>But don't tell me that there are no sadistic assholes in uniform. I
>was there.
Charles Willeford was in the Army and the Air Force for 20 years. He was a highly decorated soldier in WWII and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery. He stayed in for so long because he said the job gave him plenty of time to write. After he retired he became an English professor and crime writer. He said one of the themes he wanted to explore in his novels was what ex-soldiers are capable of when they return to civilian life. This is from an interview:
>"A good half of the men you deal with in the army are psychopaths.
>There's a pretty hefty overlap between the military population and
>the prison population, so I knew plenty of guys like Junior in Miami
>Blues and Troy in Sideswipe. Like some of these other tankers [i.e.
>tank crew] I knew used to swap bottles of liquor with infantrymen in
>exchange for prisoners, and then they'd shoot 'em for fun. I used to
>say 'Goddammit, will you stop shooting those prisoners!' and they
>would just shrug and say 'Hey, they'd shoot us if they caught us!'.
>Which was true - they used to shot any tankers they captured. So
>that sort of behaviour became normal to them, and I used to wonder
>'What's gonna happen when these guys go back into civilian life?'
>You can't just turn it off and go to work in a 7-11. If you're good
>with weapons or something in the army, you're naturally gonna do
>something with weapons when you get out, whether it's being a cop or
>a criminal. These guys learnt to do all sorts of things in the army
>which just weren't considered normal in civilian life."
http://www.noexit.co.uk/willeford_somethoughts.htm