Let me ask you a question: How come you never joined the military?

i've thought abt it a million times. mostly i think i just dont want to have to get in shape

should have asked him for a date
xpost

I'm never asked this question. I wonder why.

hahaha Ned

I felt a bit bad for laughing, and then I couldn't think of anything to say that wouldn't start a pointless argument with a guy who was just the messenger (of death).

just in case we needed any more reason to believe hurting was just a big elitist dickhead at heart

you'd better be fucking glad blount quit posting

haha, coming from you

why would ANYBODY join the armed forces!!! what a DUMBASS move!!!

$20k bonus!!!!!!!!!!

and a free ipod!!!!!!

why would ANYBODY join the armed forces!!! what a DUMBASS move!!!

I have friends who joined the military, asshole.

i've considered it. medical school is expensive, dudes.

I went to public schools from elementary through college so it's not unheard of.

oh boy.

well then what the fuck is your problem, asshole?

I am really, seriously, not even ABOUT to crawl into this garbage on ILX because nobody besides me, blount or chuck eddy even knows what the fuck they're talking about or what you can do in/with a military career; I don't give a sticky tan SHIT what your dad did for a fucking living. So your options are thus: either email all three or at least one of the people I just mentioned or sit here and watch the horseshit to roll in.
Hooray.
-- TOMBOT, Wednesday, September 15, 2004 10:34 PM (2 years ago)

because nonetheless I couldn't help but laugh at the irony of asking the question in such a rhetorical way at this particular time in our history

if you know what it's like to feel a litte bit desperate to get out of your situation, why you going to laugh at a recruiter like an incredibly rude fuck and then start some smug thread about it? You're better off kicking a homophobe out of your hotel for the can of worms you just opened, son.

please at least say it was the LCD soundsystem City's A Sucker laugh and not just a regular hee-hee

Miss Manners needs a letter about how to handle this question.

She's good with these things.

Tombot too but he's a little less faux-Victorian.

btw long xxxxxxpost to cankles: that's why I joined the air force yo! of course that turned out to be kind of a mistake in the long run but hey it's not like I was going to make a career out of it in any of the branches

then again even the USAF makes you do group PT now, fuck that noise in the rumpus

Relax dude, I chatted with the guy for a minute, took his card. I don't think the recruiter walked away feeling his pride hurt by the elitist prick a full head shorter than him. I was just surprised that this line is being used.

haha, i know dudes that joined precisely because it would force them to get in shape

at this point, reasons for:

-- free medical school + i get paid while i'm there??
-- potentially interesting training (from an admittedly morbid, medical point of view: wartime = loads of opporunities to learn/do some actual life savin')

against:
-- i go to iraq and get killed
-- associated with military industrial complex
-- four years of being a $NEEDS_OF_THE_MILITARY on a base somewhere AFTER going through residency = not a real doctor until i'm basically 40

xp wait that is the actual line he used?

do you like godsmack?

also: Hurting, aren't you, like, old?

(old, in this case, equals over, say, 22)

Man, I bandied about the idea once or twice but I just figured I am way too yellow bellied and bad with shouting authority figures, but I kinda understand why some of my friends have gone off, in that wandering around the world away from everyone you know kind of way. I don't know how I would respond to recruiter solicitations, I would probably lie and say I'm Quaker or something.

cos i'm a girl

like that's an obstacle these days? (xxp)

also: don't want to die for country

Would it be acceptable to say in a friendly way, "I'd prefer not to discuss it?" That's how I deal with anyone who asks me questions.

also: Hurting, aren't you, like, old?

Well I'm about to be 28, which is probably another reason I laughed a little - I was kind of surprised he asked me. I did happen to be less than a block from the local high school, which is probably why the guy was in the neighborhood, and unfortunately there are plenty of kids at that school who probably feel desperate to get out of their situations.

I just started this as a 1am goof thread, really. Sorry if it came off as smug.

I was going to say I should probably refrain from full flame warrior mode bcz I think you had a bit of a phrasing accident up there went you asked the question. OTOH a lot of folks are joining up now because this is the first time in a while, if you just read the MSM, that it doesn't seem like an instant ticket to the Big Dusty Tunnel Of Maiming, regardless of accuracy in reporting.

$20K is a lot of change to cover debt to people. I really resent the attitude (can you tell?) of people with half-decent jobs and/or prospects to act like enlistment is some kind of low caste option for fry cooks and quik-mart stockers from west virginia. It's a ticket out for a lot of people, underprivileged or otherwise. It's the best form of "affirmative action" in the entire country. Depressing!

