Would you look down on someone who hasn't deployed?

You don't say if you're Regular Army or Reserves. I wouldn't look down on you either way. I'm a Vietnam veteran, but I enlisted to go into intelligence, a relatively safe job. I certainly didn't hold it against draftees who were deployed to Germany or Panama. In your case, I'd just consider myself lucky that we haven't had a major war in the past 8 years with a call up of hundreds of thousands of troops to go into combat. Yet.

How's your Farsi?

Look, I'm a proponent for at least a 15 million man Army so they DON'T have to be deployed. Nobody picks a fight with a 15 million man Army. They pick fights with under-staffed and over-extended armies. They know we can't use our nukes except as a last resort, and our troops are so spread out all over the world that we couldn't put together a 1 million troop invasion if our existence depended on it.

While I"m totally on board with an all-volunteer military, I don't like the concept of the Reserves. Leaving families in a position where they don't know what's going to happen and can't plan anything is totally unfair to them. I'd rather see them in the Regular Army learning skills that are transferrabble to civilian life, in addition to combat training.

Soldiers should spend more time getting an education and building up their skills while they are in and preparing for the day their military service ends instead of worrying about a combat patch which will mean absolutely nothing when you go to look for a job after service.

I do not look down on anyone serving in the military period!

No, nuff said.

Not deploying is usually not a choice. What about all the people who serve in peace time? What about people who have skills that are not deployment skills? There is no shame in never deploying. There is shame in dodging the draft and getting fake medical reports issued for you.

No. When you serve, you serve at the service's discretion. You can't control what unit gets deployed or the rotation schedule.

For the most part no. You go where you get assigned. I had a good friend who was in the 82nd in the 80s and again in the mid 90s. He had just transferred units, when the unit he had just left deployed to Grenada for Urgent Fury. While we were in DS School, his unit deployed as part of Operation Just Cause. Then, a year into being on DS duty, Desert Storm kicked off. We heard they were taking CM Soldiers to augment units. We almost had orders until the clerk noticed our DS patches. He stopped typing and asked what our unit was--D Co, 82nd CML BN. Clerk then asked where our headgear was. We had left of DS hats in the waiting area on purpose, and he didnt find it humorous. He proclaimed our Soldiers would deploy before us, and a few did.
So, no, unless the Soldier deliberately avoids it through questionable means.

To be honest brother, I have always just kept to myself. If I payed more attention to what others are doing or not doing then it kinda takes away from what I am doing and why. I signed up to go to war and I am glad I got several opportunities to do just that. If I looked down at others that dont, it kinda distracts me from the reason I did and it isnt really productive. I have never been the kid of guy that compares my effort to others, I focus on the stuff that matters.

You can never really tell whether someone tried not to deploy or was a victim of circumstance.

I have yet to deploy and it’s frustrating. I am deployae in every sense of the word and volunteer to go, but it just hasn’t happened yet. There’s a feeling that I can’t truly earn the right to be called a veteran unless I deploy. I want a little military with my military, if ya know what I mean?