Hi,

I will be finishing college with a degree in philosophy (This is my fifth year. I transferred and lost credits). I will be approximately 100k in debt, and the thought of accruing another 100k in debt by going to law school makes me want to vomit (even though over the long run it will be lucrative). Despite studying philosophy, I am not a nerd. I play soccer, lacrosse, and I mountain bike regularly. In short, I love and need action, but not serious mortar action, or limbs being torn from people’s bodies by hot shrapnel. I’m not one of those kids who says he wants to get into some gnarly urban warfare. Once you’re dead, you’re dead. I want a job that requires travel and activity. I simply do not think I could stand another 3 years of school at this point in time. I can’t stand being broke anymore. For these reasons, I am thinking about joining the Navy. My mother’s friend did 20 years and became a pilot. He now flies for Fed Ex. He said he loved the Navy.

However, I have the following concerns: 1) I am not a terribly regimented individual. 2) I need a healthy social life (I love to drink. How often can one go out?) 3. I don’t want to be someone’s bitch. 4. I need a change of scenery to be content, and being on a ship doesn’t seem to be the best place to do that.

In short, I need a lot of action, just not gnarly action that requires me to dodge mortar fire or plunge a pocket knife through an Iraqi’s jugular. Although, I am more than capable of executing a command. . . Can you guys recommend a certain type of job for me? Would I be completely miserable in the military? Thanks for your time.

you are in between a rock and a hard place dude. With a degree in philosophy you will likely have little luck finding "gainfull" (as in professional wages to pay off that debt in a timely manner) employment. Of course your mothers friend is happy he lucked out and got a pilot slot and now makes 100K a year or so as a pilot, most people in the military are not so lucky. The military is very regimented and are more about customs/courtesy, bering and politics than getting useful work done, they do get stuff done but it takes several orders of magnitude more people to do it because of there misguided priorities. It is in your best interests to finish law school and start making some money then you can go do some sky diving or some bungee jumping (which sounds right up your ally from what you described). Some in the military talk about drinking and women etc but its rare depending on what you do where your stationed etc, its all really a crap shoot, I have friends who got to be stationed in hawaii for 4 yrs and partied on the beach and got laided and others now are in iraq kicking in doors. In the military you will definatly be someones bitch (the crap shoot is the reasonalbeness of the person over you and what there priorities are ie do they want to get useful work done or do they want to dwell on customs/courtesys and politics)

I left the national guard because I could not take the politics, getting hazed for not addressing a lt col correctly or comming to parade rest when an NCO walked by what was the lt cols major in .... basket weaving oh thats right myn is in chemical engineering im hardly going to tolerate an ass chewing from someone with a basket weaving degree or an NCO with no education, its just not going to happen from me I dont care what kind of rational you put in the only thing rank means is you managed to get some kind of degree, got some dirt kicked in your face in OCS and then just "put your time in" which does not stack up against a professional technical education in engineering, hard science, hard medicine etc.

Get your law degree and if you still want to join the military at least then you can get a direct commission but a lt col can and probably will still chew you out unless there a professional lawyer as well and if a professional JAG chews you out over a courtesy they are a piece of sh*t and a discrace to the profession. If they chewed you out because you f'ed up on a legal matter they are a little more justified. If you f'ed up on purpose for something directly related to your job and work product and he dident give you a reason to that is the only time an a** chewing is warrented

Impressive post. I'll keep it in mind. Thanks.

yetti...yeah listen to rppearso 'the deserter'

Is that all you got gunny, is to throw around libal comments. FYI im not in deserter status but I am in the process of getting out of the guard. Your comment is not really even relavant to the question anyhow, but smearing and libal are part of the politics that is the military, not to say thoes things dont happen outside the military but in the military the heat from the flames feels a little to close for comfort.

shoe fits wear it. don't like the name I've tagged you with? too bad so sad. got yer dd-214 via email yet?

I'm calling a spade a spade. you are a deserter. You are awol beyond 30 days during time of war.

don't like it, report back to your command and get out processed.

the military has better things to do than look for you. you esentially aren't worth the time or effort......


FORT BRAGG, N.C. - There is no crack team of bounty hunters, no elite military unit whose job is to track them down and bring them in.

Despite a rise in desertions from the Army as the Iraq war drags on into a fifth year, the U.S. military does almost nothing to find those who flee and rarely prosecutes those it gets its hands on.

An Associated Press examination of Pentagon figures shows that 174 troops were court-martialed by the Army last year for desertion — a figure that amounts to just 5 percent of the 3,301 soldiers who deserted in fiscal year 2006. The figures are about 1 percent or less for the Navy and the Marines, according to data obtained by the AP under the Freedom of Information Act.

