Those of us in the reality-based community know that it's a myth created by the rightwing that liberals and anti-war protesters ran around attacking soldiers returning from Vietnam. Nonetheless, liberals and progressives have learned that many soldiers returned from Vietnam confused and alienated, and didn't feel that people back home appreciated their sacrifices or sufficiently distinguished the warriors from the unjust war.

People who oppose the war in Iraq have learned some lessons from Vietnam. We bend over backwards to avoid saying or doing anything that could be misrepresented as "not supporting the troops." We accept as a given that they are mis-led by the civilian leadership in the White House, the Pentagon and even by some of the uniformed office corps. But we tend we talk about them as if we assume all soldiers, or at least most, are patriotic idealists who enlisted and serve with pride because they are committed to the nation, the military and their fellow sisters and brothers in arms.

Substituting insufficient attention to the perceptions of the troops with over-generalized veneration of the troops may have political value. To better understand soldiers, however, it helps to have a more nuanced knowledge of the women and men who chose to wear an Army or Marine uniform. Writer Michael Massing recognized this is an important question, so he set out to learn who fights, and why.

The Department of Defense surveys recruits on many issues, including their reasons for enlisting:

The number citing [service to country] as their main motivation went from 27.5 percent of all responses in 2002 to 38.1 percent in 2006. (It was followed by skills acquisition, cited by 20.2 percent, then by adventure, mentioned by 16.4 percent, then by money for education, benefits, travel, and pay.) But Beth Asch of the RAND Corporation, who does research for the Pentagon, says that such figures should be handled with care, since new recruits, when asked, often like to give their decision an idealistic cast. Furthermore, while patriotism has surged as an announced motive, it is also the case that the Army fell 8 percent short of its recruiting target of 80,000 in 2005—its largest shortfall since 1979. Since then, the Army has managed to meet its targets, but only by adding more than a thousand new recruiters and increasing the size of enlistment bonuses. Clearly, the patriotic sheen of September 11 has been dimmed by the ongoing bloodshed in Iraq.

To get beyond the aggregate survey data and hear the stories of individual soldiers, Massing traveled to Watertown, NY, near the eastern edge of Lake Ontario, and home of the Army's 10th Mountain Division:

There are some 17,000 soldiers based at Drum (four thousand of whom are currently deployed in Iraq), and they overwhelm Watertown. I met them in bars, restaurants, and one of the area's three Wal-Marts. I also interviewed them in Bradley's, a military-supply store located near Drum's main gate...I introduced myself to the owner and, with his blessing, began buttonholing customers. While a few politely declined to talk, most were more than willing (though some asked that their names be withheld). Among the first I approached was Jason Thomas Adams, a slender young man dressed in a cook's white uniform. A twenty-five-year-old private from Brooklyn, Adams had joined the Army only nine months earlier. He had never really expected to, he told me—he'd wanted to be a police officer. After graduating from high school, he had enrolled in the John Jay School of Criminal Justice. To help pay the tuition, he worked at two jobs—Paragon Sports and a restaurant on Second Avenue—but quickly went into debt. Meanwhile, he got married, his wife got pregnant, and he had no health care. From a brother in the military, he had learned of the Army's many benefits, and, visiting a recruiter, he heard about Tricare, the military's generous health plan. He also learned that the Army would repay his education loans. And so he signed up. When I asked about September 11 and service to the country, he said flatly that it had had nothing to do with his decision. I heard similar accounts from several GIs I met that first afternoon in Bradley's... That initial group of interviews at Bradley's would mirror those I had throughout my stay. In all, I would speak with about thirty soldiers, and roughly one of every four would tell me that he had joined the military mainly for idealistic reasons, for some larger cause. Often, in describing those reasons, these soldiers would sound vague—"I've wanted to be a soldier since I was young," they would say, or "my family has always served in the Army." (A family history in the military features strongly in the decision of many enlistees.)

