American culture seems to be rife with men who went to the Marines and after being discharged of duty went on to either lead successful lives or who’s life took a turn for the worse and ended up on the street.
Of c, the two groups are not equal in numbers and the third much larger group lies in between these two groups. Now, I still am interested in the disparity between the extremes. Why do some people who join the Marines go on to create an over represent the Marines amount the successful, while others end up on the street? They are all given a clean slate somewhat and are exposed to the exact same environment, what do the successful learn which the unsuccessful don’t?
In the military there are two separate classes, officers and enlisted. Officers had at least a bachelor’s degree and the military is a much different experience for them. They come in day as leaders, are paid significantly more, and have more opportunities to make lifelong connections with powerful people.
Enlisted are treated like blue collar workers, the grunts. Just in their day to day jobs enlisted people are going to have more wear and tear on their bodies. Take battle experience out of it, just as is, officers have a much better path forward.
Fraternization is illegal between officers and enlisted which basically makes it two segregated classes.
Enlisted folks also tend to come from lower income families, so while they are giving more opportunities than staying in their home town it can still be difficult for them to advance much higher.
In short, you have a large mixture of people from different ways of life with different education levels. Some take advantage of stuff like the GI Bill or other opportunities,. others don’t. Also some give their bodies to the extent that they can’t really function at the same levels on the outside.
I keep seeing posts like this, and I have to wonder if OP is a kid or if they just have no real life experience. Do homeless people stay homeless in your mind?
Three things stand out to me:
-
The disparity between military and civilian certifications. If you’re a mechanic on a specialised machine, it’s easy to become a DOD contractor on that same platform. If you’re an officer, you can say you’ve managed X people. If you’re a medic, your scope of practice is command-by-command. You might work above an LPN level but leave the military with an NREMT EMT-B certification at most which qualifies you for a minimum wage job way below your scope of practice. There are only a handful of slots for advanced schools that give you any worthwhile certification, and the paperwork required to become an LPN ($55k/year~) is very difficult to amass. If you’re a machine gunner, you spent 4+ years mastering a skill that doesn’t transfer to any civilian job and you can only sell yourself as a whipped horse with a broken back.
-
Military culture itself is traumatic. It’s closer to feudalism than it is anything in the civilian world. There’s a rigid hierarchy and set of standards for every aspect of your life. You have a pathological obsession with being 15 minutes early because your lord can have you arrested if you don’t do everything perfectly. You’re supposed to embrace the toxicity of every part of your day, much less being a cog in the demon machine that hates you as much as it does its victims, and tie your self-worth to that scripted performance. The outlet for dealing with any of that is alcoholism and/or smoking. You can’t afford or make the time for civilian therapy, while military therapists are inquisitors that can have you arrested or end your career.
-
There’s no blueprint for civilian life. The allure of military life is that you know exactly what every expectation is. You can turn your brain off because you know what to wear and how to wear it, what to do and how to do it, and how doing A will result in B for your career. Your chain of command is a line of narcissistic older siblings and parents strictly directing you down that path. You have that stick incentive of being arrested if you violate any part of the carrot plan. All of a sudden you’re removed from that very traumatic environment and it’s replaced by a much more abstract system where nobody follows the rules you’re conditioned into.
Maybe you make that deal with the devil knowing you’re a good fiddler and you get a golden fiddle for it. If you didn’t explicitly do that for that reason and get the right paperwork for that goal, you leave with nothing and probably hate the field you were trained for but not meaningfully certified in.
-
I don’t have data to support it, but I’d imagine that the job role within the military can make a big difference. Were you an officer, with a college degree, doing a lot of IT work and never deployed? You’re probably gonna be fine.
Were you an enlisted undez who scraped rust, or were deployed and suffering from PTSD? It’s gonna be a much harder time.
You’re assuming that the dramatically segmented and stratified experience is the “exact same service”, which is patently not true.
There’s a world of difference between a black officer who managed a supply line, a white non-comp who maintained aircraft, and a queer rifeman who witnessed half his unit die to an IED. And that’s ignoring rape, gang infiltration, religions discrimination, and plain ol “was your CO a jerk or awesome?”
I suspect that mental health and social support at home play huge roles here.
aka: the same things that effects everybody’s outcomes.
That’s true.
I have a question I can pose to anyone, but I am posing to you, do you think Lemmy focuses way too much on the things which we can’t control and disregards what we can? I.e., when I asked that question I wanted actionable steps on which I can base my life around, something to help me be better, instead every answer I have gotten seems to focus on things we can’t control.
I was thinking the answer would revolve around Attitude, Discipline and Mindset, and tho the answers are as revealing as these, I am not getting anything I can act on. Is Lemmy fixating on the negative 🤔
There are things you can manage, but they tend to be about controlling your environment.
JD Vance is the perfect example of someone that benefited from the military. Fit in (and let’s be honest being a straight white male still helps). Find a job that involves sitting behind a desk. Get some experience pulling a 9-5 for a few years, and then go to university for free. Don’t get injured. Don’t get PTSD.
All of this attitude with a capital A is too late. You can’t Attitude yourself out of a missing leg, and you can’t Attitude yourself out of PTSD. You can learn to cope better but coping well with PTSD is still worse than not having it.
Either have a plan to avoid danger or you need to be lucky.
I would assume it also has to do with your assignment and how much/if any combat you’ve experienced and injuries you sustained.
My Dad was drafted into Vietnam - infantry - and was wounded. He was only there ~ 6 months, and tried to go to university on the GI Bill, but for awhile couldn’t stand being in that type of environment immediately after returning home. PTSD/survivor’s guilt, etc, were too much.
