I don’t mean this in an argumentative way, but you seem to be very insightful and well spoken, so I’ll go ahead and ask.

You wrote:

“As a vet myself who has seen active service, I'm all for people protesting, taking a knee, doing whatever they feel they need to, in a (mostly) non violent way. But only because of the people who have served and died, and continue to serve and die, so those people can continue to protest.”

I really struggle with that last sentence. I’m not any-military at all, but when people say things like those that died are the reason we can protest (or are free, or can sleep easy at night, etc.), I really have a hard time pinning down actual examples of this.

WW2 was arguably the ultimate “good” war for defeating the Nazi regime, but it’s hard to believe that the German or Japanese militaries posed an existential threat to the United States. Germany couldn’t defeat Great Britain; they were not going to conquer the US. Regardless though, the sacrifice to defeat fascism was real and there is no discounting that.

After WW2, we can look at Korea and Vietnam, both which were civil wars and neither posed any real threat to the US. In fact we lost the Vietnam war, including over 40k dead Americans, and there was no catastrophic expansion of communism.

The Gulf War had a very limited goal, which was achieved, but once again, Iraq was not a threat to the US.

The 2003 Iraq war proved to be an absolute disaster and famously, no WMDs were ever found. It’s generally excepted that by this time Hussein’s regime was a shell of what it had been in the 80’s. We caused a ton of chaos and lost 4k Americans.

The Afghanistan invasion was certainly popular at the time, but much like Vietnam, the “enemy” is currently ruling the country after the loss of thousands of American lives. I think future historians will look back and conclude that while action probably needed to be taken to distrust Al-Qaeda in parts of Afghanistan, the decision to overthrown the government was an unnecessary blunder. Even on the worst hours of 9/11, there was no threat of the US falling.

I ask all of this because if the military sacrifice is the reason we can all protest, then it implies that without it, we would not have those freedoms. But I don’t really see any examples that I can point to that says - “without those sacrifices, we would not have the freedoms we enjoy.” The reality is, we’re a massive country, the richest in the world, with only two friendly neighbors, and two massive oceans that isolate is from any aggression.

Thoughts?