I’d advise you not to sacrifice your conscience by joining an organization devoted to killing human beings.
Actually the Air Force has the best food and when they deploy they bring their air-conditioned bouncy castles and make a giant tent city in the middle of an otherwise inhospitable desert. No living out of uninsulated CONEX boxes for them, no sir!
For the o.p.: realize that different people are going to have different experiences, and while do do live under certain strictures the idea that “you give up most of your Constitutional rights to do so,” is woefully inaccurate. If you want to go on the officer track then sign directly up for OCS; don’t go in as enlisted and expect that you are somehow going to be pulled up. Recruiters will push you to take an enlisted billet because those are more difficult to fill, and they’re going to push you toward the one that is most difficult to fill that you are qualified for rather than what you want or what may suit your goals. Remember that recruiters are basically salesmen, they have a quota of recruitments they are expected to meet which impacts their performance evaluation, and many do not want to be recruiters so they have little motivation to help or counsel you.
It sounds like you are looking toward the Army for a lack of any other direction in your life. Certainly many people have joined the military and found the necessary guidance and career path, but realize that many don’t, and they either wash out in or blow up in boot (often getting an administrative discharge which looks bad on service records), or they stay in for the duration of their contract and then leave with basically three or four years of service and not much to show for it. Before you sign up to giving away the next several years of your life, talk to some veterans with eight or more years of service and give some real thought as to what you want to do in the Army. Do you want to go infantry? Are you interested in construction and engineering? Do you have an interest in medicine and rescue? Do you have a technical interest in something like cartography or weather prediction? Is the Army really the best branch for what you want to do? And what might you want to do after you retire or quit? I know these are all difficult questions that you don’t have answers for, hence why you are noodling about joining the service, but don’t for a moment think that you’ll join up and have all the answers provided for you, or at least, not the ones you agree with. And you’re going to be a lot more motivated if you go in knowing what you want to do rather than just letting Mother Army tell you where to go which is crucial for success.
If you actually want to develop skills, go enlisted; you’ll have a wider array of opportunities for real training (as opposed to the “leadership training” the military has decided to send officers to despite the fact that they seem to learn very little about leadership), and you often get practical experience that applies to real world jobs. As a junior officer, you’ll mostly be making PowerPoint decks and getting coffee for your more senior officers and (if you are smart) letting your senior NCOs handle the day to day management of the enlisted that may come under your command, and your opportunities for promotion may be limited by the number of allowed promotions at a given rank and/or the politics of your immediate leadership. The pay may be somewhat better, but as others have noted, the job comes with a lot of expectations that will end up costing you a good chunk of pay. For enlisted soldiers, you are paying for your basic kit and uniforms, and most everything else you need is issued (although you may wisely elect to purchase alternative equipment to do your job properly), and there are generally minimal social obligations until you get to the senior NCO level.
The only thing I would kind of agree with GreenHell about is his comment on families. As far as the military is concerned, your family is an appendage and often a liability. Military life is tough on families in the best of circumstances with often frequent deployment and regular relocation. You can avoid some of that depending on what billet you get but the odds are that you’ll be moving every couple of years, may well find yourself deployed to some ever-loving shithole with only infrequent access to communications back home, and surrounded by people you may not otherwise choose to associate with (although one good thing about military service is that it does force you to become acquainted with people outside your own personal bubble). If you do end up going into combat, the stress and exposure to violence can definitely result in mental illness that your leadership may not want to acknowledge or help you with, and that your family and friends back stateside will not understand or probably know how to cope with. The statistics on veteran divorce, domestic violence, drug and alcohol abuse, and suicide attest to the difficulty in coming to terms with seeing and living some really awful shit, and the military does very little to help soldiers/sailors/airmen/marines reenter civilian society.
FTR, I am not and have never been in the military, but I grew up with numerous veterans of Korea and Vietnam, have many friends and associates who are or have been in the military, and work professionally with a branch of the military. It can be a rewarding career and can lead to other opportunities, but that is likely only if you enter with some clear goals and reasonable expectations, including the notion that you need to look out for yourself because the Army is just a giant machine driven by politicians for their own needs without much regard for the damage that they can do to servicepeople, and as much as they like to talk about how much they respect “warfighters” they’d just as soon send you into an unnecessary and pointless war than they would face the actual problems of their constituents.
This is such an ignorant statement I’m not sure it is even worth addressing, but just so you are aware, the purpose of having the military we have is to avoid or minimize the killing of (innocent) human beings. It is certainly one role of the military to fight, and that role inevitably puts it in the position of putting innocent people in danger, but it can and is also used to protect people from threats, and that it has sometimes done a poor job of that is as much or more the product of ill-considered political decisions as it is the result of bearing weapons. The military also fulfills a number of other roles, including disaster relief and providing humanitarian aid, construction and maintenance of large civil structures, training of foreign security services to stabilize fledgeling democracies, performing intelligence gathering and analysis to identify military and terrorist threats, patrolling the oceans to stop piracy, and many other roles.
