Yeah, I’m not generally anti-military, but there are two major problems with our military system that ensure I’ll always try to talk young people out of joining.
The first is that we’ve been inventing/starting proxy wars that we eventually send our own troops into. Our military should only be entering wars when we’re attacked.
The second is the rampant sexual-assault/rape problem our military has. As long as the system refuses to weed out and remove offenders, I’ll never say it’s a good idea for anyone to join.
i told the recruiter that my student loans were serviced by Sallie Mae. he told me that, for certain, my loans would be paid by the G.I. bill. i was desperate to move out of my parents house.
it wasn’t until the day before shipping out, the day that i raised my right hand and swore an oath, that i found out he lied. i went anyway and didn’t get my loans paid.
they will say ANYTHING.
Former Navy here. My experience was kind of opposite, however I knew when I rose my hand the first time it was bs. I told my recruiter I wasn’t going, and he said that that oath was solid, and I called him on it. I eventually went and spent nine years.
The oath was the only time my recruiter lied to me, but everything else was honest. I’m not saying he didn’t paint a rosy picture, he did, yet he told me not every day was going to be like that. I caught up with him for HARP duty, and he let me know how much he hated recruiting and wanted to go back out to sea (this is saying something because shore duty is supposed to be the shit for a duty station…I spent mine in Key West). The last time I saw him was in Norfolk on Pier 12 as he was making his way to the USS America, and I was making my way to the USS Enterprise.
There’s a lot of pressure to fulfill quotas, and a recruiter’s advancement is dependent upon making those quotas. It’s a lot of pressure for someone to have when the two to three years you spend on shore duty is classically supposed to be better than spending your time on a ship (or boat if you’re a submariner).
Good on them! Joining up is a scam. You get to trade your life for possibly getting a chance to further your education; that is if you don’t die during your service. And then, who’s freedom do you end up really fighting for because you end up fighting a foreign war? You end up fighting a war to enrich the billionaires more. Once your service is up, if you are unfortunate enough to have real and tangible mental trauma, you’re cast aside like someone who’s shelf life has expired. Fuck #Amurica.
Thats not entirely fair.
You also get to be used as a political stage prop during election season! /s
And don’t forget the damage from the uranium in the bullets blowing through the air and all the other damage that isn’t exactly straight up death
And also the long-term risks to your health. The likelihood of chronic back and knee pain as well as hearing loss is fairly obvious. However, there’s also exposures to toxic chemicals in both open and closed environments that can put you at risk for cancers (especially lung, bone marrow, kidney and bladder) when you’re older. It blows my mind that ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) is unconditionally accepted as a service-connected condition. No one has any idea what exposures might be causing this, but the prevalence of it in former military people as opposed to civilians is so much higher that the VA just accepts it. It’s and awful disease, untreatable (except nursing care) and incurable and the VA isn’t going to have to cover care for long.
That there might be a causal link between ALS and military service is something that I had no idea of. I had no inkling that it was accepted as a service-related condition. Yes, ALS is a godawful disease that results in a slow, prolonged, and often agonizing death. If I should ever develop it myself, I would just take a hot shot of fentanyl and go to sleep … permanently. Once ALS takes root, it is irreversible.
In the mid-00s, my junior-year class got pitched a “career test” which basically everyone signed up for, because we were all anxious about starting the college applications process. We show up, and surprise, it’s a bunch of recruiters giving the ASVAB. Middle fingers all around.
I’m thankful for my recruiter. He was a disillusioned E-5 in the Navy who hated the bureaucracy and complained about it all the time. He did not lie at all, and, frankly, I think I had a better time when I was in than he did.
But fuck joining. It’s a trap and you shouldn’t have to do that for a better life as I did.
