What is the value of military veterans holding public office?

For a voter considering which candidates for public office to support and/or endorse, might a candidate with military experience offer unique and more valuable insight than one who does not have military experience?What is the value of military veterans holding public office?Military service can give tremendous experience in many areas. You meet people from all over the world and discover that color, ethnicity, and religion have little to do with a person's worth. You get to see foreign lands and cultures from a safe perspective. You find out that you can live without all the niceties that you grew up with. The motto: "the army builds men" has a lot of truth to it.
On the other hand, being a non productive member of society and getting paid for it can lead to an attitude of being owed. I was ashamed when I got my first army pay because I had done nothing productive to earn it. I was just there. I did not like the waste of time and material or the dumbed down attitude of working to the lowest common denominator.
So, like most everything else, it is what you make of it. There is no doubt that John McCain has experience and insight that Obama and Clinton can never have. That can be good in some facets of governing but skew the attitude away from the more social side of governing. I told my children that if you are not a Democrat when you are 21, you have not heart. But if you are not a Republican when you are 40, you have not brain. Obviously, we need industrial and social programs.What is the value of military veterans holding public office?Everyone offers something unique to public office. What a military veteran offers is that he or she at some point in his/her life decided that the country and our way of life is more important than his own life. To this end he offered himself up to protect the nation. That doesn't mean that he isn't a dumbXXX and could be a complete idiot in elective office.What is the value of military veterans holding public office?Being a veteran does not make someone a gifted politician. Jimmy Carter was a Naval Nuclear submarine officer and he is not held as one of the top presidents. One of the worst vets to hold public office was Ulysses S. Grant. He was great on the battle field but horrible as a president. What really matters is the candidates understand of how things work and the ability to make good judgments that benefit the country or community that they live in. By the way, I am a veteran so this is not an opinion from someone with no military experience.