The military. Did you join? Why or why not?

Don’t want to steal this thread’s thunder, but a topic on the hijinks and horrors of boot camp would likely make for amusing reading.

@Bullitt, let me know if that is kosher.

My wife flew Black Hawks with the 101st Airborne. She was stationed in South Korea, and she was in Iraq for the Gulf War.

No Rah Rah Hooah bs here, I was burned out, had just quit one job and got laid off from another, hated where I wad physically, mentally emotionally, so I joined the army.

Yes, my Dad served in the Regular Army all through WW2, then a bit after was a FT National Guys employee.

My eyes were not good enough- 1Y. I served with the US Treasury for 20 years- not the same at all, but at least federal service for the nation.

Thanks to all the posters here for their real Service.

TLDR version. I had a couple of oppertunities, but I’m glad I didn’t. With my anxiety condition, I think it wouldn’t have worked out well.

I had a Sunday School teacher who was in the ROTC and in the National Guard at the same time, with a special status of not an officer but better than otherwise? Don’t remember the details. He took me out once to meet other people and tried to get me to do that. It just didn’t connect with me.

While I was in my second year of engineering, I happened to have an interaction with a navy recruiter. He really wanted me to sign up for ROTC and switch to nuclear engineering.

I know that the military is a great choice for many people, but it wouldn’t have worked for me.

There are five types of people…ones who are hardware junkies. Who has the coolest toys? The military, NASA and maybe the CIA. But I was no flag waving patriot. I hated the right almost as much then as I do now.

I was not in the military but I sent both of my children ,straight out of high school into the Navy. My son retired as a Senior Chief after 22 yrs. and my daughter married a Master Chief and left after 6 yrs. I’m very proud of their service. Both of them obtained their degrees in the Navy and both were independent, grown up and very responsible very quickly. I was a single parent. I couldn’t afford college for them. To me it was like having a whole ‘nother set of parents. The Navy was very, very good to my family. My husband was a Marine in Vietnam. Our Thanksgivings are……interesting! Lol! He laughs about their ice cream man suits and they make fun of him for being the epitome of a Devil Dog.

You dont have to be a right winger to be a patriot.

Went to a recruiting talk that the Canadian Armed Forces sent to our high school. Nothing in it interested me.

I had uncles and aunts who served in WWII, but neither of my parents did; they were both the youngest of their families and the war ended. Other than those uncles and aunts, in the unusual circumstances of WWII (general war), I don’t have any relatives that have been in the military. Nor have I ever met anyone who came from what some here are calling a military family. Canada doesn’t have the same military traditions as the US. I know five people who were in the military: one I think joined up after high school; one has been in the reserves since high school; one did a hitch as chaplain; two were JAG, part-way through their legal careers, not as a starting point. That’s all I know of.

I never joined because there is not one single aspect of the military lifestyle that I don’t find horrifying. And that isn’t limited to just the physical activity and the risk of death. It is every aspect of the communal living and the forced travel. There isn’t one second about it that wouldn’t be a dystopian hell for me.

U.S. citizen here.

With me, it is a why not.

My parents could afford to pay my full tuition at a fancy college, and did. So I did not have a financial need.

Also, I was and am a reader. I recall reading a number of disturbing war books, including All Quiet on the Western Front, as a teenager. Did not sound like Hogan’s Heroes. No way I was volunteering.

So the only way I would have possibly served is conscription. I was born in 1955, the first birth year where none of the young Americans were drafted.

What if I had been born a few years earlier? I now think it was wrong to evade the draft because then someone else would go instead. Did I think that then? Not sure. But I was, even then, a political centrist – skeptical of the wisdom of the Vietnam War, but also thinking our side was morally much better than the enemy. Plus I was fairly well informed and would have realized that young men like myself did not then get thrown into combat (unless they volunteered for dangerous duty, as, famously, John Kerry did). Plus, exaggerating a medical problem, to get out of a duty, goes against my personality.

So my guess is that I would have taken any unambiguously legal deferment but eventually allowed myself to be drafted, serving in a safe military specialty while feeling a bit of guilt about that.

I joined the USAF back in 1976 to get as far away from Northern Idaho as possible. The school I went to wasn’t worth shit when it came to preparing kids for college (If you took the “advanced” course you got to take Algebra!), and I wanted to meet real people that weren’t far right wing shit-for-brains.

Did you get stationed at Mountain Home AFB? :stuck_out_tongue:

I got stationed at March AFB in Southern California, where I got to go to A couple Parliament-Funkadelic events and CalJam II.

My dad was in the Air Force for 20 years, flew cargo planes, mostly, and retired as a major. He did one tour in Vietnam, flying helicopters, I think.

