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Sometimes, semi-intimate contact with the locals is NOT desirable. Sometimes, overwhelming, overaweing ready-for-anything posture IS the way to go.
Now, having said that, sometimes it ain't. If you can get away with that 'cop on the beat' schtick, then by all means, play the game.
Remember, soldiery and what is essentially a helpless populace may lead to mutual feelings of contempt, and the next thing you know, somebody's got panties on his head, or schoolboys are getting gang-wailed by tough-guy soccer hooligans in camo. Over-familiarity, theft by either side from the other, rape of local women, swindling soldiers by the hungry local sharky-boys...all of this is inevitable when foreign soldiers mix with the locals. It has ever been so, and it is only one of the milder reasons that war is such a plague on the people whose land it comes to.
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"The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it, and if one finds the prospect of a long war intolerable, it is natural to disbelieve in the possibility of victory."
- George Orwell
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