" we judge the merits of military service on the basis that these individuals volunteered to make tremendous sacrifices in service to a noble ideal: our Constitution, and the concept it embodies (a self-governed people)."
If that were true, policemen and firemen, who face danger and death every day, and teachers, who have low pay for doing a very vital social task should be getting equal or greater respect. This was precisely my point.
The assumption that everyone in the US army joined up to serve the Constitution etc and is universally motivated by "sacrifice" is very suspect. This maybe true for a minority, or for people who join up in a national emergency or just after an attack on the country, say Pearl Harbour or 9/11, impelled by patriotism.
Plenty of people join because they want a steady job, because they can't pay for college, want a fast track to citizenship, want something to belong to, are subject to a draft, (as for the Vietnam War ) etc. Why should someone who joins the military for such reasons ( and I suspect those are the majority) be worthy of a special respect denied to (say) a fireman or a nurse?
The notion of respecting someone for an assumed intent, and not any objective metric of success or competence or totally independent of morality or political view point is highly suspect and naive.
The Japanese soldiers at Nanking, though not all volunteers, were people who respected their political system highly and were willing to sacrifice their lives for the Emperor and Japan. The willingness to sacrifice their lives for a cause their society deemed just doesn't make them automatically worthy of respect, or any less war criminals, as some of the Japanese hardliners would insist.
To quote a fictional character, "A knight is a sword with a horse. The rest, the vows and the sacred oils and the lady’s favors, they’re silk ribbons tied round the sword. Maybe the sword’s prettier with ribbons hanging off it, but it will kill you just as dead".
A soldier is a man with a gun whose job, stripped to the essence, is to kill. What distinguishes him from a mafia hitman is that society deems his work to be necessary, and he is part of an organization subject to socially approved rules and regulations, and he is trained to do his job.
So far so good. One can agree it is a necessary job, a (sometimes) dangerous one, without choosing to automatically respect every soldier just because one assumes he sacrificed a lot to "serve the nation". I suspect that the selfless "sacrificers" motivated by a "higher cause" are a minority in any army.
And a description like, "individuals volunteered to make tremendous sacrifices in service to a noble ideal" would fit a policeman perfectly, if you happen to assume that every policeman chose his job only because he wanted to dedicate his life to justice and protecting his fellow citizens. And yet we don't expect random people to thank every policemen "for his service".
And with that, I exit this overlong thread. Thank you for your extensive reply. It has helped me clarify my thinking.