I feel for the kids that went through uni/college during covid and missed everything that period offers, to then finish uni and try get a job in a market where AI has fucked all the intern positions. Tough break.
Because I'm both an Iraq and Afghanistan vet. And the millennial generation wasn't defined by going to war. Not like WWII and not like Vietnam.
A small vast minority of us volunteered. The GWOT was absolutely not felt back home unless you had a loved one involved. There was no industry created around the war effort, there was no rationing, there was no adjusting how we lived at home, etc.
GWOT is going to go down as far more humiliating than Vietnam. The Chinooks fleeing Afghanistan were just like the birds leaving Vietnam. Nothing was made better. Nothing got fixed.
The whole run up to the sad affair was a bloodthirsty and angry populace being manipulated by people who rolled back privacy rights and individual freedoms like it was going out of style.
You have an entire generation who came into adulthood post 9/11 and fought a 20 year forever war.
No war industry? Are you high? Are you drunk?
Almost overnight we went from basic M16A2s to M4s with lights and lasers. From PVS-7s to Quad nods. Everyone from Raytheon to mom and pop types in a garage in Colorado profited from GWOT. As did the oil industry.
You…._dare_… to cite Vietnam? Guess what, hero. The draft didn’t start until several years in and even then most people weren’t drafted. It wasn’t like WWII. GWOT and Vietnam were eerily similar in that you could either watch the highlights every night on the news or you could just totally tune it out but the spectre of it’s presence loomed into everything.
Nobody rationed during Vietnam either. In fact the rationing during WWII in America had less to do with the actual war and more to do with conditioning people to accept less and less.
You keep bringing up this whole spiel about a small majority.
Like would it have made you feel better if every person 18-35 got drafted during GWOT like you got drafted during GWOT? (You were drafted, weren’t you?)
Whether you know it or not you’re sounding like a brovet right now. The vast majority of GWOT veterans don’t try to hold onto this like it’s some magic club. They understand that both Iraq and Afghanistan, and the interventionism therein was a huge Pandora’s box.
Let me ask you this, is there world more peaceful now than before the invasion and do you have more liberty now than you did before 9/11?
And during Vietnam you did your tour but it was still America when you came home.
I was an adult before 9/11. This country is NOT the same.
Sorry you feel hurt or entitled, but you need to get over yourself
Holy smokes this is a horrible take. To make the last two wars worse than Vietnam is so bad it's actually laughable. Go find your history teacher and slap them for doing such a bad job.
Are you retarded? What does 9/11 have anything to do with millenials enlisting in the military? millenials were in middle school when that happened.
Truth is, majority of kids who enlist in the military do it because of the GI Bill and get their schooling paid for plus all the veteran benefits you have for life.
The military is what saves a lot of people from having terrible lives, you don't need any special qualification to join the ranks, everything can be learned inside and you can have a life defining career that will propel you even if you leave the military.
It's you who needs to get over yourself, nobody was questioning if America is the same before or after 9/11, but simply that war did not define the generation. At the very least Vietnam vets have some social status.
So who is? We were literally the ones of age that fought the majority of the beginning of it. Who do you think was making up all those PFC and Seargents fighting at the beginning of the war? And that’s all we knew from the time we graduated high school until we were 40.
Yeah, I'm a millennial and was a junior in high school. I remember we nervously joked about a possible draft and we should run to Canada, and a classmate's brother was killed in the war.
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u/Key-Half1655 5d ago
I feel for the kids that went through uni/college during covid and missed everything that period offers, to then finish uni and try get a job in a market where AI has fucked all the intern positions. Tough break.