Read this post recently, and decided to repost it. It's written by a fellow servicemember, so I'd say it's a bit biased, for instance this is an all volunteer Army now compared to WW2 and Vietnam, but still an interesting read, that briefly touches certain aspects of our lifestyle, which we VOLUNTEERED for. So yeah, it blows big time sometimes, but hey that's the choice, and we shouldn't be complaining openly much at least not to the civilians, let's stay professional and drive on. Nonetheless, pretty cool stuff below.
"I remember the day I found out I got into West Point.
My mom
actually showed up in the hallway of my high school and waited for me to
get out of class. She was bawling her eyes out and apologizing that she
had opened up my admission letter. She wasn’t crying because it had
been her dream for me to go there. She was crying because she knew how
hard I’d worked to get in, how much I wanted to attend, and how much I
wanted to be an infantry officer. I was going to get that opportunity.
That same day two of my teachers took me aside and essentially told me
the following: “Nick, you’re a smart guy. You don’t have to join the
military. You should go to college, instead.”
I could easily
write a tome defending West Pont and the military as I did that day,
explaining that USMA is an elite institution, that separate from that it
is actually statistically much harder to enlist in the military than it
is to get admitted to college, that serving the nation is a challenge
that all able-bodied men should at least consider for a host of reasons,
but I won’t.
What I will say is that when a 16 year-old kid is
being told that attending West Point is going to be bad for his future
then there is a dangerous disconnect in America, and entirely too many
Americans have no idea what kind of burdens our military is bearing.
In World War II, 11.2% of the nation served in four years. In Vietnam,
4.3% served in 12 years. Since 2001, only 0.45% of our population has
served in the Global War on Terror. These are unbelievable statistics.
Over time, fewer and fewer people have shouldered more and more of the
burden and it is only getting worse. Our troops were sent to war in Iraq
by a Congress consisting of 10% veterans with only one person having a
child in the military. Taxes did not increase to pay for the war. War
bonds were not sold. Gas was not regulated. In fact, the average citizen
was asked to sacrifice nothing, and has sacrificed nothing unless they
have chosen to out of the goodness of their hearts.
The only
people who have sacrificed are the veterans and their families. The
volunteers. The people who swore an oath to defend this nation. You.
You stand there, deployment after deployment and fight on. You’ve lost
relationships, spent years of your lives in extreme conditions, years
apart from kids you’ll never get back, and beaten your body in a way
that even professional athletes don’t understand. And you come home to a
nation that doesn’t understand. They don’t understand suffering. They
don’t understand sacrifice. They don’t understand that bad people exist.
They look at you like you’re a machine – like something is wrong with
you. You are the misguided one – not them. When you get out, you sit in
the college classrooms with political science teachers that discount
your opinions on Iraq and Afghanistan because YOU WERE THERE and can’t
understand the “macro” issues they gathered from books with your bias.
You watch TV shows where every vet has PTSD and the violent strain at
that. Your Congress is debating your benefits, your retirement, and your
pay, while they ask you to do more.
But the amazing thing
about you is that you all know this. You know your country will never
pay back what you’ve given up. You know that the populace at large will
never truly understand or appreciate what you have done for them. Hell,
you know that in some circles, you will be thought as less than normal
for having worn the uniform. But you do it anyway. You do what the
greatest men and women of this country have done since 1775 – YOU
SERVED. Just that decision alone makes you part of an elite group.
Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.
You are the 0.45%."
Thursday, October 20, 2011
Sunday, October 16, 2011
Upcoming road trip
It's that time of the year again. The leaves are falling, pumpkins getting sacrificed, NY Giants hopefully winning, and it's our unit's turn to deploy again. Soon I'll be on the 15 hour plane ride again, and not in the middle seat like last time... But not before I eat my Thanksgiving turkey, and get some serious slope time (let's just have faith in the La Nina again), matter of fact, I think I'll skip the turkey, and enjoy an extra day of skiing. They got turkey in Afghanistan. If not, there is always SPAM and hot sauce. Hot sauce makes everything better.
SRP is over, month long NTC vacation in the Mojave is a distant memory now, just getting through paperwork, and other joys of prepping for a deployment with information coming in last second. If this whole Army gig doesn't work out, I can probably work as a circus gymnast from all this "Be flexible" military readiness...Should be able to bend backwards now....
SRP is over, month long NTC vacation in the Mojave is a distant memory now, just getting through paperwork, and other joys of prepping for a deployment with information coming in last second. If this whole Army gig doesn't work out, I can probably work as a circus gymnast from all this "Be flexible" military readiness...Should be able to bend backwards now....
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