Are troops really still fighting for our freedom of speech and freedom to petition?

In the sense that they are fighting to preserve the United States as a safe entity with its laws of freedom of speech and other rights, they are fighting for your freedom of speech.

Should the US be defeated by its enemies, you might no longer have the right to free speech (in fact, you probably wouldn’t).

How would us being defeated by enemies no longer make us having the right to have freedom of speech? I’m not trying to be rude, just trying to learn that perspective. Didn’t we lose the Vietnam War? We still have our rights.

No, they/we fight for each other. No soldier gives a crap about political bullshit.

No, they’re fighting for a lot of other reasons, most of which are detrimental and futile.

Didn’t we lose the Vietnam War? We didn’t officially LOSE the Vietnam War, we just left. We hare the biggest, meanest, mother honking military on the planet, we don’t lose wars. It was not like we SURRENDERED like we made Japan do. Though today we fight for economic imperialism.

No. Whoever is making that argument is trying to shut you up since the tactic is to shame you for being ungrateful. If anything, it would have been more apt to say, those soldiers are fighting for your freedom to live since terrorists from abroad would love to kill you.

Magnified, this line of argument is what gave Bush power to mobilize America to invade a country that hasn’t done anything that warranted a Pearl Harbor kind of retaliation.

You could retort with a question of your own, like, well, How far would you go, how much preemptive killing would be acceptable in protecting your freedom to live? Drop bombs on civilians and kill a hundred thousand innocents? Because that’s what Bush did in Iraq. Which also killed almost five thousand US soldiers and damaged the bodies of thousands more, for good.

In most modern wars, it is the individual soldier who decides why he’s fighting. Unfortunately, most modern wars are fought to preserve money or resources, not principles. Usually what it comes down to is fighting for the guys next to you and saying “F**k it!” about everything else.

@CaptainHarley Yes. And it pains me that they have to go through finding a worthy reason for themselves as to why they have to kill or be killed.

Since Vietnam, I have been very outspoken. I decided that I was there to defend my freedom of speech and so I use it at every opportunity. : )

@chelle21689 The Vietnam War was different. We were not direct parties to the war. We were fighting halt the spread of communism which we felt threatened our future. (And thus ultimately our right to our maintain our lifestyle including freedom of speech.)

Losing a war where we lost our form of government and our sovereignty is what the bottom line is.