By best friend has recently decided to join the military and I figure I am the only person who knows enough about the world to stop him. He feels he is stuck in his job and that only a college degree will get him advancement. He has a decent job (around 40K or so), owns a home and has an almost paid off car. He does not know yet that I completely oppose his decision and I have about a month and a half to convince him.
I figured I would start by trying to convince him that by the time he got to start college he probably would be prevented from going due to what is the inevitable economic catastrophe oncoming. I think military spending will be cut drastically (by choice or by necessity.)
Then I would tell him that associates degrees are becoming a dime-a-dozen and that in a few years having an associates degree will not set him apart from the pack.
If I cannot convince him that college is not going to help him then I will have to convince him why joining the military will be the biggest mistake of his life.
At this point I think I would be the only person saying that it is a bad idea instead of probably a bad idea. He doesn’t realize how lucky he has it and that the world will be changing real soon. Does anyone have any advice or experience in this matter?
Training to become a killbot screws you up. Ask him what percent of people who enlist go back to college and get jobs paying over 80k in the private sector? Practically none. Killbots are UNFIT for civil society. The government shovels them all into its failed ventures like the post office. 40% of the people who work there are ex military. Either that or you go into the “private” military… which is also not a real job.
Tell your friend to stfu and go be the best damn whatever you can be. Employers are looking for motivated intelligent people. The owner of a medium sized financial group called my gf up a few months ago begging her to work for him because of an internship she had 2 years ago. 50k/yr plus career opportunities. She’s 21.
Go be an engineer. Go be a geotech. Go be something. The average person doesn’t want to work and it shows. Its not hard to place yourself in the top 1% of workers both skill and compensation wise. You just have to cowboy up and deal with the tough times.
Or you can puss out and join the military, get paid with stolen money, kill brown people, feel like you’re really part of a group, and have both the right and left kissing either cheek of your @$$. While you’re at it, you could just join the mafia. At least people are allowed to defend themselves from THOSE criminals.
Trying to find a documentary I watched aggges ago. Don’t think it was the one above, but it was about how the military changes you. The above apparently does both sides with cooperation with the US army, so EH?!
Will try find the other one I watched, which was quality.
Either that, and show him.. or get someone who has been and is against it.. to come talk to him one day.
I am pretty sure he’s aware he can end up in a combat unit and sent over to kill people or be killed so I’d skip that part. I’d also skip the economical part: military means your paycheque is signed by the government and we all know government employees are the first in the pecking order: if there’s need for serious budget cuts, government employees are the last to feel the heat. Also the temptation of a more or less free college degree makes the package even more attractive.
No, if you really want to do something effective, drastic measures are needed. You need to show him what would become fo him he survives that mine blast or sniper shot in Afghanistan. Only the most “presentable” maimed soldiers are usually shown to the public: the ones missing an arm or a leg. It’s great from propaganda values: an image of the stalwart young man with a sleeve rolled up and medals on his chest. And it doesn’t hurt the armchair warmongers’ sensitivity.
I saw a while ago the picture of a young man (he could almost have been my son) being pushed in a wheelchair: he was missing both legs and an arm courtesy of a landmine in Afghanistan. That made my stomach churn and according to military doctors he’s a lucky one: at least he can feed himself, type on a keyboard or turn the pages of a book. There are many young men who cannot do that. They will spend the rest of what cannot be called life being turned on their sides to avoid bedsores. And here’s the good part: government is going to dump them back on their families with nothing more than a measly pension to cover medical expenses. Think about all those moms and pops in rural America who had their son turned into something worse than a vegetable and returned to them complete with instructions on how to feed him through a tube and turn him around at regular intervals 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
He may be willing to make the “ultimate sacrifice” but is he willing to have his family do the same?
Thanks for the support. I don’t know what he plans to do in the military. I’m not even sure which branch he plans to join. Last time he spoke about it to me, which was about 3 years ago, he was planning on joining the Air Force. I might be able to sum up his thinking by stating what I think his military “friends” have convinced him: most of basic training will be fun and then you’ll get money for college.
I have never heard him speak of ‘democracy’, ‘helping the country’, or ‘freedom’. He has just had too many people pouring honey in his ears. None of whom I think ever actually served in combat.