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Originally posted by Mike_A
reply to post by Drunkenshrew
Hm, I haven't served in the military.
Yet you make grand proclamations about how soldiers think and about what they are trained to do with no greater insight than that provided by a wikipedia article. Oh well if wiki uses the word indoctrination then my personal experiences and those of plenty of others here and outside of this site must have been a haze like dream.
And to be clear my bone of contention is with your ill informed drivel about “all natural barriers which keep soldiers from mistreating their fellow humans [being] battered down”; about recruits being drilled to “always” follow orders; about soldiers being brainwashed and all the additional reams of stereotypical nonsense found in your posts.
If you looked beyond you own stereotypes and those provided by “Platoon” or “Apocalypse Now” then you would find that soldiers run the range of personality types and are every bit the thinking, considerate people you are.
Training does so much but I'm sick of these armchair pundits claiming, with all the authority in the world and none of the experience, that it turns people into brain-dead, gung-ho, death junkies.
[edit on 10-1-2010 by Mike_A]
During World War II, US Army Brig. Gen. S. L. A. Marshall had a team of researchers study what soldiers did in battle. For the first time in history, they asked individual soldiers what they did in battle. They discovered that only 15 to 20 percent of the individual riflemen could bring themselves to fire at an exposed enemy soldier.
That is the reality of the battlefield. Only a small percentage of soldiers are able and willing to participate. Men are willing to die, they are willing to sacrifice themselves for their nation; but they are not willing to kill. It is a phenomenal insight into human nature; but when the military became aware of that, they systematically went about the process of trying to fix this "problem."
From the military perspective, a 15 percent firing rate among riflemen is like a 15 percent literacy rate among librarians. And fix it the military did. By the Korean War, around 55 percent of the soldiers were willing to fire to kill. And by Vietnam, the rate rose to over 90 percent.
Originally posted by factbeforefiction
Children and animals? C'mon this is the most asinine bunch of ridicules propaganda crap that I have seen in a very long time. What's next?.. American soldiers are torturing hello kitty dolls and telling bunnys there is no Santa Clause? Why don't you just give it a big rest and go outside and play hide and go @$%^ yourself.
Originally posted by The time lord
So don't be too against your own country and people, sometimes they do wrong but the bigger picture is that the whole army is trying to stop these harsh laws and free people while a few break the moral codes.
Maybe you are sick of armchair pundits like me, but I will reply to you anyway. It sounds ugly and unpatriotic, that the military uses psychology to turn young men and women into killers, but it is true. Most people loathe killing other people.