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Military recruiting has to come to you because you can't just stroll onto a base and check out the place

Nope, that's not it at all. They have actual recruitment offices. They go out to advertise and coerce, not because it's the only way people can join.

Just like how you can't go into an airport so they do airshows to give you a glimpse of what goes on inside the fence

You most definitely CAN go into an airport. I've done it many times myself. I found that it's usually a requisite for transatlantic travel.

Kidding aside, airshows are the Top Gun movies in person: it's all about promotion to make it easier to coerce people into joining and also PR so people will focus less on the killing because they focus on the entertainment.

You can't be this gullible, Shirley.

There are scummy recruiters

Yeah, that comes with the territory of convincing people to kill people.

but also those that are very honest about what it can/can't provide

Also about the cost? The killing? The high risk of crippling lifelong mental and/or physical harm?

I bet no recruiters talk about that part.

Many use it to get travel, training and experience the private sector would never pay an unproven rookie to get

True, in a way. For all its profiteering, the private sector usually don't hire people to kill and be killed in faraway countries for no good reason.

Unless it's one of the mercenary companies euphemistically referred to as "military contractors" like for example Blackwater/Xe Services/Academi/Constellis Holdings. That's one company changing their name twice to run from their well-earned reputation as torturers and mass murderers for hire and then merging with another mercenary company.

Then in a few years they leave and move on to better things

Unless of course their time in the military have left them permanently physically and/or mentally disabled. Kinda hard to get a good job when you have severe PTSD to the point where it affects your cognitive function and are missing limbs.

Even MORE difficult if you're dead.

And honesty is the best policy

Not one the military favors, though.

The US military does good and bad

With the bad outweighing the good thousandfold. Apart from all the harm to US soldiers, it kills a shitload of innocent people every year, tortures people, enforces US imperialist hegemony and otherwise is used to directly and politically harm other countries across the world and is the worst emitter of CO2 of all organizations in the world.

The world, including the US, would be MUCH better off if the US had only domestic forces that never leave the country.

but they sure as hell aren't the Russians forcing unequipped, untrained kids out to die over a trench.

Sure, but still atrocious. Just because worse exists doesn't make an awful thing good, no matter how much the DNC leadership tries to convince the world that it does.

If you're about it be about it, just know what you will be signing up for. Don't let them choose a career for you

Easier said than done. As I said before, they're coercing and tricking people into significant choices that they wouldn't have made voluntarily without being influenced.