[PaulHoule]

Military officers and enlisted persons have political views, but it is a matter of professionalism that they don't talk about them.

Jim Webb (Marine officer who earned a Navy Cross in the Vietnam war, novelist, and a Democratic Senator from Virginia) wrote that many military people who served in Vietnam became lifetime Republicans because they blamed Democrats for starting and managing the war, and then they felt abandoned by the Democrats when elements of the party aligned with the anti-war movement.

I think many military people serving recently and serving today had their bodies battered and bruised in the Iraq war working with an unappreciative population for a poorly administered war based on a lie by a Republican administration. You don't see them going on TV talk shows to discuss this, but you do see that Virginia (which has a large and growing percentage of those people in it) used to vote Republican and now it votes Democrat.

As I told a friend, "they want to keep their pensions."