I guess I understand.

Many of you are civilians, have been civilians your whole life, and have almost no actual experience with the military other than the stereotypes you see on the screen.

In fact, the Military is one of the last few safe stereotypes.

Hollywood doesn't need to know anything about the military to include the military in TV and movies. Privates are robots who shout YESSER!, Sergeants are PTSD ridden drunks and sadists (and usually have some type of incurable venereal disease which keeps them out of combat which is why they are sadists), junior officers are bumbling ernest dolts, and senior officers are almost always engaged in some nefarious conspiracy to something something gazpacho. And they're all just itching to overthrow democracy and probably kill a lot of people in the process because there ain't nothing the boys in uniform love more than killin' -- unless it's stealing boxes of gold from Saddam's palace. It's always the same.

That's what you think of, isn't it?

That's why when I wrote the previous piece about not panicking over the military, more than 500 of you wrote screaming to remind me about Kent State. KENT STATE, MAN, WHAT ABOUT THAT? WHAT ABOUT THAT, JIM?! OMG WHAT ABOUT KENT STATE? And what about it? It was 46 years ago and you actually had to go back that far to find an example of poorly trained, poorly led, second string troops from a vastly different military and a vastly different culture to panic over and the stereotype is so ingrained that you didn't even realize that you couldn't find any other examples post Vietnam.

In reality, like everything else, things are bit different from Hollywood. (They were a bit different even back then, and they are vastly more so now).

But still, that's what you're thinking.