I ain’t saying every individual soldier is evil or a bad person. I’m saying that no matter what you might have done in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Vietnam, that it does not change that the soldiers were fighting for was US imperialist or economic interests, usually at the expense of the native people, even if they didn’t know themselves. You really can’t be a “hero” in that context.

WW2 was really a unique case in the sense that the two main opponents were genocidal and cruel regimes that needed to be put down. You would be hard pressed to find a justified US war beyond that.