The composition of our armed services and veterans represents the best and worst of this country, that we have some insanely great citizens and yet we can't figure out a better way to utilize them than to stuff them in a uniform for a half dozen years or so. The caliber of the human beings just sitting in our VA hospital waiting rooms should be a huge blaring wake-up call to US private industry and how they manage people, but hey, nobody in charge of anything has a fucking clue about the military anymore.

I suspect Michael Bay probably has a better idea of what Americans are capable of than most politicians and executives do at this point.

river wolf if you go into any service other than the Navy you'll most likely be doing clinical work. You get loads of time off to go hike and camp and climb up rocks, free medical school is HUGE bonus, and uh what do you mean you won't be a doctor? you'll be a doctor the whole time, just wearing some issue scrubs instead of whatever you want.

e-mail me anybody who actually wants to talk about this question. I'm a lot more honest than 99% of recruiters.

and speaking of "old" the army is taking 40-year-old HS dropouts at this point, I think. Seriously.

One serious question - would there be a good reason at this point not to try for a civilian contractor job over a military job at this point (if you didn't feel a particular military calling)? I mean I'd imagine it's at least slightly less dangerous and probably pays a lot better, and it sounds like what would be low-wage jobs stateside might pay about as well as the army does there. I mean I don't have the exact numbers here, but I'm wondering.

I know the Australian army also pushes the Med deal. I assume there's some kind of obligation to stay in the army after completing the degree?

xps

$20K is a lot of change to cover debt to people. I really resent the attitude (can you tell?) of people with half-decent jobs and/or prospects to act like enlistment is some kind of low caste option for fry cooks and quik-mart stockers from west virginia. It's a ticket out for a lot of people, underprivileged or otherwise. It's the best form of "affirmative action" in the entire country. Depressing!

yeah but the bonus is actually half up-front, then the rest over the life (er...) of the service contract. prolly not tax-free either, i'm guessing. so not exactly the most straightforward advertisement.

Hurting: the vast majority of civilian contractor jobs are given to veterans. I've met a few rare dorks who managed to get into the business without putting on battle dress, but they represent a tiny fraction of the workforce. Additionally, if you're talking about jobs overseas, the level of danger is pretty much the same, and you don't have the health benefits of military service to back you (and your family) up. I would argue, in fact, that the contractors signing up to go get a fat paycheck in the green zone are dumber than the soldiers, in many respects. Not just because I have a natural instinct to hate them or anything.

w4lter: anytime the military pays for some degree of your education, even military training, there is an implicit amount of time you are required to serve unless forcibly discharged for medical or judiciary reasons in order to give the service their money's worth. Usually it's a one-for-one balance; in my case I spent just over two years learning to be a cryptologic linguist (korean) and nobody remembered to update my paperwork, so I got out after exactly four years of service (hey hey!) when I probably should have been active duty for another two months. In the case of med school, uh, yeah, that's going to be a while, but you're doing exactly what you wanted to do in the first place, just in uniform and for less money (strongly offset by lack of loan payments).

okay j0r3l but $7K upfront with another $7k over six years is still a nice chunk of change for people who don't live in NYC.

frankly I dunno why the money is even under discussion though because really after about four weeks in you realize money is exactly the least important thing. I think what I miss most about the military is having a gang of bros all in the same situation being able to smoke and bitch and hang together every day at work and every weekend.

Why would anyone want to be a pawn of bloodthirsty war profiteers. Good for you Hurting.

okay j0r3l but $7K upfront with another $7k over six years is still a nice chunk of change for people who don't live in NYC.

lol hey dude i'm unemployed, and even so, that's a nice chunka change anywheres. even dc which can be almost as expensive as nyc with 10000000x less interesting stuff going on (if we're gonna go east coast location chauvinist in this thread, which is like 99% of all ilx threads these days anyway - CIO ITS FUCKING BORING) (that's a general CIO, not to you in particular)

no, sir, my point was more this: if you get yourself killed i don't think you get paid. there ain't money enough in the world for me to want to join the military, even if i could use that strings-attached not-really-$20k right now.

and hey comraderie is nice and all, some of us got enough from being in the boy scouts. I KEED.

anyway, certainly i don't begrudge anyone their choice to do whatever they want. i just figure if i'm gonna get blown-the-fuck-up, my family should get a cool million or something. i dunno. time to sleep.

hey it's like up to a quarter million now. they do have some of the best life insurance in the game.

dude i can already get usaa right now thanks to dad and stepdad, don't need to sign up for no iraq war.

Would you really kill for bush if he gave you a million?

