A good chunk of those in the military are basically those who can't succeed in the real world, and drag down the service for those who don't join up for self-serving reasons.
Total BS. We have a totally voluntary military so the military has the luxury to pick those who are smart enough to do what they are assigned to do.
There is no question that some of the men in combat are there for the excitement of putting their lives on the line and others are there to kill a human being. Better that those guys get it out of their system in Afghanistan than here.
Again, this info comes from casual conversations I've had with those I know who serve.
Can we judge you by the people you hang out with???
I know that my best friend basically just joined the military because he never liked school and it was the only career that required basically no school aptitude to succeed in.
That’s funny. When I joined the USAF I spent the first four months in intensive technical training before I went to a base near Austin, Texas where I worked in the bomb dump. Then I went to Thailand and worked harder than I had ever worked and haven’t worked as hard since. To work on a nuclear weapon takes almost two years of training, the electronics training is pretty long too.
I fear that your friend will be killed if he doesn’t do his book learning.
Really? With all the FOBbits going over seas for 6 months then coming back claiming all sorts of disability expecting the government to set them up for life because they had to sit in a tent for 6 months?
Those are the few and the ashamed of themselves.
This was actually a big reason for my cousin in the navy going career (he originally wanted to be a teacher and the Navy was a way to pay for that) now he's 9 years in and last I heard he was a CPO.
So, when you told us about your best who friend jointed because he is stupid you forgot about your cousin who is smart and wanted to get an education for his service in our military??
There was just a terrorist attack on our military in Germany.
if you are white and want to go to college, there ain't **** for you and you are SOL unless you can afford to pay for it yourself
I agree that it isn’t easy but my son-in-law gets $18K per year to go to graduate school. He makes all As, his parents disappeared when he was ten and he lived with his older sisters until he started working his way though school. He also works at the school in the chemistry lab but I still have to help them out from time to time. He is so liberal that it’s hard for me to like him but he may learn once he goes to work in the real world.
spoken like someone who has never been there.
I have to agree. When I was in Thailand, August sixth, 1968 I was driving an RT forklift loading bombs onto a forty foot trailer. I had just loaded two trailers with 750 pound bombs and was about to load another trailer when our relief came a few minutes early. I gave the best forklift in the bomb dump the James and his crew chief decided to go a few rows back and start loading 500 pounders. We took them to the locations with 500 pounders and went back to our squadron area. I was have drunk by 7:15 PM playing cards when one of the guys said that he was too drunk to play so he got up and went out the back door. The he burst back in with his hands over his ears and said that there was going to be an explosion. Then the ground shook just as I got to my feet to go out and see what he was talking about. The fire that the guy had seen was gone but the sky was still full of falling sparks in the direction of the bomb dump. We thought that we must be under attack because the explosion was so close. By the time I got my cloths back on we heard that there had been an accident in the bomb dump. After James loaded all of the trailers in the 500 pound area the crew came back to the 750s and when James picked up the first two bombs two 750s the last two 750s the top row fell off. We later learned that the bombs were manufactured wrong by GM. Because they had a lot of powdered explosive in them the friction of the bombs hitting together caused the explosive to ignite. A second later one of the bombs ruptured from the pressure inside. The pressure wave blew James about 70 feet straight back. The crew thought that he must be dead so they didn’t look back as the jumped on the truck to get out of the bomb dump before the rest of the 400 750s exploded as one bomb. James got up and started running behind the truck and caught them when the crew chief stopped to pick up the guard at the inner gate. For thirty minutes one bomb after another cooked off in the fire, popping like popcorn until the whole revetment detonated high order. Our best forklift was blown into many pieces, our tractor and light machine was torn to shredded, every building in the bomb dump was damaged and there was sensitized explosive all over the roads that were too dangerous to sweep so we had to pick it up by hand. James was a basket case for the first two weeks and then he sobered up and came back to the bomb dump after five weeks. When the investigation team came they had us set up a revetment just as like Baker 6 was when James came in with the forklift. Then a couple of high ranking officers stood there as James was going to show them what he did. They were careful to tell him not to touch the bombs with the forks but to just get close. But, James couldn’t get his foot on the bottom rung of the ladder. He would try but his foot would start to shake and he never did drive the forklift again. So I had to do the demonstration and as I sat there in the position I knew that if James hadn’t come to work a few minutes early I would have been the one blown from the forklift and I might have been killed. James wanted out of the military but he had to stay and I doubt that he will ever get over being blown from the forklift and then being left behind by his crew. The rest of the loading crews were not very nice to the guys that left James on the ground, knowing that three people had been killed in the same situations when they ran out to get save people that were down. Normally high explosives can tolerate fire for no more than five minutes. In many cases the big bang will happen in less than a minute. So dragging James’s 200 pound body onto the truck could have gotten them all killed but James would have tried to save any of them so he was a little pissed. If James is paying attention he could get PTSD today. I carry a piece of one of the first bombs that popped in my truck to remind me how close I came to death. The forklift drivers were expected to go at full speed and I broke all of the records for the most the fastest. It was a beautiful thing to watch as the forklift spun its front tires when I changed gears with the engine at full power.