I'm writing this in response to another comment post from yesterday. Hopefully, the users who were interested end up seeing this.

I’ll preface this by saying that there are thousands of veterans who have sacrificed a lot more than I did. I consider myself lucky that I got out with only a weapons-grade chip on my shoulder. Many people were not so fortunate.

From here on out I’ll do my best to give you the “high-speed, low-drag” version, but no promises.

I was 15 or so when 9/11 happened. I live close to the west coast so I was just waking up when my Dad came to tell me that something was happening, something bad.

My family has always been conservative, of the mostly normie variety by today’s standards, and I was raised to be a patriot and to love my country. When the towers fell, I couldn't stand to see my father so worried, to see my mother cry, and I wanted to do something about it. Like many people, I decided to join the military as soon as I was old enough.

I enlisted in the Navy halfway through my senior year and shipped out the summer after graduation. Boot camp was fine, job training (A-school) was fine, and I got orders to an aircraft carrier in Norfolk, which was an exciting endeavor for 18 year old me.

I spent five years on that ship and deployed twice. I advanced quickly and performed well for the most part. I didn’t know much about what was happening politically, I figured serving was enough at that time.

When it came time to rotate to shore duty, I accepted orders to go recruiting for no other reason than they were guaranteeing that I could recruit from my hometown. Seemed like a good idea, and a great career bullet for newly frocked First-Class (E6).

I was wrong.

To try to keep things brief, I was not a good fit. I had excelled in the engineering environment but could not get behind the people or the practices I found in recruiting. It was a night and day difference, and my attitude went downhill fast.

Of the many examples I have, this is what fucked up my attitude the most. There was a points system assigned to processing potential recruits at that time. More points for diversity, gender blah blah. The seeds of the woke-mind virus we know today, but this was more than 10 years ago, so I’m sure it’s only gotten worse by now.

Our monthly goals were built around finding diversity over interest or qualifications, and the points were used as metrics for measuring a recruiting stations success, and as a recruiter your quality of life is effected dramatically by the success or failure of your station. Our monthly goals were built around finding diversity over interest or qualifications.

Anyway, it wasn’t enough to find qualified people to join the Navy, it was about finding the right LOOKING people, and white males like me were at the bottom of the list. Warfighting wasn’t the priority, diversity is what mattered to the Navy and I could not reconcile this fact with my own principles. I was thoroughly disenchanted.

This wasn’t my “awakening” just yet, but it had made me face some hard truths about military service. Hard truths that take years to digest.

I declined to reenlist and separated just shy of nine years in. My view of the Navy had been tarnished significantly, but I cared a lot for the fleet and the friends and mentors I’d spent so much time with, and I still do. I was proud of what I had done prior to the recruiting gig. I still held on to the belief that joining was the right thing, and that our efforts in the middle east were about protecting America. This was early 2015 or so . As any veteran knows, the transition to civilian life is not easy. I was frustrated about so many things. I felt betrayed by the Navy, apprehensive about starting a new career, and doubt over the war and our military’s role had started to creep in.

I started paying more attention to politics around this time and the 2016 general election was right around the corner. I used reddit a lot back then (cringe) and one day came across r/the_donald. I had heard about Trump only through media osmosis and had assumed he was just a clown, not a serious candidate. I think I was tacitly supporting Ted Cruz at that point.

But r/the_donald changed all that. The memes, the centipede videos, all of it was BRILLIANT. It was funny and informative, and as a result, the sub was exploding in popularity. It completely changed my opinion on Trump, and gave me hope that real change was a possibility.

However, the most interesting part was the left’s reaction to subreddit. Saying they hated it is a understatement. It was becoming so popular it was frequently showing up on the front page of the site and ruining their lefty echo-chamber. My first taste of liberal tears, ahh the memories.

They lied about r/the_donald constantly, saying it was racist, hateful, all the labels we’re so familiar with now. The sub was quarantined, suppressed and eventually banned outright. Nothing shocking by today’s standards, but it represented my first real taste of censorship.

Again, not my “awakening” but I was starting to see the matrix so to speak.

Then Donald Trump won the Presidential Election in 2016. If I had thought reddit’s response to r/the_donald was bad, now the entire media/government was collectively shitting its pants. The shock the day after he won was palpable, you could see it on all of their stupid faces. Something much bigger than I imagined was afoot, and that something just got kicked in the balls by the looks of it.

Hillary Clinton was supposed to win, Trump could not be president. The sheer magnitude of their outrage and the year’s long witch hunt that followed is what woke me up. Obama’s administration spying on Trump as a candidate and later president-elect was what shook me from sleep. That wasn’t the America I fought for, and as we all know now, that was only the beginning.

What followed for me was the rabbit-hole of research that has lead so many of us here. Rejecting the legacy media and looking for answers everywhere else. This led me to Q and the thousands of hours of reading and researching what was discussed. The process was painful, realizing that 9/11 was a lie hurt me deeply. Realizing that my country had been co-opted decades ago and that the core mechanics of representation were an illusion hurt even more. Like thousands of others, my military service was predicated on lies, my good faith, my patriotism, was exploited to kill millions of people in pursuit of greed and agendas that were at odds with me and the best interest of my nation. That’s what hurt the most.

I'm grateful for the truth though, living in ignorance isn't living.

Covid happening before the general election in 2020 wasn’t a wake-up call to me, it was further confirmation of the war that’s being fought. I think many of us knew something was coming before that election. Because whatever Trump is doing broke them, and I intend to help in any way that I can.

I don’t recognize my country because I’ve never seen its true face. The only way to fix it is with truth and justice to those who have stolen so much from us.

Welp, that was way longer than I intended and sitting here I feel like I left out a lot and barely scratched the surface, and I still ended up with a wall of text.

I would love to hear from other vets here, or anyone for that matter than feels compelled to share their story. I hope this ends up being helpful.