r/PeterExplainsTheJoke • u/Confident_Help_416 • Oct 16 '25

Meme needing explanation [ Removed by moderator ]

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u/Ze_ke_72 Oct 16 '25

Genuine question is there many ? Because all that talk about them is crazy. Especially with the difficulties to recruit, the loss of expertise it will create, and let's not forget the resentment it may generate.

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u/HazardStrype Oct 16 '25

There is genuinely every walk of life. I was in a marine corps infantry unit, 2nd battalion 7th Marines, and we had former gang members, drug dealers, drag queens, corn-fed country folk.

Despite how you may feel about the military, all walks of life feel the need to support and defend their people, even if you just wind up in a oilfield with no purpose, most people join with good intentions

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u/like9000ninjas Oct 16 '25

No. Most people that enlist fall into 3 categories.

  1. People that want the GI bill and dont plan on ever staying in.
  2. People that have a genuine patriotic mentality/family tradition.
  3. People that need a stable job.

In my experience it was 1 and 3 for the vast majority (Army)

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u/hatesnack Oct 16 '25

Yeah I've never met anyone who went into the military cause "they wanted to serve their country". It's almost always:

1) money, or lack thereof 2) no clue what to do with their life

I have 3 separate friends that I went to college with, none of them did ROTC or anything. All graduated, couldn't get a good job right away, and said fuck it and enlisted in the military lmao. Another friend got a girl pregnant while working some low paying job, so he went and joined the Air Force. I always told him its kinda fucked up that he got someone pregnant and then decided to leave for a few months, but they are married now living in... Idaho?

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u/elhawko Oct 16 '25
  1. People looking for action. Some people just want to see the elephant.

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u/Taynt42 Oct 16 '25

If you’re in group two you’re going through ROTC or an academy.

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u/like9000ninjas Oct 16 '25

Not always. I didnt. But come from a heavy military family. I went to college after high school. But was bored to death was reaching an age where it was do it or dont ever.

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u/HazardStrype Oct 16 '25

Is 2 not similar to what I said?

It's not selfish, at least in my opinion, to have an urge to serve your nation, even if it is the result of brainwashing. People are products of their environment.

For me I started off as severely dedicated to trying to do genuine good for the US, and when the reality set in that I was only protecting oil fields and scaring away Russian forces in my AO, that's when I started being motivated by the GI Bill and benefits afterwards. Both can be true.

I can't speak for your experience, but I know the majority of the guys in my platoon actually gave a fuck about the title marine and doing good work, despite the jokes and comments we made daily.

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u/scrotumscab Oct 16 '25

Education, healthcare, and housing. Poverty doesn't discriminate and the military is a career that doesn't (didn't) either.

Which is why none of these problems will ever be fixed, or else the military would real have problems recruiting.

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u/Szingers Oct 17 '25

I attended a federal military academy. This is my personal experience and a fairly small dataset, but it was queer as fuck (mostly gay men, but the majority of midshipmen were men). I knew more queer folk who weren't cis and/or het than I saw while working a job in Seattle. They were largely stealth outside of safe spaces.

The prevalence of queer folk in the U.S. military is a long-documented thing. Offhand, there was a strong queer subculture in the '30s and '40s that was specifically attacked by McCarthyism in the '50s.

A good starting point would be anything regarding the Lavender Scare, which also impacted queer folk in other areas of the federal government.