Both times members of my husbands unit have been deployed they sent a handful of cooks and mechanics.
Our forward support unit got attached to infantry this time around. Forward support is a pretty sure bet to go anyway and I’m sure hubby will go over sooner or later. I really don’t believe we will be leaving the sandbox any time soon sadly.
This kind of reminds me of that Pauly Shore movie where he and his friend join the National Guard as water purifiers thinking they will never get called up.
You’re absolutely correct and I didn’t explain my point well. Medic is a non-combatant role only in terms of the Geneva Convention - Corpsmen are absolutely in the shit as far as combat goes.
I meant only that ALL Marines are trained for combat and expected to be able to fill a combat role, no matter what their MOS. My brother was in the Corps; he was an intel weenie, a spook, but still expected to carry a rifle and had to do so several times on deployments with fleet Marines.
True. The Hospital Corpsmen who are stationed with Marines are non-combatants only in the sense that they don’t carry guns (other than sidearms which are meant to be used only in self-defense, or in the defense of one’s patients). My son is a Hospital Corpsman stationed with Marines. It can be a very dangerous job – several have died in action in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Now, it isn’t a slam dunk that a Hospital Corpsman will always be in a combatant situation. They don’t all go Green Side. Had Nick chosen, he could have gone to a ship, or to a clinic, instead of going to the Marines. And, even with the Marines, every deployment won’t be to battle. Nick just returned from a 6 month deployment – he went to 10 different countries, none of them Iraq. He’s moved to a different unit, now, and will (unless things change between now and then) be going to Iraq in January.
All that said, I never urge anyone to join to the military, even in peacetime. And I love the military; did 6 years active duty myself and my husband retired after 26 years active duty. But it can be dangerous, even in peacetime. And it is definately a difficult vocation and not for everyone. If someone is thinking about joining up and wants to ask me questions, I’m happy to answer them. And if somebody has decided to join up and tells me about it, I offer positive feedback and encouragement then. But I never suggest that someone ‘ought’ to join up. It’s a very personal decision.
The military is not a clearinghouse for losers and it shouldn’t be treated that way. I have known people with troubled pasts whom the military helped ‘straighten out.’ And I have known people with troubled pasts who simply carried their dysfunction with them into the military, where their shipmates had to deal with it.
The kid in the other thread seems like a mixed bag to me. The lazy-losing-jobs part may be something that military structure and discipline could overcome. But the stealing-big-wads-of-cash-from-your-mother part? More problematic. And his shipmates will not be as easy-going as his mother has been if he steals from them.
At any rate, it will do no good to try to force him into the service – unless it is his decision, it’s pretty unlikely to help… And I know my son and his guys don’t want a recalcitrant thief in their unit.
I’ll admit I was going more on my father’s anecdotal accounts than direct experience with the medics supplied to the Marines. He was active duty in the early 60s and when things were looking like they were heating back up along the North-South Korean border the Marines then at his base were given preperatory orders for an unscheduled deployment. He was also told by his hospital commander that he’d drawn the short straw, and would be embedded with the Marines, unless someone else were to volunteer before the movement actually happened. (The deployment ended up not happening, but it made for a tense 72 hours.)
Granted, this is obviously an emergency situation, not a planned deployment like the majority that are going to Iraq, now. But, I think it’s fair to say that it is possible to be pulled to the Marines, if there’s a need - whether the corpsman volunteered, or not.
This is probably true. IIRC, Nick’s Corp School class had to provide a certain number of students to FMF school (the training which HNs take before they go over to the Marines). As it happened in Nick’s class, the number of volunteers outstripped the available FMF slots. In fact, Nick (who wasn’t exactly top of his Corp School class) was worried he wouldn’t get into FMF.
Now, if there had been fewer volunteers for FMF than they needed, then I’m sure some HNs who preferred not to go Green Side, would have ended up there anyway. The Needs Of The Service always come first, of course.
I think it’s good for mellowing people out-in the sense that it often humbles a lot of arrogant jerks. One of my cousins joined the National Guard, and spent some time in Iraq. Now, don’t get the idea that I wanted him there. But I do think he came back a lot more mature and not so cocky. He’s also not so racist as he used to be.
So I think the military was good for him. However, he wasn’t a bad seed, or a totally fucked up individual before going in-just an annoying git. Foxy40’s son, if her descriptions are correct, would probably end up being court martialed.
Look at a list of the dead and you will see that they are mostly Army and Marines.
The Coast Guard, not so much.
But that’s exactly the viewpoint that I’m opposed to. If the kid is a problem going in, he’s likely to cause more problems within the military structure. And they have enough to deal with as it is. I stand by what I said earlier: the military trains soldiers, sailors and pilots. That’s all they should do, and if someone does not want to be one of those things, they shouldn’t be there. Saying, “He might fail out but who cares?” is not fair to an already overextended corps.
Join the Navy and volunteer for sub school. To the best of my knowledge no bubble head has been killed over in the sand box.
I also have $5 that says none will be.
Let me start by quoting the entirety of my respnse to magellan01’s original challenge in the other thread.
Yeah, I stand by this. As to whether every kid who volunteers to serve and joins the military today, or since around 2003, well, yeah, they are pretty crazy. Most male kids are at that age, all desperate to prove themselves and their manhood. Some are hoodwinked through their patriotism and run off to defend America, and while that is a noble sentiment they are being lied to. So maybe those kids aren’t so much as crazy, they’re dupes.
And parents who try to push their kids into the military, as a means of discipline, are crazy to do so. Again, now, with this apparently never-ending war against “terrorism” going on.