Stranger
I’ve heard such statements made regarding the Vietnam war. Mostly in movies that seem to follow the trope of the eager young LT getting his head blown off 30 seconds after stepping off the Huey.
In realty, I would suspect that junior officers experience higher casualty rates than senior officers because they are on the front lines leading small platoon and company sized maneuver elements in the field, rather than hanging out in the relative safety of battalion, brigade and division HQ (in the rear with the gear, so to speak).
I’ve never been in the military, so I have no opinion on the matter. However, having a number of friends who have been, I would caution about joining the military because you can’t decide on any other career path. If it’s something you decide you don’t want to pursue as a lifetime career, you’re still stuck with in until the end of your enlistment and afterwards you right back in the same position of not knowing what you want to do for a living.
I’m a retired field grade officer. Mostly that was in the National Guard but I finished in the Reserve and that reserve time was in AC/RC (Active Component/Reserve Component) mixed units with a lot of CONUS mobilization time so I effectively lived in a small post Active duty climate for four years…just one set of orders at a time.
So what was it about accounting and that environment that didn’t work for you? Was your lack of success just a lack of fit with the role/environment or was there a component in your performance tthat you likely have to deal with even outside accounting?
Some general questions before you hold up your hand to be a Soldier:
- While the culture does not always live up to it’s espoused collective values those values are there. Leaders have compliance with them as part of their formal evaluations. Is trying to live the Army Values something you can see doing? Every other bullet point below I could put entirely or partially in terms of those values.
- Can you see yourself able to “stand ready to deploy, engage, and destroy, the enemies of the United States of America in close combat.” (From the Soldiers creed.) No matter what specialty you go into you may be asked to do exactly that. That involves hard work to be ready, personal risk, and possibly being able to pull your sights up center of mass and squeezing the trigger.
- Can you deal with a high paced, fluid environment with limited, confusing, and often conflicting information? If you start enlisted it’s not as bad early on. The hurry up portion of “hurry up and wait” is always there. As you move into leadership roles, either officer or NCO, the hurry up portion grows because when things go FUBAR you are the one your waiting troops are looking to for decisions.
- Can you deal with physical hardship and being in a risky situation? That’s not just direct combat or deployments. I never heard a shot in anger despite about half my career being post 9-11. I have a number of what I now consider hilarious stories that were at best really painful and in a number of cases had chances of getting me maimed or killed just within the bounds of National Guard training. That was in a unit with an exceptional safety record.
- We’ve probably all seen and joked about the teamwork related messaging and motivational posters a lot of civilian employers like to use. I’ve been there and done that. I’ve even done it with Army messaging. Know that is far more real for a Soldier. Can you ever see putting yourself in mortal jeopardy for that coworker you least like? Can you see doing it even when it’s not ordered or even strictly necessary for the mission? Whether you ever see taking risks and enduring hardship for country or flag you sure as hell better be ready to do it for “That asshole PFC Shmedlap.”
I don’t need to hear your answers to those general questions. You don’t necessarily need to be able to say you are 100% sure you can live up to all of them. They are really hard questions. If any of your answers skew heavily towards a no though…find another profession to replace accounting with. I say again, find another profession in that case. You can might be able to muddle through a single enlisted term but, unless something changes in your answers along the way, I would rather you never be in a position to lead my brothers and sisters still in uniform. A professional NCO like Bear_Nenno can handle a SPC Theultimatebrucelee who’s a mediocre fit for the Army for a couple years. I’d rather he not have that extra leadership challenge. He sure doesn’t need to waste his time coaching, teaching, and mentoring a 2LT that is unlikely to ever become anything but a bad officer.
If I haven’t driven you off, help me to help you by answering the questions in that second paragraph. I’m here to help in that case. There’s a lot of inaccurate, old, and downright wrong information in this thread that we can deal with as it is relevant. That includes from your recruiter on officers. I won’t blow smoke. Unlike your recruiter, I don’t have the duty of finding enough bodies that meet minimum standard and closing the sales pitch. As truly life changing and personally meaningful as my experience was, being a Soldier is not for everyone. A career in the military is not just a job (or an adventure 
) it’s a profession and a calling. There are options for single term active or reserve component education benefits that can help with a civilian career change too if less than a full career seems to work better. It all hinges on whether you are a good fit to be a Soldier.
greenhell’s family experience is the polar opposite of mine, but his type of story isn’t unfamiliar either. Mostly I hear it from people who were in in 80’s or early 90’s. There is or was an institutional bias against marriage, but that is mostly gone (or was when I was in)
Recuiters will urge you to go into the Finance Corp, or possibly Quartermaster Corp if you just won’t go into Finance.
