Other than your writing that killing fellow humans is "neither good or bad," which is a little ridiculous, I don't see how our impressions are different.
I'm not lionizing the military or making them out to be victims. I just said that the people in the service, like the ones you met, should be thanked for taking on the responsibility of combat duty.
As a political argument I pointed out that they're largely working class, as I define it, anyway. And I was actually thinking that being rural was "underpriviliged" but that reflects a bias. I guess I'm thinking that if you take small towns in Eastern Washington and a certain (large) percentage of high-school graduates typically go into the military, those communities couldn't really absorb the extra, young workers. So, like all employers, the armed forces are not a pure "choice". After all, if it really was reasonable for working people to simply ignore an employer of hundreds of thousands, that would go a long way to making the capitalist argument that workers are purely free contractors.
boddi