Some deserters are simply allowed to return to their units, while the majority are discharged in non-criminal proceedings on less-than-honorable terms.

Pentagon officials say that while the all-volunteer military is stretched thin by the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, the number of deserters represents an extremely small percentage of the armed forces, and it would be a poor use of time to go after them, particularly when there is a war on.

As a result, the Pentagon does little more than enter deserters' names into an FBI national criminal database.

In most cases, as long as a deserter stays out of trouble — as long as, say, police don't pull him over for speeding and run his name through the computer — he is in little danger of getting caught.

"A deserter either returns voluntarily or he spends the rest of his life looking over his shoulder wondering when he'll be discovered," said Maj. Anne Edgecombe, an Army spokeswoman.

She added: "Rather than dedicate seasoned noncommissioned officers to the task of tracking down a deserter, commanders choose to spend time and resources to ensure their soldiers are properly trained and prepared to perform the missions they will be tasked with in places like Iraq and Afghanistan."

Sgt. Ricky Clousing of the Army's storied 82nd Airborne Division found that out after he slipped away from Fort Bragg in the middle of the night in 2005 rather than return to Iraq.

Having left a note in his barracks announcing his intentions, he was sure police would be waiting for him with handcuffs by the time he reached his home in Washington state. But no one was there.

A year later, when he tried to turn himself in near Seattle to make an anti-war statement, he was not hustled off to the stockade in leg irons. He was given a bus ticket and told to report to Fort Bragg on his own.

"I thought I would be more of a priority," said Clousing, a 24-year-old paratrooper and military intelligence interrogator with combat experience.

Clousing ultimately pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of being absent without leave. He was given a bad-conduct discharge and sentenced to three months in prison.

The Army is by far the biggest branch of the military, with a half-million active-duty members, and accounts for the vast majority of U.S. troops in Iraq. The number of Army deserters plummeted after the 2001 terrorist attacks and the start of the Iraq war in 2003, perhaps in a burst of patriotism, and bottomed out in fiscal year 2004.

But desertions crept back up as the fighting dragged on and the death toll climbed. Since fiscal year 2004, desertions are up by more than a third.

A total of 4,399 soldiers deserted the Army in fiscal year 2001; 3,971 in 2002; 2,610 in 2003; 2,450 in 2004; 2,659 in 2005; and 3,301 in 2006.

Desertions from the Navy have declined steadily since 2001, and are down 36 percent over the past three calendar years, falling to 1,296 in 2006. Desertions from the Marines and the Air Force bounced up and down after 2001 and stood at 834 and 42, respectively, in fiscal year 2006.

Exactly how many deserters are caught is unclear, largely because each branch of the military keeps statistics in different ways and does not give breakdowns of how many people who deserted in a given year are ultimately caught.

Many deserters decide to turn themselves in and face the consequences. Others are eventually caught, but usually after they expose themselves in some way — they get arrested for a civilian offense, or apply for a passport or a job that requires a background check, military officials say.

Under the military criminal code, the maximum penalty for desertion during a declared war is death. But such a sentence has been carried out just once since the Civil War, when Pvt. Eddie Slovik went before a firing squad during World War II. The next-highest punishment is five years in prison.

The number of Army soldiers prosecuted for desertion tripled in the year after Sept. 11. But it has essentially held steady since 2002. The Navy prosecuted 17 deserters in 2006, the Marine Corps just four. There were 10 prosecutions for desertion in the Air Force during fiscal year 2006.

The decision of whether to prosecute is up to the soldier's unit commander.

Deserters who are discharged on less-than-honorable terms through an administrative, or non-criminal, proceeding lose the medical and educational benefits and other privileges available to veterans.

"I sort of look at the administrative discharge process as the equivalent of a firing ... leaving with a bad reference," said David Miner, a former Army attorney now in private practice, with Clousing among his clients.

The number of Army deserters in 2006 amounted to less than 1 percent of the active-duty force. That compares with 3.4 percent at the height of the Vietnam War in 1971

"We had a larger problem in Vietnam because we had the draft," said Scott Silliman, a law professor and director of the Center on Law, Ethics and National Security at Duke University, who added he knows of no units that chased down deserters back then, either. "Here the individual is not going to go into the military unless they had some inclination to do so in the first place."

In the Army, officials said deserters are typically junior enlisted soldiers in their teens or early 20s, with less than three years of service. Most often, they cite financial or personal problems as a reason for leaving, officials say.

