This was for double digit (at least) hours long missions many times per week in mountains around +/-10K ft. Brutal.. lol
The accumulated weight of every little required item needed on missions.. a perpetual source of annoyance.
I assume that's why you hear of so many veterans in their 20's and 30's with bad backs and trashed knees?
Even 50 lbs would be brutal.
I had a woman just flat out turn on her heels and walk away from me upon mention of my service (I forget how it was related to the conversation). We were having a professional conversation at a conference. I've gotten looks of disgust from students (I teach various programming classes) when I tie something back to a lesson I learned in the military. Whatever.
That stuff doesn't affect me. It's more a reflection on them than it is me.
> one of them moved to Dallas from S.V. [emphasis added]
The Bay Area area is noted for anti-military sentiment, especially given the history of UC Berkeley during the time of the Vietnam War. Naturally, some of this spills over into anti-veteran bigotry.
Apparently few people remember back in the 80's when the biggest SV employer was Lockheed Missiles and Space who developed weapons for the DOD.
More recently you can point fingers at the complacency of Facebook, Google and Yahoo who were willing participants in the PRISM scandal.
US foreign policy since then has been... murkier. I don't think the Bay Area really has a position on soldiers, so much as it opposes the current and previous few wars.
It is crazy to me that people had negative reactions to your military experience. I think it points to a certain stratification of society that people would not have family members or friends in the military to help them empathize.
As the other person said, some people I've met at conferences have ended the conversation with me or told me they think it's immoral.
One person at a major Ruby conference casually literally asked me if I enjoyed killing babies.
Many people have the craziest ideas of what the military and war is like that have no connection whatsoever to reality. It's scary that civil society understands so little of the military now that it's so small and professional.
I'd say overall it's a good thing. It's a very good thing that 99% of people will never be able to remotely comprehend what we went through.
There were 15 US casualties in Afghanistan in 2017, and 14 in 2016.
That's not a war. That's a security operation.
There were 15 US fatalities, not casualties. I'm sure there were many more casualties - many of them life changing injuries.
That's horrible man, I'm sorry somebody was that callous.
I totally believe this, and it makes me very angry.
Volunteer for service, suspend your civil rights, vow to defend the Constitution, develop the technical skills, physical ability, and mental toughness to serve in combat, and lay it all on the line for fellow soldiers -- and return to a universe of people who cannot identify Khandahar on a map, and think they are morally superior... well, I would have issues.
(FWIW I have never served in the military, I don't like the chain of top-level decisions that led to a decade of active military deployment.)
I like to think that with decades of practice, I can anticipate this reaction, or at least catch myself quickly, or Plan C: apologize. Usually all of the above.
People are not mythological creatures. But getting civil society to stumble along, on a path together, has employed no small amount of storytelling and manipulation.
As American as apple pie, I suppose.
It is much better for all of us that the ones who we have kill be convinced they’re merely doing it to protect the rest of us. You can mend those hearts. You can’t mend the cold blooded contract killers.
Killing for money doesn't require you to be a psychopath, as is evidenced by the countless paid killers in the military and swat teams today.
And then some people make some crazy assumptions when I tell them I was in the infantry for many years. I have interestingly been the target of a number of "jokes" about watching Fox News and supporting Trump, even though I'm actually strongly anti-authoritarian to a fault, and I want something like the Nordic model for the United States, and I supported Bernie Sanders in the last election. I just don't talk about politics at work, so people run wild with their assumptions. The hypocrisy runs deeeeep in the urban in-group left, man. I've honestly sometimes had an easier time talking about my time in service at Hippie Hill than I have in some tech companies. Of course this isn't information I'm eager to volunteer, obviously. But the conversation does come up sometimes, unfortunately.
And this doesn't even begin to touch on the totally disconnected delusions some people have about what the world is like in a lot of places on this Earth (and throughout history). We are so lucky to live in the time and place we're living in, the majority of people reading this.
According to that, in the 1920s the British Army "discovered that armies in the past had on the average issued the soldier between fifty-five and sixty pounds". Investigations by the British, Germans, Russians, and US into how much infantry should carry throughout the 1900s all end up around the same number of 30% of the soldier's body weight (48lbs) being the ideal load, and that the maximum load a soldier should carry shouldn't exceed 45% of their body weight (72lbs, and will degrade their combat effectiveness for the next few days no matter how physically conditioned the soldier is).