhhhhhh.....ummmmmmm......uhhhhhh..."

Recruiter: "Close enough, we'll give you a stinger missle."

Now, the intersting thing about this is that in both jobs, I worked with guys who were litterally brilliant. Probably could have been CEO's of fortune 100 companies, research scientists, heart surgeons...you name it. If they had just chosen a different path in life.

Also in both jobs, I worked with guys who couldn't tie their own boots without proper instruction. In fact, I worked with a guy in Germany with a Masters Degree who it literally took an entire week to teach him how to turn a certain knob on a weapon control system properly. I worked with an Military Intelligence guy who could not for the life of him convert grid to magnetic north even when given a declination diagram. <---That, by the way, is a task even the newest infantry private does all the time.

Yeah, I would say there were slightly more mouth-breathing dolts in the job with the lower entry standards, but not nearly as many as you would think.

I think that overall civillians have a very wrong impression of what members of the military are like, what they do everyday, and who they are. It's not like the movies. Soldiers, Marines, Airmen, and yes, even sailors ;-) are real people. They truly are a cross sample of society. I had a friend at Bragg who was the papered son of a multi-millionare. I had two friends in Hawaii who grew up on reservations. One of them, without running water and for most of his life, electricity. I knew a feamle Lieutenant that was probably the most brilliant mathmatician I've met in my life....and she was a commo officer. I knew a tobacco chewing black man from a no stoplight town in Texas, a guy from Idaho who grew up in a funeral home, Mexican gang-bangers, spoiled nintendo generation ravers, brothers of minor celebraties, gays and lesbians, drug users, petty thiefs, preachers kids, bible thumpers, white trash, black power advocates, democrats and republicans.

Some joined for college money, some to get away from their home towns, but almost universally the one thing that binds them all is a belief in the piece of paper called the constitution.

I can remember how surprised I was in basic training to find out that it wasn't really like Full Metal Jacket. It's one of those things, that until you're there, I don't think you can ever really understand.

The point is....everyone is there. There are people who are inclined to violence, rape, mayhem, anarchy, etc. It's not the majority though, it's not even a lot of them. Most of the soldiers I worked with are "good" people, who cry when they encounter a starving child, who laugh at a good joke, who are scared and homesick when they deploy overseas.

Bravado aside, nobody wants to be deployed in a combat zone. Those who do, are statistcally insignifcant, not a representation of the entire military. They do it though because they believe in the mechanism that created America. For all it's flaws, all politics aside, whether you believe in them or not, a soldier believes in the system which got him there, and as such, has a duty to defend that system.

I've said it before...I've been on three major "real world" deployments. Not one of them did I believe we had any business getting involved with before I went. One I changed my mind on as soon as I was there. We needed to be there. One, the jury is still out on. I can make arguments both ways. One I don't think we should have messed with at all, and I never will. If I was asked today to go back and do all three again, I would. Because I made a choice to submit to the decisions of those elected who run the military. It's the process that I defended, not the decisions of the men who made them.