Combat Arms MOS’s are NOT filled with stoopid people not smart enough to do anything else. Those jobs require a lot of training and education to use a wide variety of tools. Infantry and Tankers and Cavalry and Artillery folks are smart and well informed, with a tinge of blood-thirsty-ness.
In the Army, there is a bias for combat arms soldiers (especially officers) when it comes to promotions.
The army wants achievers, not people that reach a certain level and plateau. There is a timeline for promotions to certain ranks that if you fail, you are RCP’ed out. (Retention Control Point)
Whoever said enlisted don’t get contracts doesn’t know what they are talking about. Every soldier, whether inlisted or commissioned, works on contract. The key is understanding the contract. The Government always fulfills it’s side of the contract, to the letter.
Other than that, basically what DinoR (who posted while I was still typing) said.
n/m, don’t want to derail the thread
if you want a real experience, join the Marine Corps
Well for starters, unless you are some “Matter national importance” Golden Child (Is your name Oppenheimer?), when you are holding an honorable discharge in your hand, no one is magically calling you back, with the exception of perhaps a national draft and you still being of draft age.
That is any branch.
Two, they will not just stick you in what ever MOS they feel like per say.
It is a total waste of their time to take someone and waste the abilities they have by deciding to have them do something they show about 0 aptitude for.
Since you have a degree in accounting, they are going to try to steer you in to something where they can use that talent, but they are not going to go off on a tangent and tell you “Hey, today your a combat engineer, or 11bravo”
Dumb, waste of their time, money, etc.
So you have a good idea where you start, your own aptitude will decide where you go from there.
You’d be prepping for OCS anyways to begin with.
You’d enter basic as an enlisted E4, in my day, due to your admin type talents, i’d call you a corporal, maybe now days everyone is an spc4? not sure.
As far as what recruiters tell you, what’s true exists on paper and can be put on paper, whats faerie story isn’t and can’t.
The condos they tell you you will live in, Mother Goose…
How soon we forget…
Are you unaware that the Army did just this thing for thousands of soldiers about a decade ago? Getting called back up after the completion of an enlistment is a very real possibility. It might happen again soon, as a matter of fact. Right now the Army is calling for a voluntary call back and offering large bonuses to previously enlisted soldiers who rejoin the military. It’s only a short time away before the IRR is called back involuntarily. They will not only be calling back Golden Children as you say. They will be calling back everyone. I still remember seeing all the fat, long-haired, miserable and disgruntled souls who were involuntarily called back to service in 2005. All of them had honorable discharges from years prior. Didn’t matter. It’s not a draft, and it’s not a violation of their contract. More accurately, it is a stipulation of the contract they signed during their enlistment!
sigh…
too bad I’m past the age, I’d re-enlist in a heartbeat. It was really hard giving up the camaraderie and sense of societal and job security I had in the army.
Far as soldier recall in 2005, I hadn’t heard of this, what MOS’s were getting recalled? (if it was news, well, I was in the midst of a family crisis at the time)
Nothing forgotten at all
IRR is not fully retired/exited yet, and that is fully disclosed when you enlist.
IRR is part of your completion, it does not become after completion until that is over.
Think of it as “Ok we will let you go home now, and for the remaining X years on the books, we will just put you in on-call status”
That is not the same thing as the OP stated he was told, nor is it the same as you make it sound, this is not being recalled back from retirement.
You get paper work when you leave active duty, and unless you are in the habit of not reading your own paperwork, it shows you being transferred to whomever commands the reserve unit, and for how long.
When that period ends you get another set of papers that show you being removed from the reserve unit, with no further commitments, and now you are done.
You get 2 discharges, one from active duty, and one full discharge.
You have been allowed to go home with time remaining on your enlistment.
No secret or strange voodoo there.
If you enlist, it is for 8 years (I believe is current), read the paperwork.
If you opt for outing early, after 4 years, you still owe 4 years, hence IRR.
If they need you, they will call you to come back to duty.
If one gets pissed off about that, i think one really needs to re-evaluate ones thought process.
One could have just run their 8 years straight and poof, no IRR.
Read your paper work.
When some recruiting or retention ninny tries to talk to you about extending, after you have only been in 4 years…
READ your paper work, not the sales pitch.
You still have 4 years left of your base enlistment, so do the math.
4 remaining BASE + 4 ReEnlistment = 8 years left on shelf.
If you only serve 4 more, you STILL have 4 on the shelf, if you out, you have 4 owed to IRR.
