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Notes -
Another way of putting this is "your grandparents probably grew up around people who remembered the Civil War."
You could call it that if you wanted, I guess. I just think culture is very powerful. As you say, the South is no longer a cultural and economic backwater, but during the time that it was I think it formed a lot of habits that endured. However, I don't think the "hard times" are the ONLY reason for those habits - Southern marital culture, for instance, predated the Civil War. I do wonder if they helped preserve them.
IIRC Native Americans are the MOST over-represented group in the Armed Forces. Not to start up the oppression Olympics, but they have seen a lot of hard times. I suspect that "poor => military opportunity" is probably more relevant here than "tough => warrior spirit" but I imagine there's room for both, along with a hearty helping of family warrior tradition.
The average age of enlisted personnel is 27. If you assume their parents had them at age 30 on average, that would mean that their grandparents were born around 1938, which is probably a little early. 1938 was 73 years after the Civil War ended. Their grandparents would have grown up around people who remembered the Civil War in the same sense that someone born in 1991 grew up around people who remember World War I; I was born earlier than that and I don't recall a single instance of anyone talking about memories of WWI. The oldest people in my life, who were well into their 80s by the time someone born in 1991 would have been old enough to remember anything about world events, were themselves not old enough to have any meaningful memories of WWI. The last Civil War veterans reunion in 1938 at Gettysburg attracted 2,000 people. The average age was 94. Coincidentally, my own grandmother and great aunt's grandfather was a Civil War veteran, and I only know this because of genealogical research I did when I was in my 30s. Keep in mind that they were born in 1913 and 1911, respectively, and he died in 1920 at age 80, so that gives you an arbitrary example of when a fairly typical Civil War veteran would have passed, and how old one would have to be to have any memory of them being alive.
Anyway, I can't find good numbers on this, but a report from Brown University on the state of origin of people serving in post-9/11 wars at least points in the right direction. Assuming their work is representative, while the fact that the South provides a disproportionate number of soldiers is true, your thesis doesn't hold when you look at things at a more granular level. Most of this is driven by three states—Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina—that have vastly disproportionate numbers. But Florida gets an asterisk since its population didn't start taking off until well after the Civil War and relatively few of its present-day residents are culturally Southern, with only 43% born in the former Confederacy. Alabama is in the top-ten per capita, but Mississippi isn't; it's close to the national average, as are Arkansas and Louisiana, which has the highest native-born population of any Southern state at 78% born in-state.
Even if the effect does exist to the extent, it doesn't seem to have much of an effect when applied to the military as a whole. The top four states in terms of total enlistees mirror the top four states in population: California, Texas, Florida, and New York, in that order. Nine of the top ten are the same; Pennsylvania takes the biggest drop, from 5 to 9. Michigan, tenth in total population, is replaced by Virginia which is twelfth in total population. South Carolina, Alaska, and Hawaii punch above their weight when it come to producing enlistees, but their populations are small enough that it doesn't move them much on the list. South Carolina moves from 23 to 17. Alaska moves from 49 to 44. Hawaii moves from 41 to 39. The correlation between population and number of enlisted is 0.98. You can criticize the numbers because they are only a snapshot of a certain subset of enlisted men taken at a certain time and not representative of say, everyone who has served in the past 20 years, but I would expect variation due to sample size to smooth out with better data, not go in the opposite direction.
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I feel like you need to be in your 50s(?) for that to be true. My grandmother was born ~1940 so it would be hard for her to interact with an adult with meaningful memories of 1865.
I am not yet 35 and one of my grandparents was born before 1930 and I think they were all born before 1940...but perhaps this is unusual!
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Martial or marital culture? I'm presuming from context that you meant martial as in military. Otherwise, I'm quite curious about the intricacies of the continued culture surrounding marriage from before the Civil War.
Martial, my fat-fingers!
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