How Has Serving Impacted You?

Not very well, apparently. My Grandpa was in the Navy during WW2 and my dad was in the Army in the 50s, neither really talked about it, but my grandpa had Alzheimer’s the whole time I knew him and my dad died when I was eight so the only thing I know about their service are second hand stories from various family members.
https://reason.com/2019/05/25/the-a...eople-shared-stories-of-the-high-cost-of-war/

Very best case scenario, you leave the service with some form of work-related anxiety as a result of "leadership" you're forced to deal with.

The military is a clusterfuck.

My brother has hearing loss, damage to his knees, and some damage to his circulatory system due to some disease he got while serving. So he’ll randomly pass out every now and then, usually if he gets drunk. Not drunk passing out, he just shuts off for a few seconds.

Yet we keep subjecting them to hellish wars for corporations’ bottom lines.

Overall I feel pretty lucky. My major combat injuries and not that much trauma. Even though I was Infantry during the Surge I never had to see an American die close up, only Iraqis. Picked up something while over there that led to IBS but I’m coping. Back and hips are shot (yay for arthritis in your 30s) but I get by. At this point what gets me down is all the suicides. I about to pull over today when it hit me. Two, maybe three years ago I passed the line of losing more comrades to suicide than battle. And that says something considering I was Infantry and then Special Operations so not exactly a FOBbit.

as I was reading this (hey I just woke up!) I thought you said your grandfather had Alzheimer's the whole time he served! Anyway serving has served me well - SWIDT?
Let me preach on it: serving the first time in the Air Force jump-started getting me away from small town Wisconsin, since I didn't have the academic chops for college and had no friends there anyway. After exiting the Air Force and working construction for several years joining/serving in the Army literally saved my life because at the rate I was getting injured working construction I knew I would end up dead, crippled or starve to death trying to raise a family doing dangerous work for not enough pay. The Army was safer and the pay & benefits were great especially for a married man who wanted to have kids.

Yada yada yada the job training after basic training was mentally very hard for me and I barely made it through. But eventually my skill set grew and grew along with my occupational confidence and now I am at the top of my game, making big bucks still serving my country as a government contractor. The physical training and fitness/weight standards (which have to be maintained throughout your career) built a foundation which allows me to be among the top 10 percent of fitness/good health/lean body weight for adult males my age - not too shabby!

Barring getting killed in a "road rage" incident I statistically stand a very good chance of living to a ripe old age with my mind & body holding out well into my golden years.

no shit about suicides! twelve vets a day commit suicide nationwide - totally not cool at all. Picking up something that gave you IBS? Small world - I have a customer who drank water from a contaminated water buffalo (not the animal folks, a big portable water container) and it gave him weird pus filled sores all along his esophagus that kick up quite frequently. Considering a water buffalo serves a bunch of soldiers & civilian contractors.....no fucking doubt there are others from this guy's unit who suffer from the same affliction.

Bummer Anc about the back & hips! My son worked with a lot of grunts as a combat medic - it breaks a body down in ways that may not catch up to you for a while, but they will catch up and often sooner versus later.

I can only speak about may father's experiences, as he told them. He loved flying, so he was just happy as hell to be handed a hi-performance fighter to fly the shit out of, even if people were shooting back at him. He made friends and saw friends die, and killed a few people, most from afar and some close-up. I think the effect that had on him was just to make him kind of hard-hearted about life and death. He was never depressed or mopey about it. He said that he had a hell of a lot of fun flying, but wouldn't want to go thru the other shit again. He never minded talking about it at all.

Wounded three times - in the belly from bullet that came up thru the bottom of the airplane over Japan; shrapnel in the lower leg; shrapnel in the groin (an inch to the left and I wouldn't be here!). He fucked up his back when he crashed an F-84 post-war.

My dad was an older draftee in 1950. He very much loved living and working near home so he definitely did not want to go and once in the military he never considered staying any longer than he had to.

But.

He openly admitted that he enjoyed it a lot considering the circumstances. He got to go to California, Hawaii, Japan and of course Korea. He met people from all across the U.S. (not to mention Japan and Korea) some of whom remained friends for the rest of his life. His biggest downsides were the permanent hearing loss he suffered in one year after a shell in his howitzer misfired. The closest he came to being killed was when an incoming shell hit just outside the tent he was in while going over maps. The shell buried itself deep in the sandy soil before detonating. Fortunately this dampened the explosion and minimized the shrapnel.

The saddest even of the war for him was when his battery came under direct Chinese artillery fire. Everyone dove into a foxhole. Two of his crew from New York dove into the same foxhole. Shortly thereafter a shell plunged directly into their foxhole and detonated. Dad had to go into the foxhole and help scrape enough of their bodies off the inside of it to be bagged.

I have a lot of admiration for the draftees of any war. They were uprooted from whatever other plans & activities they were engaged in, but nearly all served admirably! I can only speculate as to how our current crop of young civilian men would perform in a "holy shit we don't have enough people!" war.
Currently only 1/3 would meet all the standards of fitness, weight, aptitude, education, drug free, and clean criminal background check so the solution would be to lower the standards of course.....but again would that end well? I hope we never have to find out.

Well you wouldn't draft remotely as many in raw numbers today anyway as it would be impossible to train and equip them like in previous wars.

There are what about 500,000 men in each age cohort every year. So assume that you have 1.500,000 men from the ages of 18-20. You could draft 500,000 of them and probably fulfill all the possible manpower needs of the U.S. military when engaged in a major war. Not to mention if a conflict is popular enough to sustain acceptance of a draft you would probably have a considerable increase in volunteering as occurred in World War Two.

Grew up in a Navy / Marine Corps family, and I was the third generation to serve.

