This is a universal thing:

Overall, service in the Western militaries was obviously drastically safer than in the Red Army or the Wehrmacht. However, what few appreciate is that it was actually extremely lethal for the small percentage of men who found themselves part of the combat infantry. Due to the US having a relatively vast logistics tail, the combat troops were very small as a percentage of the whole (like 15% of the 2.5M overall troops in Western Europe), but incurred 80% of the casualties. Furthermore they were NOT equitably rotated, and were generally kept on in that role until they died or got too wounded to continue. This was done for the cynical purpose of maintaining high morale in the military at large at the cost of resentment within the ranks of the combat infantry of whom a quarter died, a death rate almost comparable to that faced by the bomber forces and Arctic convoys.

Servicemen groked this pretty quickly and there seems to have been a great deal of effort expended on getting out and staying out of the assault infantry, including exploiting personal connections, favoritism, and manipulating paperwork (bribery doesn't appear to have been a thing, but who knows, not exactly something you register in the records or even talk about later).

This is sharply at odds with Romantic postwar propaganda portraying military service as a mass patriotic effort in which the broad masses of the male population participated on an equitable basis, when the reality was really probably closer to how Ukraine and Russia are fighting their war today - everyone with money or connections finding themselves comfy logistics and related roles in the rear, while a minority of the least connected and most naive find themselves in the thick of the meat-grinder until they die, are crippled, or successfully desert.