Never been to jail myself, but the grub in the military is not bad, at all.
to be fair, you don’t know that. I was a recruiter for a century…I mean, 5 years…(I hated it). A recruiter isn’t going to ask him if he likes to play piano or prefers cloudy thoughtful days…they just want to know if he can pass the entrance exam, the physical and if he’s qualified to join legally. Personal depth is something he’ll have to find on his own.
He may not be. The OP hasn’t actually told us too much about him. Sure, he might not be the guy you want living in your house with you, but I can say that about my closest friends. I still maintain that if he is he is qualified that the military might be something he’d want to look into. Its better than jail.
You weren’t in Habbaniyah, Iraq in 2003.
[hijacked rant mode]
Now, the food the Army serves in Balad at the present time is better than Denny’s and most of your other low-scale sit-down restaurants; but back in '03, the cooks in Habbaniyah actually tried to pass off meatless bleached-white bones as an entire meal. Not just the entree, with some bread or whatever on the side to fill you up, but the entire meal. That wasn’t an isolated occasion, though it was one of the worst. We had an entire meal of bland watery boiled potato mush once, too.
I’d rather eat pig slop from a subsistence farmer in India, let alone prison food, than the crap those filthy “food service specialists” tried to pass off as edible back in Habbaniyah.
[/hijacked rant]
Oh yeah, OP: The only way this guy is “unemployable” is if he belongs in jail or a psych ward in the first place. Why not just let nature take its course and see where he ends up? It will end up being the best match for him anyway.
That’s horrible. Were supplies not arriving at the base, or were the cooks hoarding the good stuff?
My homeless younger brother who does have mental problems, but unfortunately won’t check into a psych hospital wrote me an email once, in an attempt to emotional blackmail me, and said that his choices were:
- Jail
- Suicide
- Allowing himself to get sick and die
This came after the hundreds of emails back and forth, with him trying one type of manipulation after another. I was finally got tired of his shit, so I was tempted to, but refrained from asking if that was a trick question, and what would I win if I picked correctly.
If someone wants to escape work that badly, then fuck ‘em. Let them go off into either world, and I suspect they’ll find out they should have made better choices.
Mixture of both.
The worst meals, like potato-only night, happened around the spring of '04 (not '03 like I mistakenly said before) when IEDs were rampant along the main convoy route between us and Baghdad. (Habbaniyah is about 15 miles west of Fallujah.) That was also right around the time of the big assault on Fallujah. Since most of our supplies were trucked in from Baghdad around that time, we were pretty much choked off.
Ugh. Sitution like that, we’d be eating battle rations (you guys call them MREs, right?)
Yeah; I mean, I don’t want to imply that we were starving or anything. We had a few days worth of MREs stocked up, and guys definitely were eating out of that stockpile. Mainly, the worst part was that the chow hall was open at all. Our guys were out working all day on blown up trucks, walked about a half-mile in the heat to the DFAC, only to find a pile of bones waiting for them? They could have just said “We don’t have any hot food, don’t bother coming to the dining facility, go eat some MREs”.