My grandfather was in the Army, and many of my uncles were Marines (three fought in Korea). My pop was in the USAF (retired a Major) and my sister, brother and I were all born on different bases in Texas and Alabama. I tried to get into the Army when I was young, but they wouldn’t take me due to my history of colon cancer. That’s never slowed me down or kept me from wrestling or playing football, but, my pop said they probably didn’t want to be responsible for paying my medical bills for the rest of my life.
My pop is conservative (much more than I am), but, I don’t think his 8 years in the AF turned him that way. He was already a rightie before joining up.
I’ve two cousins who recently served in the Army. The older one graduated from VMI and served in Iraq. The younger one spent time in Kosovo and now is toiling for the feds. These two, I think, were mostly influenced by their pop, my uncle (who spent the Vietnam years in Germany in the US Army). He doesn’t trust anyone or any political party. But, he leans partly conservative and way libertarian. His boys are pretty much the same. They seem to have a love-hate relationship with the Army… and seem to be patriotic and libertarian in the extreme.
Boot camp (“Basic Training” is for Army dogs) is great and they will whip you into shape and you will love it. I was runing five miles in 20 minutes and not breathing hard oh way back when, but when he gets to infantry school, well, dats a different story, and when he gets deployed, he’ll forget all about boot camp.
It’s like the difference between Taipei and the rest of Taiwan.
[quote=“bismarck”]…My naive hope in the better qualities of mankind came crumbling down around me and I was forced to see us at our worst.
I’m a firm believer in State organised military power (within a democratic environment - and subject to UN and international scrutiny) and completely opposed to the use of force by anyone outside of that spectrum. Uncontrolled, people too easily slide back towards barbarism.
At heart people are basically not good. That is the feeling I came away with, and I’ve seen nothing since to convince me otherwise. For me, the world is no longer the garden of roses it once was. Military power is a natural state of things and without it I believe the world would slide into anarchy. Sometimes a little evil is necessary to preserve the whole.[/quote]
Bravo! :bravo: well said.
i was in the army for a couple of years before i was asked to leave. originally i joined to learn to fly helicopters, but got stuck in infantry. not that i was ever called upon to shoot anybody. just lie around in wet ditches for a while. i sort of became an anarchist in ideology after that, maybe as a reaction, maybe cause it was cool in the early 80’s. quite the opposite POV, i’m sure you’ll agree.
and now i am much older, i too have come to realise that mankind is selfish and brutish. only the state system works in such a crowded world, thank you Hobbes. Bakunin was spot on about life with no rules being better for the psyche and ‘the soul’, but in my opinion that only works in small groups, where you cannot hide from the consequences of your actions, because eveyone knows you. for today’s world, militaries are a necessay evil. and a militry mist be subject to control from and by and ffor the people, and individual countries subject to a larger controlling body. a good case for a strong UN, one that individual countries cannot duck out of when it suits them, or exercise senseless selfish vetoes a la the current big five in the SecCon.
OT a bit, but how accurate is the depiction of boot camp in the movie “Full Metal Jacket”? Watching it recently, I was amazed that the recruits actually put up with the shit from the drill instructor. If it were me, I’d be starting a rebellion.
I’ve never been in the military, but from my mom’s stories (she was in the Holocaust as a child prsioner of the Nazis), my conclusion is not that all people are basically evil. It is a minority that are truly evil, but they come to power and scare the hell out of the rest of the good people, who are too passive. Within the general population are men who seem normal, but who in a warfare will lose their veneer of civilized behavior and commit atrocities- men of every nationalitiy. If you come to your conclusions about human nature just by looking at the truly evil, you will just see evil. I come to my conclusions by not just looking at the perpetrators, but at the survivors and the people who helped them to survive. I wouldn’t be alive if it weren’t for the allied forces- so I would never be anit-military in a broad sense.
v, we’ve had some lengthy pms about this and I want to make a couple of observations if you dont mind.
Your nephew finished boot camp. He IS a Marine. Now it is down to whether or not he’ll be a GOOD Marine.
I personally think it is incredibly insulting to suggest that a video game was the main cause of him upping. I think there are many things he is unable to say with words at his age to explain why he did it. I couldn’t really tell you why I signed up when I was 17, but at 39 I know exactly why. At 21, I knew why.
He learned to carry himself? What, with pride or arrogance? If it’s a little bit of both, good for him. he obviously needed a boost and the USMC seems to be providing it for him.
Things are planned to the minute in Boot Camp. Like I said, “Hurry up and wait” happens later on. He’ll see. There has been no acceration of anything.
Getting new Marines to sport their blues and walk around is as old as the Corps. That he can wear the uniform and talk to people about his experiences and encourage them to follow him…yeah it’s dumb, but it shows that he believes in something doesn’t it? And that is good. The USMC isn’t the Skinheads.
What is this “Marine mode” you speak about? He feels ten feet tall? Good for him. Marine Corps boot camp at Paris Island is NOT easy and many recruits don’t make through easily and some don’t make it through at all. We had guys dropping out until the 10th week. It’s a physically and mentally demanding program. If your stregth is hidden, it will find it. If you have no strength, it will make it. Sounds cheesy, but it’s true.
I do hope you reminded him to sign up for the GI Bill and get an direct deposit IRA going NOW, while he has the time. Do him and yourself a favor, HELP him and stop trying to convince yourself that he’s done something worthy of defrocking.
jdsalutes the noob and wishes him and his family a Merry Christmas.
