> That's a bastardisation of loyalty though. Yes, people volunteer, because they are expected to.
It is pretty clear that you have no idea what you're talking about. You know that you can dislike people in general, but still recognize positive qualities right? Here is another example: Sergeant Major Bradley Kasal. This guy used his own body as a bullet stop to protect his Marines, nobody expects that.
> What about speaking up about a situation that is going to get people killed?
There was a lot of that, we got it shut down at the eleventh hour.
> What about the people who didn't volunteer, where they fine with the whole thing as long as they weren't affected?
I didn't poll everybody, but I'm pretty confident in saying that nobody was fine with the situation. At lot of those guys were pretty torn between loyalty to their families, the guys that they'd just been in combat with and their fellow Marines in the artillery battalion. There were many private conversation had were they tried to talk volunteers out of it, and more than one anonymous letter to a General.
> Is the commander visiting his guys after years and year when they are dealing with PTSD?
Do you think that is practical? In their careers they will have commanded thousands of men. There is a strong bond though, for example: another personal story :) When I got out of the Corps I drove all the way across the country, for a job in DC. After a few days of searching, I found a basement apartment for rent - the landlord lived upstairs with his wife and toddler daughter. Purely by chance, the landlord was a Colonel in the USMC, and he instantly treated me like an old family friend - standing invitation to dinner, long conversation on the porch, etc. The wife was not a big fan of this, and I'm pretty sure my new buddy was constantly catching hell for it. Until one day, several months later, when I came home from work and found the front door wide open and heard panicked footsteps inside. Now this was in pretty much the worst part of DC, and I could have easily just made my way to my private entrance and ignored the possibility that the landlord was getting burgled. Instead, I began clearing the house room by room - armed with a paring knife from the kitchen. I gave the cleaning lady quite a shock, she had forgotten the alarm code and was rushing around trying to find it. I was sure that I'd get the boot for that, but instead I got a dinner invitation from the wife. The cleaning lady informed her of what happened, and it suddenly clicked for her - I was family.
> The military selectively decides what part of these virtues that are valued.
Again, spoken like somebody who has no idea what they're talking about. Outside of the philosophy department in college, I've never seen an organization focus as much on morality as the USMC. Of course, the perspective is that of the state. So any flaws you find in the logic of military morality will be rooted in the state, not the military.