Zepp's Last Stand (1979)
reprints.longform.org
reprints.longform.org
You cannot send people to die against their will in a war that makes no sense whatsoever. WWI is considered the worst war in history, both sides deploying weapons that were later just flat out banned as immoral, and drove insane a man that later became the Chancellor of Germany... and we know how that turned out.
We've seen the photos of soldiers suffering from being shell shocked in the trenches. All of them came home broken, just in different ways. We had no right to ever ask that of them.
And what is the use of a soldier that objects? In the end, he will not follow orders, he will hesitate, and he will die.
War has no place in modern society, and we knew that 102 years ago. We knew it 77 years ago. We knew it 66 years ago. We knew it 60 years ago. We knew it 26 years ago. We knew it 15 years ago. We knew it 13 years ago. And since we invented a new enemy, Isis, we will know it again in the next few years.
We keep wasting lives, we keep wasting money, and we keep the military industrial complex alive when it should be put down like a rabid dog. The enemy of today is not a foreign country ready to attack us: the enemy of today is civil unrest, the enemy of today is the cost of education, and the cost of living, and the cost of having such a broken inefficient system throw everyone under the fucking bus.
And you know what most people are doing right now? Arguing which turd is shiniest so we can catapult them into the White House instead of a prison cell?
Those soldiers died to protect what? Because I sure as hell don't fucking know anymore.
All those are points you could make.
But, you asked what they'd die to protect if we fought ISIL. This is not an absurd question. In the case of ISIL, soldiers would die to protect the innocent civilians of Iraq and Syria, who are basically good people, and protecting everyone in the world from a group that uses videos of brutal execution-style murders as viral marketing from getting access to weapons of mass destruction, which are definitely not far away (Syria has had chemical weapons facilities captured before).
That's not a bad thing to risk your life over. Stopping the Nazis 77 years ago was also a pretty defensible thing to do, not sure why you're using that as one of your examples wars that make "no sense whatsoever".
If Chelsea Clinton was required to serve, or Trump's spoiled brats had to walk into a hot zone; I don't think we would see another war for a long time.
(I once had a nephew want to join the Army. I took him to Tiburon, CA for a day of just people watching. It was a sunny day. Even the locals were out. On the way in I was pulled over because I drive an old car, and had long hair at the time. My inner voice said great! We sat in the park, but I wanted him to get a first had seat for the show. Basically a show of people, and their spawn with way too much money. On the way home, I asked him, "You would die for these people?" Well my ploy didn't do much, but he did join the Navy instead of the Army.)
The disability doctors of the Vietnam days could be very flexible. Would the FBI ask that charges be brought against a doctor who simply objected to the draft and disqualified anyone who was nearly on the borderline?
Yes we are imperfect, and must reflect accountably on our morale transgressions. Being honest about our wrongs should not prevent us from being a proud country.
If you are ashamed of the US, how many countries could you be proud of?
The nation-state has been quite the technology. throw in trade between humans in these states, and much of human suffering is quite addressed. But a cost of errors in its maintenance is shedding the blood of those who fight.
ISIS? Its DNA is described in "A Peace to End All Peace" It's not fictional; we didn't "invent" it. Those who designed the system to rid Iraq ( which was invented ) of the Ba'athists created the conditions necessary for it as an unintended consequence. But the larger context is the failure of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Empire wasn't quite a nation-state; the Kemalists in Turkey attempted to back-engineer a nation-state in the form of Turkey, but that left lots of territory in a power vacuum.
I went for Kashmir though to nurse my disappointment:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTOmK-4y9EE
Top of their game there.