No tricks no magic no voodoo no suprize
is that what bear was talking about, a bunch of reservists (as opposed to National Guardsmen) getting called up? Huh, no wonder I didn’t hear about it then, that’s not news. Heck I thought he meant people that had done their full eight years of duty. Shoot, my wife’s best friend from Iraq is a Naval Reservist from Oklahoma who never spend a day on active duty after training and was activated and attached to the Army simply because they needed exactly one of her MOS at Camp Victory in Baghdad and she won the spin of the roulette wheel, I guess? (I have no idea of what is entailed in the selection process that resulted in her going to Iraq)
His recruiter was wrong but you are more wrong because the reference was specifically to officers. We’re different.
We have minimum service obligations but don’t have a contract that ends. We serve until they either kick us out our we take action to submit our resignation and have it accepted.
The IRR did take steps to clean up their rolls during the war with respect to officers. They started asking officers of they meant to stay in it. Too many were either unreachable because they hadn’t kept their contact info updated our surprised they were getting mobilized. If they didn’t resign they just stayed in the system till they aged out.
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You stated “Honorable Discharge in hand”! Now you’re moving the goal posts…
Someone who does a four year enlistment and gets their Honorable Discharge, can and has been called back to service.
No. I’m talking about someone who joins the Army on a four year enlistment and gets out with an honorable discharge. I’m talking about getting out completely. The IRR is not “the reserves”. People on the IRR are for all intents and purposes, “out of the military”. They don’t do weekend drills, they dont train. They are not required to maintain fitness standards or body fat limits. They’re out, “with honorable discharge in hand” as Weisshund would put it. Three years later, after the person has all but forgotten about his/her service, the Army initiates an involuntary recall to active service. And then initiates a Stop-Loss to keep the person past even the 8 year mark.
Most enlistments are not 8 years. In fact, I don’t know any that are. A person usually does about 4 and is then put on the IRR for another 4, which is nothing but a list of potential recallees. Recalling the IRR and activating the Army Reserves is two completely different things.
“But during severe personnel shortages, the IRR is tapped, too. During the peak years of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, about 30,000 soldiers and Marines from the IRR were mobilized for deployments. The most common occupational fields for which they were recalled were the combat arms, military police, vehicle operators, mechanics and engineers.”
And yes, it was major news at the time. Along with other little know (at the time) military policies like “Stop Loss”.
Everyone is entitled to their opinion. It’s specifically the “factual statements” you mentioned that I take issue with.
It’s not a breach of contract if the fine print states they can do it. When you sign a contract, you agree to all the terms, not just the ones you like. If you don’t like the fine print, then don’t sign. But it is not a “factual statement” to say they are in breach of contract because they did something you don’t like.
Which ones, exactly? Most of them? This is not a “factual statement”.
This is an opinion, so I’ll just say I disagree. Family is such a major priority to commanders at all levels that specific time is allotted on official training calendars for Soldiers to spend time with their families. Family Readiness Groups and Town Hall Meetings are also among the major efforts taken toward care of family members. And it’s getting better every year. I have a soldier who will be deployed during the birth of his first child. We are already making every effort to ensure he is able to return from combat to be present at the delivery. Families are encouraged to take part in company events and take an active role in their service member’s career. Keeping families informed on what is going on is also a major priority. I don’t think your statements have been true for at least two decades.
What does it mean “you rejected”? What did you do? How does one even reject not doing something? You were not threatened with a court martial for taking your wife to get a second opinion. That’s what you’re implying, and I call bullshit.
:rolleyes:
Forgot to include the citation for the quote.
Huh, well imagine that. Well anyway, I did 7 years and 2 months on Active Duty and then finished out the 8 year commitment in the National Guard, Honorable Discharge from both, finishing in Feb 03 for Active Duty, December of 04 was when my enlistment in the Guard was up. And of course I was going through the previously mentioned family crisis at about that time too, so to me its not much of a surprise that I missed that particular military news item.
I will disagree with you on the IRR being out of the military, yes, they are, but not completely. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be called Individual Ready Reserve, they still have some amount left on the 8 year commitment they signed up for when they enlisted.
stop-loss I am familiar with, along with indefinite enlistment for certain mos’s once you reach a specified time in service along with paygrade for NCOs. The army was doing those in the late 90s for at least ADA (14J) (I was in an ADA battalion at Ft. Stewart, that’s why I know). Of course, that mission has been turned over to the Cav now, at least in part.
OH that’s one more thing for the OP to consider. It’s difficult to reclassify once training is complete, unless you want to go combat arms, but once you go into combat arms, its completely impossible unless there are extraordinary circumstances.
Yeah Bear that’s one of those things every barracks lawyer knows, soldiers aren’t covered by the constitution they are sworn to protect. The logic seems to go like this. I can be court martialled for insubordination therefore I don’t have freedom of speech therefore I’m not covered by the constitution. They don’t bother to read the UCMJ and see the enumerated rights. It’s just that the courts have recognized that there are some exceptions needed in the military due to unique circumstances.
Why would you pick the Army? Go find an AF recruiter and tell him you want to go to OTS to become commissioned.
*retired AF guy 