Support our Students?

A few days back I saw someone on a forum asking why the nineteen-year-old in Afghanistan was more worthy of support than the nineteen-year-old in university. As the forum was one of the many where political and religious debate are discouraged, the topic was quickly shut down after my, ah, response. Let's call him Jack. Jack is from the UK, so there's some cultural differences. As a more moderate type explained to me in private messages after I went after Jack with both barrels, Europe lacks a lot of the "Military Worship" that the US has. He said it's only recently become socially unacceptable to spit on men in uniform.
I think you can imagine my reaction. "Ungrateful pissants" was only the start. I think that might provide fodder for another post, but not today.

I'll go more into my reasoning here, and I'll pull experiences off my own life. I was, as matter of fact, a nineteen-year-old in college and a twenty-year-old in Iraq. I had my twenty-first birthday in a guard tower. The sons of bitches on duty with me, having found out my birthdate from my section chief, sang "Happy Birthday" over the radio. Bastards. I digress.

Let's imagine, if you will, two paths a life may have taken. Picture a nineteen-year-old male, fresh out of high school. We'll call him Tim. Let's pretend this is before the economy tanked, say around '07, so Tim here has actual job prospects. On the one hand, our man Tim could choose to go to college, get a degree and work in some cubicle until he dies of old age. Retirement, as we're beginning to realize, is just not gonna happen. On the other hand, our man Tim could choose to enlist, go to war, and if he comes back he might just come back fucked up in the head.
If he were me, he was fucked up in the head to begin with so it was just drops in the bucket.

Let's say Tim goes to college. He works part-time at some soul-killing minimum-wage job like all college students should, and the most he gets out of it is a real motivation to do well in school so he doesn't have to keep doing that same soul-killing minimum-wage job. He does fairly well in his classes, not quite as well as he did in high school but well enough. When he wraps up his time in college he's twenty-three, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, ready to start a career in whatever field he studied for.
Jack seems to think that our man Tim deserves our support, morally and financially, because Tim is studying art or history or engineering or whatever. I disagree. Tim is studying, and the only real, direct beneficiary of Tim's studying is Tim. Tim's parents might enjoy a more comfortable retirement, if they have one, if he does well, but overall he's really the only person who benefits from his college education.

Let's take a look at the other path, and say that Tim decides to enlist. He joins the Army, signs up for a combat arms MOS. Take your pick, my personal preference was 13B. Sucker that I am, my day-to-day wound up looking more like an 11B. Our man Tim, though, wraps up basic training with about four to six months to train with his unit before he deploys over to Iraq. There's still and insurgency there, and overall Tim has a bad time. He manages to avoid catching any serious injuries, but he sees some stuff of the sort that you just can't unsee. He has some buddies blown up, but doesn't get into any firefights himself. He picks up physical and mental scars, and the deployment changes him in ways most people simply can't understand. When Tim finishes his first four-year contract he's twenty-three, but most people think he's closer to thirty. Some good has come of his time in the Army, he's stronger in mind and fitter in body than he's ever been, but overall he comes away damaged. His job prospects are actually pretty lousy, as many employers don't want to risk hiring a veteran who has the dreaded PTSD. He didn't acquire any job skills in the Army, at least none documented on paper, so the best he can really hope for is that someone he knows is looking to hire somebody. Tim comes to the realization that while civilians will smile to his face and thank him for his service, he can't find too many willing to pull the knife out of his back.
Jack seems to think that this version of Tim isn't particularly worthy of support, being that all he did was go over to some foreign country and pick fights with people Jack's pretty sure would leave us alone if we'd just leave them alone. What Jack doesn't seem to understand is that when Tim joined the Army, he didn't join some mercenary outfit. It's called the service for a reason. Just like policemen and firefighters, servicemen provide a fundamental necessity for modern life. The problem is that we do our job too well, and there are a lot of people in the Free World who take their liberty for granted. There are a lot of people who fail to understand that freedom is not the natural order of things, that it takes a constant, active struggle - both politically and militarily - for a nation to remain free.

Remind me sometime, and I'll have to go into just what freedom is. I've had plenty of time to think on tower guard.