For a lot of Vet Benefits, like Affirmative Action inclusion, homeloans, and USAA access you just need to have served an enlistment period (mostly 4-6 years, some times longer for things like Doctors and pilots; they were doing less than 4 during 'The Surge' for grunts). Sometimes you don't need need an honorable.
I don't like to speculate on the nature or character of people's service unless they make a thing out of it, and Phil really doesn't.
If you deployed in the sand, even if you were pogging it up you still probably took incoming fire and had to run for the bunkers. Even if you never left the wire and just guarded a gate, you had to wonder each time you posted if this was going to be the day some Haji decided to try to reenact the Beirut Barracks. So in addition to being in an area not fit for human habitation being surrounded by backward sandniggers who want to kill you on principal, you are also stuck on the otherside of the world from everyone you cared about for a year with no hope of getting back while the rest of the world keeps moving - he was serving at a time when hopping on Zoom to say good night to the kids wasn't a thing, you got like 30 minutes for a satellite call in the middle of the night once a week, the people you cared about had to come down to the USO, and you had to pay for it.
This shit takes a toll. And everyone copes with that stress in their own way so there's no standard to how people process or want to tell the story, or if they do.
So unless the gate guard is trying to puff himself up to be Rambo, he served; End of story.
I will laugh at Phillip's spergtastic, unrealistic, and completely unaligned with reality "training" methods all day long. But if he's not trying to trade on his military experiences, I don't particularly care how poggy he was.
Though if he did start trying to cash in combat veteran chips, it sounds a bit like he never left Germany but twisted some words to make it sound like he did without saying he did.
