10 Ridiculous Things Civilians Believe About the Military

Added: 2026-05-22

[00:00:00]These are 10 military myths that we're busting today. I did a video on this a couple weeks ago. It went bonkers. So, I found 10 more incredible myths and we're going to debunk them as we go. The first is that combat is like Call of Duty. I don't know. It's so funny, but people actually believe this, which is just wild because there's no way this is true, right? Like maybe if you're clandestine operations, special operator, whatever, some of the things might tie into that, but Call of Duty is nothing like combat. And for the record, in the same vein, neither is freaking airsoft or paintball. Like, those are cool. They're fun hobbies. I enjoy playing both. You're not military.

[00:00:36]Number two is that boot camp food is intentionally drugged to kill your sex drive. There is this rumor that they put anti-boner stuff in your food at boot camp so that dudes can't get horny.

[00:00:49]Ain't true, right? The reality is it's just high stress environment and you're just surrounded by chaos and people all the time and so you're just not in the mood and generally speaking you're probably not around the person that you're attracted to anyway. Now there are probably people where that's the exception but even my homosexual friends when I was at recruit training told me they didn't have boners. So I don't know what to tell you. Number three is that if you have post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD, you can't function in the normal world. There's this very interesting stigma that PTSD manifests as beating your wife, drunk driving, punching holes in the wall, and wanting to kill everything. Um, maybe in extreme cases, some of that's true. But I'll tell you, the stigma for PTSD is so overblown that I, who have PTSD by definition, didn't think I did for years because it wasn't until someone sat me down and was like, "These are some signs of PTSD." And I was like, "I do all of that stuff." And to me, that was just normal veteran behavior. like not enjoying big crowds or wanting to sit with my back against a wall. I just assume because I don't beat my wife or drunk drive all the time trying to like, you know, toss a dice in the air for whether I make it home that I didn't have PTSD, but that's just because the stigma is so far out in left field. It It's just not the case. A lot of people have PTSD and function totally fine.

[00:02:11]Number four is that rank equals intelligence and leadership.

[00:02:16]It just doesn't. People get promoted oftentimes because they understood the system. It has nothing to do with whether or not they're a good leader.

[00:02:23]Now, that doesn't mean that getting promoted doesn't put you in better leadership positions, give you more opportunities to thrive as a leader. And it doesn't mean that because you got promoted, you're not a good leader. It just means they're not correlative.

[00:02:36]Meaning, you can get promoted and be an incredibly smart dude with great leadership. And you can also get promoted and be an incredibly dumb dude with terrible leadership. Case in point, maybe you're a mechanic. Maybe you're a worldclass mechanic and couldn't lead anybody out of a paper bag. They're still going to promote you for being world class at your job. They probably will not put you in charge of a battalion, but you get the idea. Number five here is that pilots have a suicide switch in case they're going to get captured. This comes from movies. The idea that you have a cyanide capsule, so you just like if you get like, no, sorry. In fact, just recently in Iran, a pilot got shot down. All this sear training kicked in. He ran up through the mountains and he got saved. Like, had he had a kill switch, that guy might have been able to do it, right? I don't know that he would have, but like point being, that's not a thing. Sorry to break it to you. Now, I don't know.

[00:03:24]Maybe there are some operations in which that is totally a thing, but I've never heard of it or seen it except for in movies.

[00:03:31]Number six is military grade and the belief that this means better quality.

[00:03:36]It is so funny to me and every other veteran I know when they see stuff marketed online as military grade because it's supposed to mean like it's indestructible and better and you should trust it and anyone who was in the military just laughs and is like bro military grade is crap.

[00:03:54]Number seven is that going through boot camp you get brainwashed into being a robot. That's not the case. Now, there's a lot of repetition and there's a lot of things that somebody could probably call brainwashing, but it's just muscle memory, right? Like, for example, failure drill, which is when you pop your rifle up and you put two rounds in the chest and one in the T- box, which is the the dome, or two rounds in the chest and one in the groin. So, it's boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, failure drill. That's what we used to do in the Marine Corps. That was our training, right?

[00:04:29]If you got into the right situation, that would trigger. And it's not because you're brainwashed. It's because muscle memory was put into place so that you knew what to do fast, fast, fast, fast without having to stop and think because the stopping and thinking gets you killed. The reacting keeps you alive, right? And so it's not brainwashed.

[00:04:50]It's training for the mission at hand to keep you alive and keep you in the fight. It's muscle memory. It's the same reason that when we do like machine gun leaders course and they're teaching you how to, you know, mess with a 50 cal and and, you know, do head space and timing and adjust everything and all the, you know, functions checks. It's not like in a quiet room with headphones and Beethoven on, right? You're not being serenated. It's like people banging pans, other rounds going off, screaming in your face, screaming in your head, because they want you to get to a place where muscle memory allows you to do it.

[00:05:20]When your heart is beating out of your chest, you're in full fight orflight mode, you're totally stressed out, all the chaos in the world because that's combat. Combat's not calm.

[00:05:31]Number eight here is that deployment set you up financially. They absolutely can.

[00:05:35]Between combat zone, tax exempt pay, and a whole bunch of other benefits, they can absolutely set you up very well financially. The problem is a lot of people are like, I can be bad with my finances because when I deploy, I'll make it all back. And then they have bad financial habits. So, what do you think happens when they get some money in their bank account? They blow it all.

[00:05:52]They assume, oh, the next deployment, um, I was this guy. I left my deployment. I had like $17,000 just sitting in a checking account. And I bought a Harley, a sniper rifle, a truck, a tattoo out of it. Pretty much nothing else to show for it. And like just blew it all, right? That was the wrong move. That money could have gone a long way for my financial success if I had invested it in 2010.

[00:06:15]Number nine here is that they implant tracking devices in your body at boot camp. That's just not true. Uh this is, you know, there's a lot of conspiracy theories out there, but I don't have any tracking devices and I don't remember them taking it back out, so I don't think I ever did have a tracking device.

[00:06:30]Sorry. Number 10 is that every real estate agent knows how to use the VA loan.

[00:06:36]No. Agents and lenders both. Getting licensed teaches you the legal side of what the VA loan is. It doesn't teach you how to be good with it. If you want to work with somebody who actually understands the VA loan, agent, lender, or both, I'll drop a link down below.

[00:06:50]You click on it. Happy to make an introduction for you. Totally free for you. Do you use a crappy real estate agent or VA lender and get smoked? Well, that's on you. Our people don't play games. So, if you want a quality agent or lender, scan the code and we'll make the introduction. Point is, getting licensed as an agent or lender doesn't mean you understand the VA loan any more than graduating boot camp means you know how to kill someone. You might know how, you don't know what it's like, right?

[00:07:16]Like, you don't know the ins and outs.

[00:07:19]Okay, that might be a weird example, but like agent, lender, most of them are not actually VA loan experts. So, happy to make intros if you want. That one just drives me nuts cuz people just they get sucked into working with someone who doesn't know what they're doing and it hurts them, right? Which of these 10 myths did you find the most intriguing and what did I miss? Comment down below if you've got some other interesting myths you've heard. Uh, I've heard some pretty crazy ones in my life. I'd love to see if you can beat them. So, drop them down in the chat and maybe yours will make my next video on this. Have a great day.