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Respect is important in the military. In fact, one would argue that respect is paramount to the entire damn operation. If your subordinates don’t respect you, you’re going to have a much harder time getting them to do things. Getting people to do things they may not want to do is literally the entire point of military service from day one.
You’ll find within the military community at large that respect is directly correlated to misery. How miserable is your fucking life? Within its own context, infantry Marines are usually at the top of the food chain in terms of how they’re universally regarded. However, this is a double-edged NCO sword, because it must mean that their life is extremely shit. This is a law of physics exclusive to the military.
I call this the Law of Shit.
Respect is tied directly to how shit your life is.
It is nearly a one-to-one relationship. If you work in an office and you don’t spend half your week sleeping in the dirt and being treated like you’re ten years old with forty of your best and worst friends, your life is probably not shit. You have the benefit of telling people “my Marine Corps career wasn’t so bad,” and they’ll immediately know you were a POG. This is because infantry Marines universally hate their fucking lives as Marines, and will never regard their experience with such jubilant nostalgia.
Because it was shit.
The Law of Shit is not limited to the Marine Corps either, you’ll find that the Army, Navy and Air Force experience this as well. The Army is blessed with its own miserable fucking infantry, and they earn the respect of the Navy and the Air Force as a result. The latter two don’t bother worrying about respect, because they’re much more comfortable sleeping in air conditioning that works.
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