The army did not only shaped my political believe, it shaped “me’.
i could not cope with the rules so i simply deserted. No one tells me " in the army you do what is told, you do not have to think as the Army thinks for you”
I became a rebel after doing my service but it damned created my innerself. political also.
[quote=“ceevee369”]The army did not only shaped my political believe, it shaped “me’.
i could not cope with the rules so i simply deserted. No one tells me " in the army you do what is told, you do not have to think as the Army thinks for you”
I became a rebel after doing my service but it damned created my innerself. political also.[/quote]
I’m not too clear on why you think this is something worthy of sharing.
maybe its just me, but this, IMO, is nothing to be particularly proud of having in ones past.
[quote=“TainanCowboy”][quote=“ceevee369”]The army did not only shaped my political believe, it shaped “me’.
i could not cope with the rules so i simply deserted. No one tells me " in the army you do what is told, you do not have to think as the Army thinks for you”
I became a rebel after doing my service but it damned created my innerself. political also.[/quote]
I’m not too clear on why you think this is something worthy of sharing.
maybe its just me, but this, IMO, is nothing to be particularly proud of having in ones past.[/quote]
He’s Belgian. So he’s probably talking about national service, not volunteering. I see nothing wrong with telling would-be kidnappers “fuck you” if you have the balls. Especially when you’re talking about wasting a couple of years fucking about doing peacetime service for the benefit of a government you don’t agree with. “In the army, no-one tells me what to do.” Fuckin’ A! Especially when its an army in the service of a government you abhor and hold in contempt. “You think you know what’s best? You couldn’t find your own arsehole with both hands and a map. Don’t be telling ME what to do, you damn stupid bunch of pillocks!”
[quote=“sandman”][quote=“TainanCowboy”][quote=“ceevee369”]The army did not only shaped my political believe, it shaped “me’.
i could not cope with the rules so i simply deserted. No one tells me " in the army you do what is told, you do not have to think as the Army thinks for you”
I became a rebel after doing my service but it damned created my innerself. political also.[/quote]
I’m not too clear on why you think this is something worthy of sharing.
maybe its just me, but this, IMO, is nothing to be particularly proud of having in ones past.[/quote]
He’s Belgian. So he’s probably talking about national service, not volunteering. I see nothing wrong with telling would-be kidnappers “fuck you” if you have the balls. Especially when you’re talking about wasting a couple of years fucking about doing peacetime service for the benefit of a government you don’t agree with. “In the army, no-one tells me what to do.” Fuckin’ A! Especially when its an army in the service of a government you abhor and hold in contempt. “You think you know what’s best? You couldn’t find your own arsehole with both hands and a map. Don’t be telling ME what to do, you damn stupid bunch of pillocks!”[/quote]
TC, Sandman is damn right. I referred to “service”. An army dedicated by some extremely right thoughts “for the sake of the fatherland” was not enough to brainwash me. (do not know if you heard about the scandal lately in the Belgian Army (now voluntary) where weapons were sold to extreme right Nazi oriented parties)
I did part of my service, revolted the system (there is no system in any army) and went of. Those puppets on a string would never put me under they thumbs. This said, I gained allergy for everything which salutes. Army cops…
I called my nephew the new marine last night. he told me his take so far- he hates walking around the mall for 5 hours to try to get recruits- it’s a big waste of time. i asked if he just waited for people to come up to him and ask him questions. he said ‘no’, nobody asks, they have to approach a lot of people, 95% of whom aren’t interested in what they have to say, treat them like proselytizing jehovah’s witnesses, and want to continue their shopping. he said it was cool, though, when old people who were ex-marines came up and shook his hand and thanked him. i said, yeah, i talk to this ‘old’ guy on the internet whose been out of the marines for years and it’s like still a big part of his life or something. my nephew was like (sorry i’m in teenager speech mode now), yeah, it’s like one big gang for life, and i just went through initiation (boot camp). i asked if after boot camp he had changed his opinion of the marines at all, and he just say ‘yeah, i’m still good’. he did sign up for the gi bill, but he wasn’t in to talking about the ira. he came off sounding a little flat. he said that it really didn’t bother him approaching people in the mall because the marines had taught him to act without emotion- which i guess is one way to get to self-discipline.
It’s interesting how many here were around military camps as kids and then joined.
My father was in the Oz air force and we travelled base to base when I was a kid until we hit Malaysia. We stayed in Penang for six years before Perth where my old man got out. My grand father had been at Gallipoli as a sniper with the light horse and later became a pilot. He flew for the remaining three years of WWI including the silly push into Russia in 1919.
It seemed like all the male members of both sides of my family had been in either the first or second world war and in many cases both. There were many an “uncle” that had never been right in the head since . . . " My grandmother rather boldly declared some ten years after grandad’s death that he was a war neurosis case given his advanced alcoholism and violent tendencies.
Years later I was definitely trying to abuse the system. I joined wanting to becme a medic because it meant I could bail out and go and do nursing without having to finish high school. I was 18 and had been working for two years as a rural labourer. They put me into the fucking commandos and I quit. There was absolutelu no way I was going down that road. The really shitty thing was that I didn’t get into the level of nurse training I wanted at that time because I was designated infantry and not a medic.
A friend emailed me this story a while back. Its sort of relevant to this thread and tells of one mans thoughts on decisions he made many years ago.
I am not saying these thoughts and feelings should be those of anyone but him. Its a discussion I have had with quite a few people over the years. And many have come to echo what Mr. Conroy says.
Damn, i should have known you earlier. What was the trick? acting like a psycho, peeing in your bed, putting sugar in your urine? I did them all but they still convincted me :raspberry:
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