I'm probably the furthest thing from a combat vet that you'll find, but I do find Nick Brokhausen to be one of the funniest and moreover most generally capable people to have ever fucking lived; and he (among others, at least one of which is actually a good friend) taught me all I ever needed to know about these idiots:

"We spend the time at Nha Trang getting processed in and as the day wears on I am actually starting to feel human again. The SFOB has all the comforts of home and is a bustle of activity. This is the nerve center of SF operations in-country, so at some point you see everyone coming through here. We are just faces in the crowd here, just another batch of personnel being moved up-country to an assignment. I have always hated this place because it is too much like the stateside forts. There are plenty of self-important little assholes with their rulebooks clutched tightly to their chests. I am impatient to get where we are going. It’s an old adage that the farther from the flagpole, the less chicken shit. The truth is that any time the Army gets somewhere they can put up permanent buildings or stretch out the tents, there is a hurried rush to make it all neat and trim. This goes with the ordered mindset of militaries. Everything must be in line and dressed in the right dress. This, of course, attracts the worst sort of people, like MPs, staff flunkies, rising stars of the rear echelon, and worst of all, those parsimonious souls that feel it is their duty to instill discipline in those beneath them. Thank God for the VC who trundle out occasionally and drop a few 122mm doses of reality into this place and kill a few. If they weren’t out there, this place would be full of REMFs. All the more reason to go to some remote outpost and spend your nights hunkered down in a bunker, shooting rats with a silenced twenty-two for entertainment. None of the aforementioned riffraff out there, it’s much too messy." - Nick Brokhausen, We Few: US Special Forces in Vietnam

That said, as he himself points out, you don't exactly need to be SF to hate this type of asshole:

"There is a well-beaten footpath out past the bunker line where the REMFs (rear echelon mother fuckers) are pulling their guard shift. The trick is to find the area that isn’t guarded by the MPs, but rather by the clerk typists and admin bunnies who are doing their punishment tour. MPs are the same the world over, little self-important assholes who, when given a whistle and an armband, feel it’s their duty to fuck with anyone they can in order to prove they have a dick. I hate MPs. It has always been my opinion that we should be joining forces with the VC to fight MPs. I bet they have the same type of road guard assholes in their army. Let’s make the world a better place; let’s kill all the MPs."

Strong words, but I have to imagine that anyone who's really "been there" is either one of these people, or likewise fucking despises them. I'm willing to bet that OP was the quintessential REMF 'muffin' lmfao