Why Americans like to enroll in military services despite huge risks involved?

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Accepted answer

There are many techniques used by military recruiters. You can find a list on Wikipedia. To sum up:

  • There are a lot of very poor people in the USA too. As in your county the people recruited don't have better options. This is called "poverty draft" in many articles.
  • Recruiters give you hope that they will pay for your education
  • A recruiter interviewed in the documentary Why We Fight notes that people in his profession have "the bad reputation of used car salesmen." Military defenders argue that the bad actions of a few shouldn't taint the whole. Counter-recruiters argue that high pressure on recruiters creates systemic dishonesty. The U.S. Army shut down its entire recruitment apparatus for a single day in 2005 in order to "refocus" on ethical conduct.
  • Recruiters often suggest that personal and technical skills learned in the military will improve later employment prospects in civilian life, with very similar skills utilized for nursing and electronic and mechanical repair.
  • The military inaccurately promotes a "romanticized" view of combat - using catchphrases such as honor, courage, and service - and glosses over death, injury, and civilian suffering, in order to give recruits a "soft" vision of the job.

Upvote:0

America is a country born in revolution and come of age in civil war.

Basically, it was a country that was "settled" by people who liked to fight, and who were "troublemakers" in their home country. Which is why an embryonic nation could wage a war against its mother country and win. This was true not only of the original settlers, but of most of the people that followed. Their heirs inherited their genes, and probably a number of "traditions" that sprung from that way of thinking.

There is a great gap between rich and poor in the United States. Poor people (African-Americans in inner cities, poor whites in the countryside) live in areas where there is a lot of "gang-fighting" or "brawling." For such people to serve in the military is for them to get (relatively) good pay to live a life like the one they are used to.

Many of these poor Americans are willing to "go for broke" to get rich. This do-or-die mentality was the motto of the 442nd (Japanese-American) Regimental Combat Team of Senator Daniel K. Inouye. The military (and the wild west) is in a sense, an expression of the American way of life.

As for risks, probably Patrick Henry spoke (in 1775) for many (later) Americans when he shouted: "Give me liberty or give me death."

There was a Roman saying, "dulcet et decorum est pro patria morir." (It is a sweet and beautiful thing to die for one's country.) On the surface, it seems like a form of patriotism, but is real meaning may be, "the Roman standard of living so much higher than every one else's that I'd rather be a dead Roman than say, a live (and probably enslaved) Carthaginian." As members of the richest and most powerful country in the world, Americans often feel that way.

As for Australians (to answer questions in the comments), the ethos is quite similar. The continent was initially settled by "convicts," people who liked to wield arms almost by definition. This ethos is exemplified in the following Australian song: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wild_Colonial_Boy

It's about a robber who would rather fight at the odds of one to three than to surrender (and be hanged). He gets to shoot one of the cops in exchange for his own life. Modern Australians (like modern Americans) are the descendants of such people (the survivors, that is).

Upvote:12

According to this paper from Penn's Population Studies Center, perhaps to go somewhere safer?

But it is not difficult to find conditions equivalent to combat in American cities. In Philadelphia, the death rate for black males aged 20-34 in 2002 was 4.37/1000, 11% higher than for troops in Iraq. A slight majority of the deaths were from homicide (Philadelphia Department of Public Health, n.d.)

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