Originally Posted by Replaced_Texan
I was thinking about this the other day when the discussion first came up. My brother has more kills than my husband does. Like a gagillion Texans, my brother grew up hunting. Mainly ducks, geese and dove, but he is an excellent shot and had no problem whatsoever shooting and killing birds in the sky or snakes in the water or sick looking rodents that could be rabid. My husband grew up in urban and suburban Ohio, and he didn't start shooting until he joined the Marines during the first Gulf War. Aside from spiders and the mice he fed to his snakes, I don't think he's ever killed anything on purpose. But he was good at shooting. Though he didn't go to sniper school, had his unit gone anywhere, he would have been the guy they sent high to cover everyone if there were no other snipers around. He never had to.
I'm pretty sure that my husband wouldn't have had a problem at the time shooting and killing people to protect his unit. Not god, not country, not to defend democracy or something abstract, but the guys he went in with. He was very well trained / indoctrinated to work as a team with the people around him, and he was good at his job, which included being an excellent shot. Had he stayed in longer, I have no doubt that eventually he would have shot and killed someone and maybe even a lot of someones. And I think he would be relatively ok with it.
I think my brother would have had a major problem with it, though I guess if he had to, he could/would. He'd be a lot more messed up about it later, though, at least outwardly.
At any rate, I think my husband was a 19 year old who had no interest whatsoever in college and saw the Marines as something he could do instead. He'll tell you now that he was a horrible Marine, though I've never gotten the impression that he regrets it, and he's still immensely proud of getting through Parris Island and then being Force Recon. For someone who hates being told what to do or how to dress and is insanely stubborn, I sometimes can't believe he did it. I suspect a lot of adolescent anger, resentment, and desire to prove people wrong did a lot to drive him. I think also the adrenaline rush had a lot to do with it. He loved jumping out of planes and repelling and using zip lines and stuff like that. Plus he loved playing with the toys. I can't even count the number of times we've watched an action adventure movie where he's done whatever the people on screen are doing.
Now, he absolutely HATES the fetishization of the military, and he squirms whenever he hears the words "thank you for your service." I mentioned recently how I thought it'd be funny if he and my brother went to a gun range to compare efficiency, and he said it sounded like something that would support the NRA so he had no interest. But I still think he would not hesitate to kill someone if we were in legitimate danger.
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