Thank you for clarifying your take on this. As previously noted, I've sworn in some dozens or hundreds of recruit applicants, and tried in most cases to get a sense of why they were signing up. Assuming they weren't lying to me, it was a varied mixture of steady paycheck, my home life sucks, training/education, serve my country, the judge told me it was this or jailtime, go slaughter foreigners, etc. (Okay, no one ever actually told me that last one, and the second-to-last one we actively pursued and tried to negate). Via neat rhetoric, you've neatly put every servicemember into either the "mercenary" or "fanatic" column, but in the same way that everyone that has sex is either a "prostitute" or a "nymphomaniac".
