The following is a point/counterpoint article examining whether young people should join the military.

The point portion is written by Sherri Nielson, a student at UCLA. The counterpoint, appearing as bold text, is written by Lance Corporal Jonathan Allston, a U.S. Marine currently serving 15 days of restriction awarded at company NJP.

Point: For many seniors about to graduate high school, the military seems like a great option instead of going straight into college. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Our all-volunteer army is overflowing with uneducated knuckle-draggers desperately seeking employment but couldn’t find a better job. Once you enlist you’ll merely be a cog in the military industrial war machine. Joining the military could quite possibly be one of the worst decisions you could ever make.

Counterpoint: For many seniors about to graduate high school, the military seems like a great option vice going right into college. This is a bunch of bullshit. If you join up because you were tired of school, stand by to spend more hours in the classroom instead of training for combat. Joining the military could quite possibly be one of the worst decisions you could ever make.

By joining up you are participating in the denigration of another young mind. Military training and indoctrination places you in a kind of moral stasis where basic human goodness and decency are replaced with an unethical agenda of imperial American foreign policy.

You spend most of your time in classes about moral and ethical conduct on and off the battlefield. The list of mind numbing ethics training is endless. There’s violence prevention training, substance abuse training, rules of engagement, core values, sexual assault prevention, sexual harassment prevention, anti-hazing programs, and so many suicide prevention classes you’ll consider hurting yourself just to escape it all.

You’re going to have to kill people. It’s the nature of being in the military which is, by design, a global genocidal mechanism. You will likely be sent to hostile places and forced to kill — and we all know military members can hardly tell the difference between combatants and civilians.

You’re probably never going to kill anyone. You’re most likely going to deploy, but no matter what your recruiter tells you, it’s way more boring and there will never be any hand-to-hand combat. If you’re lucky, you’ll get to fire your weapon in the general direction as everyone else. You’ll never know if it was you who capped Johnny Taliban at 300 meters.

What’s even worse, you and the members of your unit will indiscriminately kill everyone you come across. There have been so many senseless crimes perpetrated by the military over the years. It should come as no shock that if you join, you too will participate in war crimes.

Even if you do end up in a fire fight, it’s a bureaucratic nightmare. If you are shot at by the enemy, you won’t be able to return fire unless you positively identify the shooter and prove he has intent to harm you by shouting your name as he fires. Then someone two command levels above you located thousands of miles away might give you permission to defend yourself.

Recruiters lie and get you to join under the pretense they take care of their own. The military doesn’t care about you. You are just an automaton to feed into the meat grinder, a number no one cares about.

Recruiters are lying sons of bitches who get you to enlist under the pretense that you’ll get great benefits and be taken care of once you get out. Military types take care of their own. Once you get out though, no one really gives a shit about you. Civilian life is pretty cut-throat. They generally have no clue and could care less about your service.

There are many other reasons not to join the military. You’re basically going to throw away your golden years after high school to join the military industrial complex. You’ll probably get married and have kids, then get out with no education and nowhere to go.

Bottom line: Don’t join the military.

There’s a metric ass ton of reasons not to join the military. You’re basically going to throw away your golden years after high school to join the armed forces. You’ll probably get married, have kids, then go on deployment and have your utter whore of a wife cheat on you with your best friend. Then you’ll get divorced, develop an alcohol problem, and end up seeing the substance abuse counselor twice a week.

If you do get out, you’ll have to go to college on the GI Bill with barely functional retards at your local community college. Hopefully, if you can get through that and figure out how to max your VA pension, you’ll at least be in decent shape.

Bottom line: Don’t do it dude.