It’s an out if you grow up poor and in a poor region of the country. You get training and free medical and money for college. You get to serve your country.
I wouldn’t discount the money. It’s not great when you start out but if your job prospects aren’t looking so hot elsewhere it can be a decent option.
From talking to the ex-military people I know it seems that the job training aspect was also important. It’s a biased sample of course since I don’t know many plain old enlisted riflemen but technical training does seem to have lead to some jobs after service even without looking at the people who use the military to become pilots or to get engineering / language schooling paid for.
For a lot of the folks I grew up around, it’s sports or the military as a way out. Sucks but that’s the way it goes.
Training (including potential benefit of GI bill), healthcare, good retirement pension, free room and board. I think it’s a reasonable package, all around, for someone without a bachelor’s + (>65% of the country).
It is the easiest way to get a federal air traffic control job, which has a median pay of about $125,000. Back when I was in the military, though, my unit was entirely rotten.
I was a plain old enlisted rifleman. No practical work training to speak of, though of course a good base of discipline and attention to detail and so on. That said, I got my first tech job almost entirely because of the infantry service. That was 1986, not sure it’s a good strategy now.
The non-traditional students I teach, often transfers, who are veterans mostly tell a similar story. Where they grew up, it was either make meth/sell crack or go into the military. Rural or urban, most come from backgrounds where at best they were looking at finding work doing construction or retail if they were lucky, food service if they weren’t. The military looks awful good in that situation.
As an aside, the veterans who come to school here are generally fabulous to have around. In addition to the expected discipline and general savvy you’d expect, they usually have had a lot of diverse experiences and are able to look at problems/questions from different angles. Keep in mind these are vets who have self-selected into a college where we place a lot of emphasis on critical and integrative thinking skills, so perhaps they aren’t typical, but I enjoy having them in my classes.
Anecdotally, most of my students who are veterans have very mixed feelings about their time in the service. Most appreciate what they got out of it, but most also echo a lot of the concerns expressed here. One of the most constant and consistent things I hear is that they perceive the command structure in general to be corrupt, and don’t really trust or respect much of the leadership in the military. That rather frightens me.
I felt that way (corruption.) I wouldn’t use that term. I would say that the military breeds war hungry leaders. You’ve heard it before, all the military leaders tell the President how well they can do it, just give them the word. Upper management (officers) can get that way. Their life has been to have the well oiled machine ready to go, they want to rev the engines sometimes, and maybe take it out for a spin.
For only a few it’s the money. But for many it is steady employment and a way out of the hell hole they were in. Other perks: meals, lodging, healthcare for life (if you look at the VA as actual quality heathcare, which is a stretch,) training, travel, GI Bill for education, VA Loans for housing, VA perks for tons of miscellaneous things. If you retire in the military there is a pension and use of bases stores and a few other items for life.
For me it was the training. I walked out the door and tripled my military paycheck, and was a good way to quadrupling it. I have a VA loan on my current house. I’ve used, twice, VA healthcare when I was between jobs where I’m covered with much better healthcare. I’ve never used my GI Bill. I don’t regret the time I served but I’m weathered and wizened. ALL OF THE ABOVE only hides the fact that our military machine is propped up to look attractive so we even have a force. If it was mandatory there would be a much different outlook on our troops and us being in never-ending wars. If all the assholes on Capital Hill served, we’d have much less war. If all of the people in this country saw the military waste on a daily basis, they would be screaming to cut the budget as soon as possible.
It’s a charade for money. It’s a charade for getting what our leaders want (oil, destabilizing regions, putting figureheads that like us in charge of other nations, etc.) And we send a ton of kids mostly around the world doing things as part of that charade. As a former Navy guy, we couldn’t even leave port without an injury of some sort. We couldn’t end a cruise without a mishap. We couldn’t finish a deployment without losing someone in some way. Even in peacetime, people die. And a lot of them are still kids in my eyes, less than 21. In wartime or in conflict, it is even worse. And so little is either said or done about those with injuries of the mind. Each day, an average of 22 veterans commit suicide. The whole charade works because the benefits are always highlighted, but the drawbacks rarely are.
Oh, I agree with you on this, for sure. In my experience, though, recently the actual term “corruption” has cropped up a lot, with people describing (anecdotal evidence, of course) situations where actual dereliction of duty and criminal behavior are tolerated or endorsed. I’m sure it’s nowhere near widespread, but when you have senior officers cashiered for taking bribes and stuff,it does filter down to King Rat and all.
Don’t want to discount anyone’s opinion here as they’re all equally valid I’m just curious how many of you have recent military experience? (I’m talking last 20 years or so) As an Air Force officer going on 15 years now I’m always curious what the view of the military is from the civilian sector is and how those opinions are formed.
For example the individual above who strongly suggested that a primary reason for joining the military was to commit war crimes. I realize that’s likely not a majority opinion but I am curious where that opinion comes from. And trust me I’m not saying you need to have military experience to have an opinion (and great ideas) about the military.
Yeah, that was pretty messed up.
For the record, I work with active duty folks on a daily basis, and such a view is completely absurd.
I agree and I don’t think that’s a popular opinion. In general though I do believe that there is a significant gap in understanding between the civilian sector and the military and it goes both ways. Having never held a civilian job outside of college I honestly have no idea what the vast majority of people experience in their work lives but I think I have more opportunities to “see the other side” than civilians do unless they either work with them like you are are related to someone. So I’m always asking people who aren’t in the military what their thoughts are and how they were formed.
I think you have to understand that in the big picture this is a fairly liberal board, and right now there is a level of anger among liberals, unprecedented in my lifetime, about the direction of the country, including the country’s military activities.
