Infantry is awesome. At the end of the day, you work harder and are more disciplined, combat-competent, filthy, sweaty, exhausted, freezing, broiling, hungry than any other regular job in the military. You get to become proficient with a plethora of weapons, mind-boggling communication systems, tactical vehicles, and drilled-into-you tactics that you get to doing instinctively without even thinking about it.
Infantry sucks ass. You are treated like shit by high-level leadership. You enlisted to kick doors and shoot people in the face, but there you are picking moss out of the cracks in the garrison sidewalk because General Fucknut is coming to give a 3 hour speech about whogivesafuck. You embark on an 18-mile roadmarch; 26 miles later, your feet are hamburger and your 16-pound machine gun feels like it weighs 56 pounds. You stand guard at a weapons range in the sub-freezing temps for hours on-end, hours after the range went "cold" (no more firing), on a secure garrison, because you "train like you fight." You show up for formation in the freezing rain; one guy forgot his gloves; everybody has to take their gloves off. You get your long-awaited weekend snatched away for CQ (charge of quarters = barracks desk duty) or battalion/brigade staff duty or courtesy patrol (even though there are such things as MPs) or a work detail or because your leadership fucked up scheduling and the ONLY day open for the weapons range is on the weekend.
You deploy and live in dust-caked tents while a hundred meters away, personnel clerks and finance desk-jockeys who will never leave the FOB are living in air-conditioned housing units. You go on patrol for 6, 8, 10, 12, 24, 48 or more hours at a time, come back to the FOB and get in line for a hot meal; too bad, says the dining hall guard: your uniform is too dirty to come inside. You are moved out to a combat outpost with no running water and no electricity (other than the radios at the command post) and live there for a few weeks at a time; when you're not on-mission, you're in a guard tower, or fixing vehicles, or burning shit in oil-drums, or digging ditches, or stringing razorwire, or filling sandbags, or rolling out on QRF (quick reaction force) to help a patrol who got hit, or you're cleaning your weapon. If you have time to eat, masturbate, sleep, and wipe your asscrack off with babywipes, you do it.
You train for 14 weeks to earn those blue disks, crossed rifles and blue cord (if you're a Marine, you train for 26 weeks, and I don't know what infantry-specific accoutrements USMC infantrymen get, forgive my ignorance, fellow grunts) and train for months or even a year further at your line unit to deploy to combat. You learn how to use almost every gun we have, you learn how to drive (and maybe gun) Humvees, Bradleys, Strykers, MRAPs (unit-dependent) and practice shooting with night-vision and infrared lasers, or night-vision or thermal scopes. You and your buddies give each other IVs with night-vision in the back of a moving Bradley for combat-lifesaver training. You itch for the day you deploy, while the veterans around you roll their eyes, having already seen what you yearn for.
You get there and the enemy hides in civilian clothes; he uses women and children for human shields and spotters for mortar attacks. He kidnaps people from opposite tribes/sects and rapes women and murders children and tortures people with power drills to their kneecaps and cheeks and he cuts the tongue out of a 13 year old boy because the kid chatted with you during a halt on-mission. He kills your friends with sniper rifles and IEDs and you rarely, if ever, even see him face-to-face. You probably won't get the opportunity to kill him; rarely will you get the opportunity to even shoot at him. When you finally get that chance, you won't feel a thing. You won't be happy that he's laying there in front of you, bleeding and moaning on the pavement. You'll see dead people... civilians killed by them, killed accidentally by us, indigenous security forces (cops, military, local hired militia), bad guys... you may see people die right in front of you, within mere meters. At the end of it, you'll be dull. Numb. Desensitized. You'll wish you fired your weapon more.
You'll come home and be unable to relate to the friends and family who clapped you on the back and wished you well when you left those few short years ago. You'll know that you were the very top of the food chain; only special operations direct action teams trained more, did more, saw more, and were in more danger than you were. And your future college classmates will find out you were in the military and say things like, "Oh, my cousin is in the Navy, I think he does something with computers. He went to Iraq; it must've been SCARY." Or, "My buddy Joe joined the Army. Did you know him?" Or, "Did you KILL ANYBODY?" Or, "I support you guys, but I oppose the war. You didn't really believe in what we're doing over there, RIGHT?"
The highs are higher; relationships are more passionate (and more quickly burned out), weekends and block-leave periods are cherished, and days you somehow don't get put on the tower guard roster are things to behold.
The lows are lower; I think I already summed them up.
Caveat: tankers, scouts, combat engineers, and arty guys (the other combat-arms MOS) are cool too. And medics/corpsmen, EOD, dog handlers, psyops, civil affairs, JTACs, and pilots. I don't mean to seem like I'm marginalizing every other military MOS aside from Army/USMC infantry.
The beer I'm drinking right now is one of the best beers I've ever had. Because it's Labatt-Infantry-Blue, bitches.
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