Marine Raider to Receive Navy Cross for Hours-Long Firefight Against ISIS

You don't join the military being concerned with the "why and where" you may go into combat. No one is guaranteed the next minute, hour, day, week, etc., so it does not matter as a soldier when your profession is to carry out combat operations. Do we say that the gas station clerk who gets gunned down by a criminal for $150 in the register died over oil, snacks, and lottery tickets? No.

Soldiers don't die for oil or whatever agenda that some politician who occupies the White House may have. We die (and even kill) carrying out the very duty that we volunteered to do and the cause doesn't have to be noble or deemed "worth it". When you die, it doesn't matter to your loved ones, because you are gone and never coming back. The pain will be the same if you were saving kids from a burning building or you got shot by a sniper guarding a oil field in some Middle Eastern country.

You are either a true warrior or you are a lost soul wearing a uniform for the absolute wrong reasons.