Even soldiers with sophisticated explanations of how their patriotism and devotion to protecting America led them to enlist often cited additional reasons connected to income, education, career and life-opportunities:

I was sixteen at the time. I had always wanted to join the Army, but that moment—it influenced me here, in my heart. I had job offers, but I wanted to fight for my country—for the red, white, and blue. And to make my family proud. It takes a select kind of person to join the military and risk his life for his country. Of all the soldiers I met in Watertown, no other spoke with more conviction. Yet as we talked, he acknowledged that there was another reason for his decision: he hoped to make a career in law enforcement, and joining the Army would, he felt, help. So, even in this case, where patriotic concerns loomed large, considerations of self-improvement played a part as well. Among most of the other soldiers I spoke with, such considerations overwhelmed everything else. Over and over, I heard soldiers talk about being hard-pressed to pay the rent, of having a child and being without health care, of yearning to escape a depressing town or oppressive family, of wanting to get out and see the world.

This month the America Prospect published a supplement, prepared jointly with Demos, titled Mobilizing Millennials: Will their Economic Raw Deal Fuel the Next New Deal? One of the articles, by Demos' Tamara Draut, lays out the grim data that describes what's behind the economic distress that led many of Massing's interviewees to enter the Army:

When Pell Grants were created, they were intended to cover three-quarters of the cost of attending a public university. Today they only cover one third.

The average American between 25 and 34 years old spends 25% of their income on debt payments. Since few in this category have mortgages, the debt is mostly on student loans, credit cards and auto loans. This percentage is double what Baby Boomers in the same age group were paying in 1989.

Between 1995 and 2002, rents in just about every metro area increased over 50%. Combined with their higher debt payment, this makes Mellennials less likely than their predecessors to be able to purchase a home, which for decades has been America's biggest source of personal wealth creation.

Even when they can purchase a house, Mellennials pay on average one third higher monthly payments than young homeowners did in 1980.

Finally, the experiences of Jason Thomas Adams, the first soldier mentioned by Massing, are hardly atypical. Young families with both parents present pay on average 11 percent of their income for child care, and 7 percent on health care.

Unlike just about every other industrialized country in the world, the US has no national health care, students pay exorbitant college tuition, and we have few subsidies for child care. That doesn't mean, however, that government-provided health care, affordable housing, free education and subsidized child care aren't available to young Americans:

[F]rom the survey data, and from my interviews, it seems clear that the military does not consist of society's "dregs." Rather, it consists mainly of young men and women who, raised in working- and lower-middle-class families, yearn to make it into the middle class. Unable to achieve this in the hypercompetitive and expensive market economy, they have instead sought to achieve it in the Army. With its guarantees of housing, employment, health insurance, and educational assistance, the US military today seems the last outpost of the welfare state in America.

What kind of country have we become when the only way for young Americans to be assured of the basic social safety net provided to citizens of just about every other advanced country requires them to risk death in a war that their fellow Millennials overwhelmingly oppose, and which many of the enlistees themselves view with ambivalence if not hostility?

There are two problems here. First, as a nation we need to change the government policies and expand the economic opportunities necessary to prevent the Millennials from becoming the first generation in American history to do worse economically than their parents. This is not only a policy imperative, it's also a major political opportunity for Democrats to lock in today's young voters as a pillar of their electoral coalition for decades.

But if economic, career and life-opportunities are a primary reason driving most soldiers to enlist in the military, what will happen if women and men in their late teens and twenties no longer need to enlist to avail themselves of a just social welfare system comparable with what exists in other developed nations?

The military is one of the most esteemed institutions in American society. Like all institutions, it has problems. But the military will always be appealing to many young Americans, who will seek to challenge themselves, find solidarity in a patriotic endeavor, and learn skills and experience adventure. Recruitment needn't be aided by the increasingly huge cash bonuses being offered by the Army and Marines in order to meet quotas. It will be relatively easy for the military to meet recruiting goals through one change in foreign and defense policy.

To repair its stature among young people, the Military needs to be viewed by young women and men as a institution prudently employed to protect America, and not a plaything abused by a reckless administration and it's Republican supporters. The military can easily survive and thrive in the presence of a New Deal that ameliorates the economic and life pressures currently afflicting the age cohort targeted by military recruiters, but only if we end our disastrous war in Iraq.