I thought about enlisting after college, probably to also be a pilot. I had taken some flying lessons after high school, soloed but didn’t have my private license yet. I don’t know if that would have scored me any points toward being a military pilot or not.

A few things worked against it. My dad did not seem very happy being in the service. Same with some of his friends I had met, but not all. I also remembered how tough it was for them to get flying jobs when they left the Air Force; that’s an industry that has gone through boom-and-bust cycles over the decades.

I think the last thing had to do with the recruiting ads that ran at the time. They were full of “we can give you training”, “we can help pay for college”, etc. They all seemed to be pandering, and promising what the military could give me, with no sense that wanted or needed anything from me. Odd as it sounds, that kinda turned me off the idea.

I’m 51, and I had originally really wanted to be a fighter pilot, and then possibly an astronaut. Great grandfather, both grandfathers, and my father all served, as did pretty much every friend’s father with one notable exception. So joining the military seemed like a natural thing for a young man to do.

At some point in high school I realized that my eyes weren’t quite good enough to be a pilot, so I sort of shifted over to the Army, and wanted to be an Armor officer.

Long story short, between me injuring a knee pretty severely and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, I realized that it was pretty likely that the Cold War would if not end, at least be dramatically different than it had been for the prior 40 years, and that my hopes of getting into a service academy might not be realistic, depending on how the admissions went, and how I would do on the physical. Plus, the prospect of more competition for fewer slots in a seriously drawn down military wasn’t terribly appealing either, and nor was the idea of a cash-strapped post-Cold War military.

I don’t regret not joining, but it is one of the great “What if?” questions of my life.

We didn’t even get that. I went to an academic high school, where university or college were expected after graduation. I guess that the Forces decided we were a lost cause for recruiting, and stayed away.

Interestingly, one of my classmates wanted to join the Forces. The guidance office, while it could tell you all about universities and colleges, had nothing about joining the Forces. Oh, they knew about, and could help with, applying to Royal Military College, and urged my classmate to apply there (and he certainly had the grades to go), but he wanted to do the Forces “from the ground up,” as he liked to say. The guidance people ended up calling a Canadian Forces recruiting office, and got him the necessary forms and paperwork.

Since him, I’ve known a couple of others who had careers in the Forces. Both ended up serving in UN peacekeeping tours overseas. But my classmate never did.

When growing up one never knows what external influences can randomly come along to pull you one way or the other. I did not come from a military family, and I also did not grow up with any desire to join. It wasn’t on my radar at all. I did not think ‘military’ was a job people did. That sounds silly, but that’s the way it was. I did not know anyone in the military.

I’m the oldest of 5 siblings and we grew up back east, Upstate New York and New England. The summer after graduating high school my dad moved the whole family to San Francisco. We caravaned across the country, 3 vehicles (including a Ryder truck) driving 3,000 miles westward on I-80.

Once settled in San Francisco I got a basic job, and where I got off the bus on Market Street (at Market and Third) on my commute there was a recruiting station on that corner and in the windows were brochures showing the airplanes and ships I built as plastic scale models as a kid. Cool pictures! Interested in those pictures, I stopped in to look, and some military guy in a uniform I didn’t recognize was very friendly and saying hello. A nice enough guy, so we chatted a bit.

I was sooo naive. I didn’t know what a recruiter was or did. I didn’t even know there was a Marine Corps. (Marine Corps? What’s that?) I only came in to look at the pictures of the cool airplanes. And the rest, as they say, is history…

This was November-December 1979, and that congenial guy was Master Sergeant James, USMC. Once I realized I was seriously considering enlisting, I stepped back and looked at the different branches and what they had to offer. I’d taken the ASVAB and scored decently well, so I could pick any service and any MOS I wanted. I spoke with recruiters from all four services and learned about the differences in the services and their missions. I ended up choosing the Marines because I wanted the most challenging boot camp.

I’m the first in my family to serve. I ended up serving 13 years, from 1980 to 1993. I got some nice reenlistment bonuses, some decent training, and financial assistance for my degree. Once I finished my degree, the time separated from my wife and kids was becoming a hardship so I was done with it. It was time to transition to a real civilian career.

I’m glad I joined and all in all while there were some crappy times, I’d do it again. And the older I get (it’s been more than 30 years since I got out), as the great baseball player Ted Williams put it —

It’s a funny thing but as the years go by, I think you appreciate more and more what a great thing it was to be a Marine. I am a US Marine and I’ll be one ‘til the day I die.

I’m an absolute pacifist, and also while I was at prime joining age, my country’s own military was literally the enemy so I wouldn’t have joined even in a non-combat capacity.

I am very pacifist as well, though not an absolute pacifist. My pacifist values made me a better Marine, IMHO.