Tom, another question out of curiosity - what are the chances that the average low-prospect recruit would avoid a dangerous tour in a war zone right now? I mean I assume they're pretty desperate to get bodies over there, and I imagine there's more than a little truth-bending in the recruiting process.

i'd kill for ned raggett if he gave me a million! that wasn't what i said, lame troll dude.

Hmm Tombot was pretty tetchy 11 yrs ago

― faculty w1fe (silby), Wednesday, August 22, 2018 7:41 AM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Came back from the military like that

He's still kinda tetchy 11 years later tbf.

what capn jolly-bot a bit tetchy? I'm shocked!

I guess if you combine Northern Jutland and Norway it's good to guard against threats from the west but we haven't controlled Norway since 1814 and haven't been scared of threats from the west since, well, 1814. I don't think it's really of any strategic importance to us.

You sitting right on top of a lot of Germans there though.

No, that's Southern Jutland. I'm getting my Danish geography confused again.

The clue is in the name...

Not necessarily, part of Jutland is in Germany after all.

it was only the other year I became aware of that odd little (formerly Prussian) chunk of Russia between Poland + Lithuania. I know it's WW2/Cold War legacy thing, but come on Russian Federation, you already live in 10 time zones, don't take the piss!

was only reading about that last week. hard to say who came out best rly.

oh yeah, Barbarossa is just completely apocalyptic and monumentally bad for both sides alright.

mini aspects of that front are v compelling. the changing shape of finland and the final result of the land lost, the verdict that they had to pay reparations etc is a very interesting study vs their maintaining a semblance of self-direction and the relatively v few losses they suffered (also ofc the camps they themselves ran holding ethnic russians)

war, its fantastic

"(also ofc the camps they themselves ran holding ethnic russians)"

lucky bastards that didn't end up in a stalag! While the West were having ticker tape parades all the captured Red Army conscripts were getting sent out on cattle trains to the gulag archipelago, to learn the concept of fighting to the death for the motherland and probably die of starvation. Red Army blues!

I've just realized Fred wasn't banned after all, hurrah!

I grew up a pretty staunch pacifist, raised by Christian pacifists. As a teenager I turned into a hippie pothead. I would get regular recruitment calls from Sgt. Smith. I only spoke to him a couple times as he tried to wheedle me down. "I don't want to join the army - I just want to play guitar." "Oh, you can play music in the army, son..." My guitar teacher also tried to convince me to sign up. My lack of discipline was all too apparent to him. 1996 would have been a great time to join up!

Later, as a college dropout in San Diego with very few prospects, I really considered joining the Navy or Coast Guard. I had met many enough military people around town to cast off the notion that military people were all belligerent warmongering blockheads (some of them were definitely morons don't get me wrong). The ships and helicopters and planes were highly visible out there and were really neat! I mentioned my thoughts to a friend who I really trusted and she struck me down immediately saying like "Why in the hell would you think of doing that? That really doesn't seem like you." And she was right in that it didn't seem like me. But it may have been a better growth opportunity than forcing my way though the rest of the English Literature degree that I had been transferring through 4 separate colleges I kept dropping out of.

I lived with veterans in San Diego as well. Good people. But the way that one guy used to yell at night made me quite happy I never enlisted.

it may have been a better growth opportunity than forcing my way though the rest of the English Literature degree that I had been transferring through 4 separate colleges I kept dropping out of.

it was

x-posts: Dunno, probably local special interest or something? The whole conscription thing is completely pointless, everyone knows we can't defend ourselves against whoever could conceivably invade, and most likely we'd just be nuked since we're mostly just in the way. A populist in the seventies proposed that we'd get rid of the entire military and instead get an answering machine that said 'we surrender' in Russian

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

― Frederik B, Wednesday, August 22, 2018 11:15 AM (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Populist otm and I'm stealing the hell out of that one for o'er here.

Short answer: I thought it was the military that made my dad that way. Although in hindsight I think my dad might've just been that way. Also my perpetual problems with authority would have likely gone over like a lead balloon in that setting.

My timing couldn’t have been better, too. I enlisted in 1999, avoiding the dot com bust, and by 9/11 I’d already been trained for a job that had no applicability to the GWOT. And I tried to get over there, towards the end of my term, but was told to stay at my desk and wait for my orders to Korea instead. Those never came, so I CLEP’d the last credits needed for my undergraduate degree and got my honorable discharge in late 2003, when we were entering another bubble, and then left contracting work for federal employment just in time for the financial sector to seize up.

the assumption that nobody who joins the military has perpetual problems with authority always brings out the lols. You do all realize most of the military is composed of the boys who spent more time in the principal’s office than the rest of the class combined, yes?

