It reminds me of the joke about politicians -- once you can fake authenticity you can fake anything.
I primarily respect soldiers because I assume they were f-cked in the birth lottery yet they managed to somehow beat the odds in a culture where the poor are told to drop dead. And then there are those dwindling few rich families, mostly southern, which still preserve the noblesse oblige attitude and actually put their as-ses on the line to defend values which the rest of American society doesn't really measure up to anymore.
But. If you were a PFC file clerk I'm not going to lay down and worship you. A third grade teacher does far more for our country than any soldier. And as to that solider, while I have nothing against him we should all have a lot against the MIC which uses him as a literal human shield to gin up their profits.
The greatest "political correctness" of this (and pretty much every other) country is to extol the virtues of the representative of the coercive power of whoever owns the state. The guy who suffers most from that is typically the solider himself, who is just a disposable unit in the balance sheet of the rich f-cks making their fortunes using him as their public face.
And one of the ways they do that is the way Tulsi did -- take a sweet sunny vacation for a couple years safely in the green zone filing your nails and then run as one of Our Brave Heroes. Directly to the extent that you respect real soldiers, you should be offended by that cynicism.