10/14/2026
Something I've noticed after years of being around the veteran community, particularly guys who pursued infantry, special operations, and other combat roles, is how many of them experienced some form of abuse growing up. It raises an interesting question. How many of us joined the military because we wanted to fight, vs how many joined because we were looking for something we never had growing up?
Consider a kid raised in a home where love was conditional, authority was unpredictable, and suffering was daily. He learns early that nobody is coming to save him, that weakness gets punished, and his value comes from what he can endure.
Then he joins the military and suddenly everything he learned growing up makes sense. Tolerating pain earns respect, sacrifice earns acceptance, and obedience earns approval. For perhaps the first time in his life, he's surrounded by men who would die for him. The bonds in the Lance Corporal underground during the heart of the GWOT (2005 era) were the moments Hollywood tries to glorify. But there's a catch.
The institution providing that brotherhood had demands. As the deployments stack up he begins to recognize the incompetence, politics, and failures of the leadership he was taught to trust. Eventually, he realizes that his loyalty to the men beside him and to the institution commanding them, aren't necessarily the same thing.
So he gets out and feels the brotherhood, the structure, and sense of purpose disappear. Now he's back where he started, searching for belonging, only this time he's carrying the conflicts of war with him.
In the documentary, In Waves and War, one of the veterans asks a disturbing question "If we eliminated childhood abuse, would we even have a military?"
What if some of the toughest men in our military weren't born looking for a fight? What if they were boys who learned that suffering was the price of being loved, and the military was the first place that made their suffering feel like it meant something?
For some, the military gave them the brotherhood they never had, then sent them home to figure out how to live without it.