Later on in life his injuries prevented him from being able to work. This, combined with rising medical debt, left us in a bad spot.
What you’re exposed to when you serve and when you served also come into play - PTSD is taken more seriously now, as are the effects of things like Agent Orange. I’m not sure if the VA is better or worse from, say, 20 years ago, but that could also be a factor.
Not sure if this helps to answer your question, but that’s my personal anecdote.
They are all given a clean slate somewhat and are exposed to the exact same environment
OK, try actually imagining this “clean slate” and “same environment”. Imagine yourself, right now, going to boot camp alongside someone who’s lived a life of relative privilege with lots of educational and exercise opportunities - someone better educated, fitter, even taller than you. Imagine yourself alongside someone who lived a life lacking in privileges - a crappy or unfinished education, not particularly healthy, shorter than you.
Imagine how you and those two hypothetical people tackle the different obstacles this “same environment” gives you - imagine going through an actual obstacle course with them. How easy or hard does each person find each obstacle? Will a short person find climbing a rope or wall as easy as a tall person? How about balancing on a log, crawling under wire, or jumping over a ditch?
A “clean slate” isn’t any kind of reset of their abilities and experiences. “The same environment” inherently means it challenges their individual abilities differently. They get different outcomes because they were different people to begin with, so react differently to their experiences, like everywhere else in life.Excellent points. The military is a human endeavor, and is just as rife with all the same issues as any other organization, with all the expected biases. Boot camp is tiny part of overall service, and honestly barely relevant to the day to day. Mostly, you will have the same experience in the military as out, just with added hardships. People are still people, even when in uniform.
An attractive, fit, nuerotypical, charming person will have a much better experience than someone out of sorts with the above.
The military doesnt stamp you and everyone elese into the same person. It just presses you into a specific shape to do the specific task they need. Everything else is still there, if not exacerbated by the trauma of it all. They earnestly dont give a shit if that task destroys or improves you, as long as you do the task for the time allotted.
Different outcomes happen because people are different.
Sample bias. Any advertising, campaigning, fawning and celebrating are the exceptions. You are exposed to the “success stories” exponentially more through media thanks to government and corporate forces despite the successes being exponentially rarer than the failures: suicides, mental health disorders, divorces, denied medical care by VA, insufficiency of college fund programs, underemployment, etc. The coverage Success Stories get as the 1% or whatever, dwarfs the failures which are the 99%. This reversed representation explains why they may be perceived as equally likely, which is confusing.
The answer is sample bias; deliberately misleading. After all, who is going to sign up if they could see reality represented? Most would just work fast food–same crappy outcomes, fewer bullets.
This is bullshit because it’s not a 1% / 99% split.
The successes are more common than the failures in my experience. They’re absolutely not “exponentially rarer than the failures.” I work with many successful veterans, all of us are near or above six figure salaries from our civilian jobs, not counting any military benefits. I’m one of those. My wife is an active duty officer. I got out after I did the minimum time to get the benefits I was after, because I like smoking weed and having a beard. I had a plan to pay off my college debt and get experience in the field. I pulled it off, and even got to travel to Japan and live in Italy. I got even more education benefits for reenlisting for a couple years.
Yeah, I know of a few suicides. I know of a few suicides and drug overdoses from civilian life, too. Divorce rates are astronomical on the enlisted side, I’ll give you that.
What fast food job can get you a career and college afterwards? You won’t get decent healthcare, nor room and board, nor an opportunity to travel with a fast food job.
Not every job in the military is infantry. It’s got more risks than a typical civilian job, but it’s absolutely not the 1%/99% split you’re claiming. Most people make it out fine and it sets them up well for life afterwards. That doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed success, though, and some people treat it this way. It is what you make of it.
Here’s a source corroborating my experience with veterans:
“New York’s 9/11-Era Veterans: A Quantitative Study by Sex, Race, and E” by Lawrence Cappello
9/11 era veterans in the New York metropolitan area performed well above their non-veteran counterparts in most socio-economic categories. The data indicate that between 2007 and 2017 employment, income, and educational attainment rates were consistently higher, and poverty rates consistently lower, than those of the metro area’s general population. These trends held relatively firm during the financial crisis of 2008 and as the veteran population continued to grow into the 2010s. In short, there is considerable evidence within this report to affirm that serving in the armed forces continues to have a direct correlation with greater socio-economic success. This correlation is particularly stark among Latinos and non-Hispanic blacks, where the variances between their non-veteran counterparts are prevalent in income, employment, poverty rates, and educational attainment.
There’s a lot of statistics that can be found in this Pew research article too. I believe this sums it up well. Sure doesn’t sound like only 1% have a successful experience.
A large majority of veterans endorse the military as a career choice. Roughly eight-in-ten say they would advise a young person close to them to join the military. This includes large majorities of post-9/11 veterans, combat veterans and those who say they had emotionally traumatic experiences in the military.
Family and social supports when you get out. There is a lot of adjustment to a world where you have to make your own way and decisions. Having support lets you make some mistakes and recover. Even if that is just getting a wrong job, or not finding a place to live fast enough.
Military service is traumatising, but can build up a nest egg of funds, so to speak. If your trauma doesn’t turn into a self-reinforcing cycle, you’re in a better position than most in our society (materially, not morally). It lends itself to falling in one extreme or another.
That said, I imagine there’s a decent number of people who get regular jobs in the middle that you never hear about. Just the people at the bottom get the whole “they sacrificed their mental health and their life, why can’t we help them” signal boost
