Hacker News Reader

Comment by antisthenes | Hacker News Reader

If you are a soldier and find other reasons to fight rather than for the person next to you, then I wonder if you're fit to fight at all.

You know what I'll say? I won't say a goddamn word. Why? They won't understand. They won't understand why we do it. They won't understand that it's about the men next to you, and that's it. That's all it is.

View on HN

This is a really odd idea. I get that individually, in a given moment that might be why, but there has to be a reason. The military doesn't just stochastically find itself in other countries shooting people and getting shot at.

The military certainly recruits using lofty external motivations like "defending the nation" and "making the world a better place". Apparently it's not viewed as a problem, that all such high-minded bullshit is forgotten soon enough in war zones. There must be some mid-level officers who realize that this is the reason why they never win any of the wars they fight. Their men, as you say, have no other reasons to fight. In contrast, their opponents are fighting for their families, communities, and religion in addition to their comrades in arms.

I can well imagine that lofty ideals like defending democracy "for queen & country" quickly go out of the window when bullets starts whizzing past your head.

But what motivates people to sign up, go through months of training & travel to far off foreign lands to fight? Without those motivations, the desire to defend the 'person next to you' would only manifest when your homeland was under threat of invasion.

I imagine some people like being soldiers.

The best thing you could do for the men next to you is take them home.

Or you could just not become a soldier and go to begin with--then there won't be a person next to you who needs you to fight for them. But hey, why introduce logic and reason into the situation when everyone clearly wants to keep them out?

Sorry but that makes no sense from a policy point of view.

Soldiers don't make policy.

And yet I find the answer to "Why did you sign up?" to be "To defend the guy next to me!" an odd statement.

Should no one be a soldier in peacetime? Because logically, if the hypothetical guy next to you isn't getting hypothetically shot at...

It isn't why people sign up; it's why they continue to fight after the reasons they signed up have become destroyed in them.

Read up on how the WW2 US Army was recruited, trained, and sent into battle. To the degree possible, squads were kept together from boot camp to build up 'unit cohesion' based on sticking up for each other. Most people don't fight for abstract principles, they fight to stand up for their friends, and/or to not look bad in front of their friends. It's bad policy to ignore that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com