Until this week, Army Recruiting Command had a public partnership with the Black Engineer of the Year Awards, or BEYA, an annual conference that draws students, academics and professionals in science, technology, engineering and math.
Almost everyone I know who was at one point involved in the US military, came out it with a lot of resentment for the US military and bitterness towards the system in general. Maybe there is some self-selection bias there, and maybe my generation going to Iraq and Afghanistan makes a big difference, but that’s what I observed.
A buddy of mine when he was much younger actually was really thinking about signing up, and he spent half an afternoon or so talking with a recruiter, and the recruiter and his colleague both clearly had massive issues both with the military and with their own lives, and he came out of it with the firm conclusion “Jesus Christ I’m glad I didn’t do that.”
We’re roughly the same age then, about 1/2 of my friends served, who got snatched up entirely broke down to economics.
Whoa, your friend got lucky! Even disillusioned recruiters tend to fall into the “don’t talk to cultists because they stand to earnestly sell you the lies that convinced them” column of troublemakers in my experience. All of my friends left the military disabled, some worse than others. Most of them were injured by friendlies, the rest were indirect IED hits on transports.
Yeah. No one I know got messed up bad, but some were clearly psychologically damaged. And some people they knew from before got real messed up. Like real bad. And for what?
Almost everyone I know who was at one point involved in the US military, came out it with a lot of resentment for the US military and bitterness towards the system in general. Maybe there is some self-selection bias there, and maybe my generation going to Iraq and Afghanistan makes a big difference, but that’s what I observed.
A buddy of mine when he was much younger actually was really thinking about signing up, and he spent half an afternoon or so talking with a recruiter, and the recruiter and his colleague both clearly had massive issues both with the military and with their own lives, and he came out of it with the firm conclusion “Jesus Christ I’m glad I didn’t do that.”
We’re roughly the same age then, about 1/2 of my friends served, who got snatched up entirely broke down to economics.
Whoa, your friend got lucky! Even disillusioned recruiters tend to fall into the “don’t talk to cultists because they stand to earnestly sell you the lies that convinced them” column of troublemakers in my experience. All of my friends left the military disabled, some worse than others. Most of them were injured by friendlies, the rest were indirect IED hits on transports.
Yeah. No one I know got messed up bad, but some were clearly psychologically damaged. And some people they knew from before got real messed up. Like real bad. And for what?