For me and my friends living overseas on base, we never thought we wouldn't put in at least some time. Friend of mine once said: "You wake up every day for X number of years and you're in the navy. Then one day, you wake up and the navy is in you." That's how life has been for me.

I've been off active duty for 20 years, and still think of myself as 'a former navy officer.' It's in me, and it influences all my dealings with other people- I carry that pride with me every day, and a lot of idealism that doesn't really match the reality of the day-to-day grind of life in the service, but the ideals themselves are worth believing in. "All the best things we stand for," and all that.

My experience overall was good. I served in peacetime, fortunately, and suffered no long-term injuries (I've got bad knees, but I had bad knees from playing football in school before I enlisted).

well I wish you (as a smart officer) could pimp-slap some common sense into the Army officers who work in the office next to my shop.
They are responsible (I guess) for the building now and they have about ten toilet brushes in the bathroom (for two toilets) but not one fucking plunger!
A toilet brush is "nice to have" of course but doesn't cut it when I shit a DURAFLAME log in the morning.
They put a fancy push-button number code lock on the door on the south end of the building, but the north end has a broken lock that opens with a vigorous tug first time, every time, so the building is never locked.

Not much of military significance happening when I was in the Navy in the early 1980s. No injuries or trauma to speak of, but then the project I worked was all shore duty. I didn't plan it that way, that's just how it worked out. Got a good technical education out of it, made lifelong friends, but got out after one hitch because it drove me fuckin' bugshit that I had to take orders from some mouth-breathing retard just because he signed his name an hour before I did.

that's the thing about the military - you have your share of good bosses and bad bosses.

Two ways the military continues to impact me:

I still tuck in the laces of whatever boots or shoes I'm wearing. I tie them once in the morning and they stay that way throughout the day.

Unlike most of my counterparts, I can wait with infinite patience, doing absolutely nothing until it's time to act. Waiting for an overdue press conference or event to start doesn't bother me but I've seen others practically lose their minds because they're not used to "waiting".

Well, that's true of most places but at least my civilian bosses didn't control my life once I punched out the clock.

Well, I don't doubt there's any number of enlisted folks I served with who probably thought I was a dumbshit officer for (pick your reason here.) Like most people, I wish I had the knowledge, experience, and leadership skills at 24 that I have now at 50. The catch-22 about a military career at every level is how much of it is 'learn-as-you-go.' That's why prior enlisted folks generally make better officers- they've already got some experience, maturity, and seen how things work from the bottom up. I will say that as part of an aircrew, we were all pretty tight on deployment- officer and enlisted alike. We stood the same duty schedule, flew together, detached together, stood the ready alert together, and partied together in foreign lands... you basically become a small 'band of brothers.' Lots of great stories, and we really all had each others' backs.

I forgot, one time I was not paying attention while playing volleyball and took a serve right to the back of the head. It made me dizzy and disoriented for a second.

I think the only relative I have who died was in Vietnam. My mom’s cousin, he kept going back to try and save more of his group and got killed. I was born long after he died, so I never knew him.

I had some in WWII and Korea too. Both my grandfathers were in WWII, one was at Peleliu. I don’t think he got hurt, but he had pretty severe PTSD when he came back. My dad mentioned some of the details he talked about once, something about having to climb over dozens of bodies and seeing some of his friends.

Wait - is this thread based on the US army tweet?

They asked the same question, expecting an outpouring of jingoism. Instead they received a litany of responses referring to suicides, mental health issues, drug addiction, sexual assault, inadequate health care, exposure to chemical agents and war crimes.

I think an interesting question would be how those differing experiences affect peoples' attitudes to warfare, the military and policy making.

also when you are aboard a ship it's really hard to get away from people you don't like, or get out from under the flagpole - at least in the army or air force you can get a little more distance from your work environment to clear your head.

When Dad was stationed in Virginia, before he shipped out to the Pacific, he used to drive home to NJ when he could, or occasionally borrow a plane to buzz the house. It cost him once when his crappy old car broke down halfway back to base and he got nailed as AWOL for being a full day late reporting back.

to be honest I've only met one military pilot who wasn't cool & laidback as hell whenever they could afford to be. That was one of my company commanders when I was stationed in Germany. Luckily she got out of the army a few months before we deployed to Iraq in 2003 - that would have made a hard/risky mission even harder and more dangerous at every level.
Karma caught up to her though - the army IRR kicked in and they recalled her ass, and she was in Iraq flying black hawks with some other unfortunate unit.

interesting AWOL/desertion story from my AIT (army job training) days about 30 years ago: we had a dude from Chile go AWOL because he was subpoenaed for a murder trial....... in Chile. Yeah, kinda hard to make it back by Monday with that on your plate. I guess he figured if he got through the recruiter's background check and made it into the army, he was "good to go" but he was sadly mistaken.

Amy's first cousin was a U.S. Navy medic who served a great deal of time overseas. He missed his fathers funeral several years ago while he was in Iraq. Amy and I were at the funeral and he sent a letter that was read during the service. He apologized for missing his fathers funeral but said that whenever there was an overseas conflict he just couldn't help but volunteer for duty. He left the Navy and got the exact same job as a contractor aboard a vessel deploying a towed sonar array around the Sea of Japan looking for North Korea and Chinese submarines. I last saw him a couple of years ago at the wedding of another of Amy's cousins.

Of course, I twisted my ankle on the way to a military recruitment event in Arkansas because it had been raining and I slipped. I tried to get there but they had all left by the time I arrived.

The ankle was very painful for the next week so I like to think that I suffered a serious injury in order to serve my country.

Yeah, the air teams do tend to be closer together than any given surface warfare community.