Have you forgotten that the Bush administration’s initial goals were much grander? To declare was on “terrorism” everywhere, wherever it appears. Well, that turn out to be almost everywhere where there is conflict, from Northern Ireland to Chechnya to Sri Lanka. In a very small sense the world may be lucky we bogged down in Iraq, because Iran would have been next, or Syria, and then who knows where else? The neocon agenda was and to put an American stamp across the face of the globe, and only their incredible incompetence in pursuing that goal has prevented them from widening the war even further.
And say what you will about “keeping out of the desert”, there are no guarantees that can be done.
Finally, as to the term “batshit”, well it was the Pit, and the OP had already called her petty thief child a “monster”, so the rhetoric was already over the top when I got there.
Anyway, if it makes you feel better, I apologize for the “batshit” part as being overly emphatic, but I stand by the crazy part.
Look at the post above yours. :dubious: 
Well, yeah, I’ll buy that if he could make it through sub school, he’ll probably be safe. And if he could make it into Annapolis by the time his schooling was over there’s a good chance this mess we are now in will be winding down – assuming the Dems don’t self-destruct AGAIN during the next presidential election. 
How about another WAG. I think the kid’s odds of going to jail for petty theft if mom calls the cops are lower than his odds of going to Iraq if he joins the military.
The KIQ is making a 4.0 in college according to a post in the original thread.
I totally agree that joining the military ≠ dying in combat. My son has been in the Air Force for nearly four years now; his hitch is up in November. He went in as a computer programmer and will leave as a computer programmer, having seen nowhere more dangerous than Omaha in that entire time.
While he wasn’t the kind of screwup that this thread is talking about, he nevertheless was a kid with no self-discipline who has benefited enormously from military discipline. He’s matured in ways that I could only dream of before his enlistment, and even though he was reluctant about signing up (but had no other real options at that point since he’d flunked out of college and wasn’t going to last as a minimum wage slave for long), he’s come to enjoy it a great deal. In his MOS, only volunteers go to Iraq or Afghanistan, and he wasn’t interested in volunteering, so the biggest danger he’s faced in his tour has been the time he hit a deer with his car last year.
Military life can instill a lot of good qualities into young men and women. Basic honesty, though? Probably not so much. If the kid in question has stolen that much from his mom, he probably wouldn’t last long in the military, and frankly, a bad discharge is probably a bigger hindrance in life than a felony conviction. But enlisting in the military is also not an automatic death sentence, and it’s a huge disservice to those who’ve served their country proudly to suggest it is.
Good for him. For a lot of kids, me included, school was a breeze and didn’t require much in the way of work or discipline. That’s a far cry for getting through boot camp, or whatever they call the naval version, and passing whatever skills and aptitude and psychological tests that would be needed for sub school. The biggest problem is, you don’t really have an option to drop out and try something else of your choice.
If the KIQ cops a serious attitude toward his instructors and his entitlement to a cushy position, he will seriously piss people off who can unload some serious punishment on him. Like mom could now, but I don’t think they would be as forgiving.
My sister was in from about 1980-84. She got language training and ended up in West Berlin eavesdropping on Soviet radio traffic. She told me once what they were “threatened” with if they flunked out of DLI – being assigned as jeep drivers in Texas – Amarillo, I think, is there a big base near there? Anyway, not such a terrible fate.
I don’t know a lot of military people, but I know 3 families with 20-ish kids in one or another service. In two of these, the father or mother is also a vet, and they tried every means of persuasion they could to discourage their kids from enlisting. So far all the kids remain alive, and oddly enough, the only one who hasn’t served a tour in Iraq yet is a Marine. So far he’s been stationed on Okinawa.
The military is not inherently bad in itself, or for everyone who joins it. But it has been and still is being terribly abused by its civilian leadership in the form of the Bush administration, and by too many officers who have nodded, said yessir, and gone along with Rumsfeld et al. Because those who spoke up basically got cashiered like General Shinseki.
I’m not sure whether this is addressed to me, but none of my posts have claimed that.
[hyjack] How did you do that?[/hyjack]
Maybe they simply see the world differently than you and feel that it is an honorable thing to serve their country at this time. Maybe they’ve weighed all the “facts” as you see them and came to a different assessment for themselves. But, I guess in your book that means they fall somewhere on the continuum between “batshit insane” and “dupes”.
Don’t you think that has to be assessed on a case by case basis? I mean, who the hell are you to make a blanket statement about what is right for thousands of kids you’ve never met? For them choosing an option that has proven beneficial for hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people. Or for the thousands of parents who know their kids and determine that the military would be better for them than the life they are currently leading?
Well, good for you. I’m sure that those in the military and their families who might come across your post will be gratified with you magnanimity in downgrading their status from “batshit insane” to “insane” or “crazy”.
Of course you missed the reason for this thread in your honor: it had to do with the appropriateness of your post in that other thread, not your stance on the military or Iraq. Could you have NOT voiced your opinion that the military is not a good option without pissing on those curretnly serving? Seriously. Would that have been an impossibility for you? Or do you have Der Trihs Syndrome, and any time the thought of our young people serving in Iraq crosses your brain you reflexively simply must piss?
I went to the Arial charmap, scrolled down till I found the character, and copied and pasted. I keep a link to charmap on my desktop; it’s very useful for all those special characters. [/hijack]
When I want to use ° or ¢ or ≠ or ≤ or ≥, I use the Character Map program, generally found in Start → All Programs → Accessories → System Tools.