Army and Marine officials say there is no evidence that repeated deployments to Iraq are leading to more desertions. The Army's Edgecombe said that more than 60 percent of deserters over the past 18 months have had less than a year of service, so they haven't been deployed at all.

In recent years, the military has lowered its standards to fill its ranks, letting in more recruits with criminal records or low aptitude scores. But officials said that does not appear to be a factor in the rising desertion rate either.

In fact, Edgecombe said, recruits who got into trouble before they enlisted tend to shape up under the influence of the military's code of honor and discipline.

Those who leave without permission are considered AWOL for 30 days, after which they are "dropped from the rolls" and branded deserters.

That is when the paychecks are supposed to stop, but a congressional audit found that more than 7,500 deserters and soldiers who were absent from duty improperly received $6.6 million in pay between October 2000 and February 2002.

Once a soldier is dropped from the rolls, employees at a small Army office at Fort Knox in Kentucky enter the deserter's information into the FBI database.

When someone is arrested for a civilian offense and the computer flags him as a deserter, local authorities typically hold him and contact the military, which might send someone to bring him in, or ask him to come in on his own.

The military does actively chase down deserters who committed crimes before abandoning their posts. Military officials do not have jurisdiction off-base to arrest a deserter, and so the federal Marshals Service works with the military in such cases. Spokeswoman Nikki Credic said federal marshals arrested 68 deserters from all services in fiscal year 2006.

"People have been hiding for years and years. If you want to hide out, you can," said Maj. Jay Delarosa, a Marine Corps spokesman. But he added that in the information age, it is less likely that a deserter can hide forever.

"There's other ways people reveal themselves besides being caught with a broken tail light," Delarosa said.

___

quote:

Originally posted by Yetti:
Impressive post.

Yeah, you'd better stick with law school. If you think the village idiot who posts here is impressive, you don't belong in the military.

His rant was impressive. Nothing else.

I just tell it like it is thats all. I dont sugar coat military service like 90% of veterans and recruiters. Veterans and especially recruiters focus heavily on the desireable aspects of the military and talk little of the vast undesirable aspects of the military. Then once you are signed up the desireable aspects that the recruiter spoke of fade into the distance and the only things other military members talk about are the undesirable aspects and how you better get used to it because your in the army now. In life work and risk have to be directly tied to reward, without the reward there is no incentive for the work or taking the risk. The military is not so good at the reward part and if you wise up and complain about it you get responces like similar to thoes on this site directed towards me. If you want to bust your butt for table scraps fine, but dont degrade people who get fed up with it and find a better way of going through life. The admin discharge stigma is a dispicable part of our society and is the equivalant to retaliation.

WHY, WHY, WHY do I click "show post"?

PLEASE read this retardo. I'm actually reaching out and attempting to get you involved in some type of interaction that I hope you will FINALLY get.

False consensus effect
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The false consensus effect refers to the tendency for people to overestimate the degree to which others agree with them. People readily guess their own opinions, beliefs and predilections to be more prevalent in the general public than they really are.

This bias is commonly present in a group setting where one thinks the collective opinion of their own group matches that of the larger population. Since the members of a group reach a consensus and rarely encounter those who dispute it, they tend to believe that everybody thinks the same way.

One of the most notable examples is the possibly apocryphal quip by The New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael, who reportedly said she couldn't believe Nixon had won since no one she knew had voted for him.

There is no single cause for this cognitive bias; the availability heuristic and self-serving bias have been suggested as at least partial underlying factors.


Now-- you "telling it like it is" and us veterans "sugar coating it" is not the case if you read and understand the above. I have a degree, I served in the exact same military and I did 22 years. True, I didn't get paid what I could out in the civilian world, but money was not why I was serving. I did it partly out of patriotism, partly out of love for the job. How did I have fun in the same military you served in? (read the above) Then, you bitch and moan about your terrible experiences in a PRO-MILITARY FORUM and wonder why you're not understood? (again, read the above)

This will be my final address to you in somewhat respectful manner unless you wise up.

I agree with that statement and I am giving potential recruites the flip side of the coin (the ones who did vote for nixon). I agree there are veterans and members currantly serving that have had reasonable good experences but on the flip side there are people who have gotten burned in the military as well (and I have posted numerous articles about it). It is important to have ALL the information before joining.

People have been burned in all phases of life. Look at the effects of chemicals on the environment. They are not bad unless the people responsible for insuring a safe environment do not care.

the problem with the military vs other civilian jobs, is if you get burned in the military it is extemely difficult to quit and will cause you much more problems than a civilian job will.