Former Army Sergeant and current PhD student.
I think that last post picked all the wrong reasons to say why the military is a bad career choice. For clarity, I was a 19K (M1 Abrams tanker) when I joined the Army and was in for five years with one year in Iraq.
You know what the worst part of the military is? Knowing almost everything you are doing is bullshit and meaningless. My first unit in the Army was getting ready to deploy (within 6-8 months can't remember) and you'd expect that time to be when you are training intensely, your days are packed with meaningful and well planned activities, etc... no, it was the opposite. I spent most of my days picking weeds, cleaning toilets, sitting through impromptu "training" given by the E-5's which were painful to even sit through, and doing all kinds of other remedial tasks. Even going to the training in California (can't remember the name) where we were suppose to simulate being in Iraq was a joke. Every single day it felt like we were trying to find ways to kill time.
While I was in Iraq I went on 400+ combat missions. I thankfully never had to fire my rifle, but my life was in serious danger over two dozen times, and constantly at some low level of danger the entire time. I calculated my hourly pay while there (including hazardous duty pay and such) and I made effectively $3.13 an hour. Every single day was the same. Wake up at 430 am, go eat, go to the trucks, drive them over to the mechanics to be vetted to go out, go back to the staging area, load the weapons and MRE's and Gatorade for the day, get the daily intelligence briefing (this was almost never intelligent), go over the mission for the day, do the mission, get back at 5-6 pm, take the trucks to get fuel, get back unload the weapons and gear, have a post mission brief, go eat by 7-8, sleep and repeat...every single day. It was painfully monotonous ( I guess thankfully but that is a year of my life gone).
The pay isn't that bad for a single person and the benefits are great blah blah, but good luck feeling fulfilled or like what you are doing has meaning. There are absolutely jobs in the military that are the exception to this rule, but they are rare. I changed my MOS to what I thought was a much more "technical" field where I might feel like my job had more purpose (this MOS was "hard" to get into with only ~500 people in it). I went through a year of "school" which having now completed two Bachelor degrees in STEM fields and working on a PhD in another can tell you was the equivalent of high school. When I got to my next unit in the new MOS, it was the same old same. Pointless training, bullshit time-killing tasks etc...
Go to college, and get loans if you have to. It is worth it. I look back now and truly regret all five years I spent in the military. All of the benefits like travel, maturity, life experience, and so on, can be had in life, in others ways, in less damaging environments.
Edit: I should clarify this applies only to my experience as an enlisted soldier. Almost certainly an officer has a better time...but they've already got a degree and likely alternatives to the military if they want. I also want to emphasize this obviously does not apply to all jobs in the military. However, I speak to my experience in both a combat MOS and one of the more technical MOS the Army has to offer because the underlying bullshit persisted.
Submitted November 15, 2017 at 10:43PM by Welvo http://ift.tt/2ik6ZDU
