The thing that bugs me is that there's no middle. People appear to either be the type of asshole OP mentioned or they idolize soldiers in an equally terrifying way. I view the military as a job. It's not a job I would want, but there's tons of jobs I don't want. In peace time it's pretty effective at helping people move up the economic ladder. In war time it provides trained killers to take out the bad guys. I don't say that flippantly, that's an important and necessary part of maintaining our civilization. Any beef I might have about things the military might be doing at any given time is better directed at political leadership than the boots on the ground.

Very good point. I think this is objectivization -- exactly the sort of cognitive glitch when I encounter people who look very different from what I am used to.

I like to think that with decades of practice, I can anticipate this reaction, or at least catch myself quickly, or Plan C: apologize. Usually all of the above.

People are not mythological creatures. But getting civil society to stumble along, on a path together, has employed no small amount of storytelling and manipulation.

As American as apple pie, I suppose.

There’s some moral hazard in treating self-sacrifice-and-killing as merely a job. Idealizing what warriors do on your behalf (imagine it was actually to defend your people not the interests of an empire) is an important way that humans deal with the act of killing. I don’t think you want cold blooded killers who do it for a meager paycheck, as opposed to the glory and heroism of defending others.

I would rather cold blooded killers who do it for the paycheck than to the cheers of the coliseum.

No, you do not want to reintegrate a half million cold blooded sociopathic murderers with no regard for human life back into society. No no no. You don’t know what you’re saying.

It is much better for all of us that the ones who we have kill be convinced they’re merely doing it to protect the rest of us. You can mend those hearts. You can’t mend the cold blooded contract killers.

We can't even reintegrate the ones supposedly doing it to protect us. If we, the general population, stopped participating in this delusion that they're protecting us, we'd likely send them out to do less killing in the first place.

Killing for money doesn't require you to be a psychopath, as is evidenced by the countless paid killers in the military and swat teams today.

Interview those paid killers and find out why they do it. If my personal experience as a warrior doesn’t convince you maybe hearing it directly from them will.

If you're suggesting fewer people would sign up to be paid killers if we didn't lavish them with hero worship, then I'm okay with that. In fact, I'll go so far as to state that as an intended consequence. The other, larger component, is that the false dichotomy between hero worship and villainization robs the general public of the ability to rationally consider what our military is doing.