To be fair...

I want to point out that for many of our friends, people we liked and respected, the army was a great thing. It let them do an important job, gave them responsibility and experience - self respect.We knew people who were escaping poverty and prejudice, people who were serving a cause they believed in, people who wanted to do something meaningful. I don't think the importance of all of those things can be underestimated.

The army is an extreme culture because it has to be. It isn't a corporation quietly churning out widgets and watching a bottom line. Instead, it's an organization whose primary product is intangible, and in it's most basic sense unachievable: security. And that means life and death - literally.

Kirk's experience wasn't the army's failure, or his - it was a series of events, a confluence of personalities, that resulted eventually in an intolerable situation for him.