This is something the general media narrative isn’t really getting, b/c we’re so used to coverage of “angry, energized” hard right supporters in this country, and the “angry left” gets dismissed as a fringe. But, over the last decades things have worsened to the point where normal, workaday, non-extreme, non-radical, non-crazy liberals are PISSED OFF. In a deep, serious way. We feel our country is losing its democracy, losing its moral way, and is in general under existential threat, from within.
So that leads to a lot of liberals, including many non-extreme, non-crazy, non-radical types who are seriously upset about the recent history of war crimes and military abuses in the US, and the right wing’s simultaneously cavalier and jingoistic attitude about it. And that anger is making liberals far more critical of the military than they used to be.
So I don’t agree with the sentiment that accuses people of wanting to join the military to commit war crimes (except for a tiny number of extremist assholes), but I do understand where the rage and attitude is coming from.
In the bigger pictures, US conservatives don’t really get this sea change on the left.
That comment probably puts it too strongly, but: I don’t think one can discount thousands of years of honing the process of attracting young men into organized armed bands whose chief purpose is to kill strangers. That is, after all, what it is about. My own experience of Infantry basic training is that it works: on the day I graduated from my training class, I was emotionally and physically ready to go anywhere and kill any armed person I was told to kill, without asking any questions about why we might be doing that. And I was far from the most prepared in my training company; some of them were downright frightening.
So, let’s not lose sight of what the military is for, and let’s be mindful of how it has been used by our country, and let’s consider that not a small number of people join up with some dream, some reasonable expectation, that they will be called upon to kill strangers. It isn’t FedEx. If you are in the military, you are part of a machine that kills people, all too often indiscriminately.
I’d argue you could make the very same argument about conservatives. I would hope that most Americans would be righteously angry over someone who commits war-crimes.
I’ll keep my own opinions to myself for now but I would say the vast majority of my non-military friends have absolutely no idea what the military does or any informed opinions about what it should do. I blame both them and the military for this.
Allen West is on line 2.
Edit: I mention him because we can’t even effectively prosecute and convict war criminals, and I think that’s evidence that a lot of people don’t really mind them at all, at least in the abstract.
What’s weird and completely unselfconscious about many older, Facebook / Fox News conservatives is that they’ve been sharing “REVOLUTION” memes and pics for a decade and been listening to an ever radicalizing extremist viewpoints from talk radio for three decades, about “black helicopters” and “Obama coming for your guns” and whatever the panic of the week is. I remember here in Texas when the military was going to run some exercises in the western part of the state all the nobs were white faced and wondering if ‘this was the moment’ when Obama sent Order 66 and the robotic drones of the Army began randomly shooting all those with Patriotic bumper stickers and Don’t Tread on Me flags. I was pretty flabbergasted then.
Now they see actual liberal rage and it’s not that they don’t know what to do - it’s that this is what they’ve expected for decades.
It’s a lot like a Tsar suspecting everyone of treason and executing anyone who looks askance at them. Eventually such antisocial behavior will start to create treasonous plots out of self preservation - and now all their paranoid behavior seems true to them. Conservatives want to utterly undo every single thing liberals have done while sharing SECEDE and GUNS4EVER, and then seem surprised when liberals do the same (if spirit if not in kind), as if such behavior and talk were a one-sided affair that only they possessed. To them it only justifies the paranoia they’ve lived under all this time.
Outside of the conservative bubble though I think people are becoming furious over the inability of government to respond to anything, more or less, which is the real source of liberal anger. If liberals could see a path forward and watched progress on important issues being made, even if it were slower than they desired, there wouldn’t be this urgent anger.
That’s basically my take on AOC et al when talking to conservatives. If you don’t want this kind of rhetoric, you’ve got to stand up against Trump and that kind of demagoguery. Of course at that point they stare and shuffle away because what they want is for everyone to agree that AOC is radical but also that Trump is great because liberals are by definition monsters.
The last time this kind of view became popular, our country basically fucked over a generation of young men who were drafted into the military to fight in Vietnam.
Nowadays, there’s no draft so it’s not quite as bad in that folks aren’t literally forced to go into combat like they were then, but the practice of blaming the men and women in uniform for the actions which are directed by our elected government? That’s an extremely bad practice.
Those people serve our country, and for the most part they are not responsible for the higher level strategic decisions of our country’s leadership any more than you are.
A bunch of these guys were sent into combat when they were barely adults at all, and suffered traumatic injuries both physical and mental.
Talking shit about them and saying that “they joined the military to commit warcrimes” is appalling and shameful. It is inexcusable.
Ha trust me I’m aware:). That being said, I’m sure there’s actual data out there somewhere but from pure anecdotal evidence I would say the vast vast majority of those who join the military (all branches) do so for reasons other than “kill something”.
But you’re right that is the purpose of the military at its most basic level. I think there has been a concerning trend over the past 30 years to use the military for things it’s not designed for. I also think the general attitude of attacking anyone who criticizes the military as “not supporting the troops” is dangerous and makes it very difficult to have a national conversation about what a proper use of the military is.
So I think 2 things are at play here. I don’t see this as evidence most people are okay with war criminals so much as most people just don’t give a fuck about what it means to be a citizen anymore. There is a strong apathy about the responsibility of citizenship and I think a lot of that comes from how unproductive our government is right now. Why bother getting angry when you’re convinced things can’t change.
On the flip side though I think you get an overreaction from those “defending” this because they are too close to it emotionally. They’ve lived through the deployments, the broken families, the losses, the instability or they know those who have. They’ve elevated the military (and SOF in particular) to hero status above reproach and that’s obviously not helpful either.