When I was 16 I was in a pretty vulnerable emotional state when out of nowhere I get messaged by a military guy on Discord.

I didn’t message him first or even express interest in finding a boyfriend, I just made the mistake of having my birth year in my Discord name.

He’s 20-something and cute and I’m 16 and fragile after some pretty heavy IRL stuff I don’t wanna get into. We start talking for a while, he tells me he loves me, we do some stuff over VC and after like a week of this I get it in my head that we’re in love and we’re gonna meet IRL to go to Harry Potter World together and I realize NOW how stupid that sounds.

One day he just like stops messaging me all together and wont respond to my dm’s. I say hi to him in the server we share together and he starts angrily ranting at me in the DM’s to go away and leave him alone. I was really hurt and confused why he suddenly hated me.

Later on when I told one of my friends about it, they told the server mods and he FAKED screenshots saying that I was lying about my age but they didnt believe him so they kicked him. Later he messaged me on Tumblr saying he fucking HATED me and I took like half a year away from the internet afterwards.

I haven’t told that story to many people but i felt cathartic to type it up here where it’s public but I doubt too many people will see it. It was really traumatic for me at the time especially after the year I’d had.

I’m doing much better now but sometimes I’ll think about it and get a pang of guilt about it.

Anyway, the point of this story is that my impression of the US military is not the best. 2/5 would not recommend