Words matter, and if you actually care about people losing their lives and innocence in these wars, then you should totally be on board with not calling the US military adventurism in Iraq "defending their country". It's mythologising the event in a way that's likely to get more people to sign up, when you should be getting fewer people to do so. The US unilaterally decided to invade a sovereign country that was no threat to it in the slightest, a country that was on the other side of the world, and that the US's own allies were begging the US to hold off. That is not 'defending'. 'Serving', yes, but not 'defending'. It also didn't do much for 'Freedom' in the area - one country is destroyed, another is imploding, and Europe is a little destabilised, all due to this adventurism.
If you care about people in general, you should call it what it is. Don't abuse soldiers who didn't do abuses themselves, but at the same time, don't mythologise them and chest-beat about how patriotic it is to go and kill brown people that aren't a threat to the people back home. Yes, 5000 US soldiers are dead, but that's only 1% of the death toll in Iraq from the invasion, and that doesn't include the knock-on effects in Syria. There was an article recently on HN about how even the guy who toppled the statue of Saddam in that famous photo-op, even he would rather live under Hussein's regime than modern Iraq.
If you want this kind of horror to stop happening, then people need to stop getting misty-eyed about serving their country in ways that are clearly not defence. There's a difference between 'not respecting' and 'not wanting the lie propagated'. Then the next time this kind of thing happens, there's not going to be a fresh source of recruits.
They served. They were certainly misused and misdeployed, but they served their country, they lost limbs, lives, time and the innocence that most of us enjoy our entire lives, and they deserve respect and support. Not worship; merely respect and support.