I don't assume that at all. I just assume that, say, my tendency of telling managers that I'm not going to do a thing that I think is stupid would cause me no shortage of headaches in a military context.

In a military context they train you how to properly report on your decisions to not do stupid things and the managers are trained that they have to listen first before telling you to stfu and get busy with the stupid. It’s all done kinda loudly though.

It's never crossed my mind that I would be a good fit for the military. I was a sensitive kid growing up and I've had trouble keeping weight on since I was 14. I don't think I would last a week of basic training. That having been said, the militaristic ideals of routine, structure, discipline, teamwork, etc. all appeal to me. This thread underlines for me the fact that it would be nice if our society had something like a pacifist version of the military, devoted to waging the moral equivalent of war (though not the way that James characterized it).

i was upset about the lack of a space force

I mean pointing out that many successful military folks who have greatly enjoyed their careers also had significant issues with discipline and structure prior to boot camp can be a post hoc fallacy, sure, but it’s still funny to read all the people saying “oh, my issues with authority and institutions would make me a bad fit” when you’ve actually spent time around military people

(NB for the sake of clarification, I have spent a lot of time around military people, ensconced in military housing, etc. Just not so much as an adult.)

because I hate confrontation, hate yelling, hate people being upset with me let alone trying to literally kill me, dislike war in general and specifically the wars the US is currently engaged in, and also have no athletic ability to speak of

Those are all completely valid reasons!

Yeah, in many ways the question is similar to 'why did you never become a stockbroker?' inasmuch as my answer is 'I am probably ill-suited to that particular career path in almost every imaginable way' with the added bonus of compulsory proximity to that ill-fitting world for the bulk of my childhood.

el t getting mad defensive about why everyone isnt ex military is good thread fodder imo

im gonna start a thread asking the same thing for for civil service, and i hope to emulate his tone

I served as a medic in the Army Reserve from 1991-1993. It thought my problem in college was a lack of discipline (it wasn't), and it payed my bills. If WW3 had gone down in the 90s I would have called back as a mobile hospital ambulance/triage medic, probably.

Incidentally, its actually advantageous to have never fired a gun (yet have calm nerves and good eyesight) for Army firearms training. There were people in my company from rural backgrounds who'd hunted since childhood, but I was always in the top 2-3 on the range, downing targets at 150-300 yds.

i was a red diaper baby and far-left politically as a teenager so joining the british army was never in the cards for me. my brother, while going through a sort of conservative spell in his early 20s, tried to become an officer, much to my parents chagrin, but didn't pass the entrance test - did well on all the paper tests and physical bits but he's a bit reserved and doesn't project leadership at all so this was unsurprising.

oh yeah i guess also being from a catholic background in the west of scotland and abhorring the british army's role in northern ireland was definitely a factor

couldve joined....the other army

One of the few things I give the Great British Public credit for is that, despite the concerted efforts of the right wing press over many many years, they do not regard the British Army with any great reverence, certainly not comparable to the US Army in the USA.

to be fair the military worship in the u.s. is a kind of state religion. the "our brave boys" patter and apologia for war crimes is pretty mainstream in the uk

oh also I hate guns, add that to the list

I'm unconvinced many of the GBP are, er, convinced by the Our Boys stuff. Always seems to me like public school educated tabloid hacks second guessing the plebs.(xp)

all that endless minute's silences for our brave lads crap at football matches seems to be popular with a broad section of fans i.e. the middle class family types as well as the EDL/FLA alliance type vermin! Although some of that might be just classic mob psychology at work.

A lot is down to the differences in patriotism between the US and the UK - patriotism in the USA seems at least plausible, what exactly are we supposed to patriotic about in the UK? The House of Windsor? Protestantism?

Not being French.

Not even that, that's purely an English obsession.

im gonna start a thread asking the same thing for for civil service, and i hope to emulate his tone

― flaneur brayin (darraghmac), Wednesday, August 22, 2018 8:41 AM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

He'd stand by your side there probably

If I could take a standardized test and be slotted into a federal job guaranteed I would do it in a second

Too busy exploring the world and meeting different people

The whole identity/patriotism of one’s country has to be the most ass backwards thing the government has brainwashed people with

Mostly agree with dedalus/my boy james joyce on this

Controp: being a missionary is more eye opening than joining the military

My brother (3 years younger than me) just retired last year after 23 years in the Army. His oldest son joined the Air Force this year right after high school (just like dad) and just shipped off for training.

cubicle-less toilets (sorry for reddit link)

https://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/10aq2b/i_see_your_shitters_and_raise_you_with_a_military/