Yeah! ;-) I've always wondered about that myself, Ake. Why would anyone want to join the military? Really, the mind boggles at the thought of it. First they tell you what a good guy you are for joining up and defending your country....THEN the torture begins.

They process you like an animal for the slaughterhouse. They cut off most of your hair and make you wear bloody uncomfortable clothing. A sadistic pit bull of a sergeant puts you through basic training, doing his best to completely humiliate and break you and crush any tendency you have toward independent thought or action. You go through that hell for an extended period until you are thoroughly cowed and regimented to obey every order without hesitation. They also feed you crummy food and make you live in crummy accommodations with your fellow sufferers.

When you have survived and passed basic training they congratulate you for having been turned into a mindless, emotionally battered automaton with severe hostility issues simmering somewhere down in your tortured psyche...and then, if you're not too lucky, there will be a war somewhere that they can send you to. In that war you will face short intervals of sheer terror and long intervals of boredom in some foreign land. You will get to be hated by people who are from a different culture, and you may get to kill some of them...or be killed by some of them. You will see towns destroyed, homes burnt, young women raped, children blown up, and valuable equipment turned into scrap. You will see friends getting their arms and legs blown off. You may presently come home missing various parts of your own body, and you will find when you do that very few people care and that your society doesn't really have a lot of time to deal with your personal problems.

You might recover. You might not.

"There's No Life Like It!" (the old Canadian forces recruiting slogan...)

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In Canada, most of the young people who join the military do so because they can't find a job...and it seems like one good way to solve that problem. So they are mostly coming from economically and socially disadvantaged families or localities.

Then there are the "military families"...meaning families where there's been a long tradition of serving in the forces...and that's where you'll find quite a few of the officer types coming from, I would think. For them, it's seen as a noble career. I can understand that, from their point of view. I don't share that point of view, but I can understand it. It's like any other kind of career: if you believe in the basic concept, then you can see it as a noble career.