US Military = Not really heroes

I could beat up every single kid in this photograph. At the same time, even.

I think we've all pretty much seen the stories in various papers at this point. Guy joins military because he heard they would pay for his college and, for whatever reason, his parents didn't exactly set the world on fire, so it basically came down to that or, you know, taking out a loan (Ooh, can't do that!). Fast forward to about 13 years later: Guy never actually quite made it to college (Do they ever?), but he's got his own little shitty career in the military and he's about 7 years from making that big Army Retirement Dollar, at which point he'll have all of the skills necessary to fill potholes in the street or, if he's lucky, work at the post office.

But, dude's on his 3rd consecutive tour of duty in Iraq. President G-Dubs Mengele had originally said he would only be over there 6 months, tops. But since then, shit went all wrong and he's running out of people dumb and unfortunate enough to send over there. His fat, ugly wife is having to deal meth and blow people just to supplement whatever she gets a month from welfare (Hmm, thought white people weren't on that), especially since the President went and cut Daddy's pay that much more since the war began. The oldest of his 7 toothless children has already run afoul of the law and the youngest has just been diagnosed with, I don't know, rickets or some shit. Anyhoo, you catch my drift.

So now he's thinking it might be best to either

A) Find some way to weasel out of having to serve anymore right here and now

or

B) Wait until his current tour, or whatever is over and go ahead opt out, or not re-enlist (I'm not sure what the actual procedure is).

From what I understand, this kind of scenario is becoming more and more common. I know Michael Moore brought it up in Fahrenheit 9/11 and featured a buncha different kids (in the literal sense) who were like, "Dude, we gotta get the fuck outta here!"

So I guess my question is, at which point do these people stop becoming "heroes" and start becoming, you know, guys like I just described? I don't think very many of them at all signed up for the military expecting to be put in harm's way and now that they have, a lot of them are looking for ways skip out on having to be in that situation. The truth of the matter is that the majority of them are really poor and unfortunate people who are being duped and exploited by President G-Dubs Mengele and his gang of War Profiteers/Criminals. If anything, I think it might be more of an insult for guys like him to call these people heroes than for me to call them a buncha saps.