Who Signs Up to Fight? Makeup of U.S. Recruits Shows Glaring Disparity

[Aristus]

2. Mine, too.

What a bunch of yahoos. Every time they went swaggering about town in their cowboy gear (always spotless and well-pressed, looking like they'd never ridden a horse or gotten dusty in their lives) I cringed a little, sure that the Germans thought this was "American culture."

This was the late 80's & early 90's. While the rest of we red-blooded American young men were understandably going ga-ga over Whitney Houston and Jodie Whately, the rednecks were tut-tutting and wagging their fingers at white guys who admired 'n****r' women.

They polluted the air of the barracks with their incessant, lame-brained country music, and polluted every flat surface with their chewing tobacco spit-cans.

One of them roomed with my best friend from tanker school, who is Filipino, and he put up Confederate flags all over the place. My friend was hurt and irritated by this, until I started sneaking into the room when Rebel-head was gone, and leaving anti-confederate messages on Post-It notes stuck to his flags. My friend thanked me for this, and we are still friends and in touch to this day.

The Southern boys (I was born and raised in the South, but never felt any kind of kinship with the blockheads I've just described...) were always beating their chests about how 'patriotic' they were, blissfully unaware that the region they championed so incessantly took up arms against the very nation they claimed to love.

The military is the perfect environment for such empty-headed aggression, anti-intellectualism, and provincialism.