Their life seems to be worth more than 35k, who would have guessed?
this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2025
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Patriotism = Military Industry Complex
Flip a sign or get shot at hmmm that’s a tough one
Flip a sign or spend the rest of your life thinking about the time you were ordered to incinerate a hospital full of elderly and children and wake up in a cold sweat every time you hear a loud noise, and have to fight the VA office for every penny of benefits you were promised for becoming one of Earth's most horrible monsters while watching your friends get blown apart in bloody chunks.
Hmnn...
"Why are you wearing a mascot suit on a hot day for a few hours when you could be carrying up to 150+ lbs of military gear in mid-day desert heat on your body as you trek up to nine miles on foot for days at a time while periodically being shot at or bombarded for 35k and a shit-tier job?"
35k nearly untaxed, plus government funded Healthcare, education, housing fund, plus potential for promotions if you're not completely incapable. Let's not lie, the US spends a stupid amount of money to make the military a better option than sign spinning.
You still get shot or deployed to Washington. Idk, flipping a sign still sounds better.
Spinning signs isn't going to give you PTSD from watching people die horribly.
Well, hopefully not.
Not all military members deploy to that situation, either. There are many non-combat roles.
In a country where you don't speak the language, and the locals at best distrust you, but more likely hate you. You're convinced that some of the locals are the same guys who are shooting at you from time to time, but you can't actually prove it. You can no longer ever feel safe, even when you're back home in the USA. With the advances in modern emergency medicine and combat casualty response, if you get shot or blown up overseas you have a decent chance of surviving. But, you might come home with fewer limbs, or having to shit into a bag strapped to your chest for the rest of your life. When you get out of the military, some people will constantly be thanking you for your service, but others will be calling you a baby killer, even if you spent the entire time in some random tent looking at a screen.
You're legally required to follow the orders of whoever happens to be president at the time. Currently the secretary of Defence is a moron who used to be on Fox News. He got away with saying things on a Signal Chat that would have resulted in Court Martial if you'd done it. The way things are going, it's just a matter of time before the orders are to shoot at American civilians. Some of your squadmates have been raised by Fox News and Newsmax and are eager and excited to shoot at Americans. Others know that the kinds of Americans who will be targeted are the ones who look like them.
But yeah, sounds like fun.
pfff only 35k and you don't get to wear a duck costume? get real army boy.
12 plus hour days of fuck-fuck games
Move this hole there lol
“You’ll still have to wear a bunch of shit in 96 degree weather. Occasionally you will still have to duck. ”
"Yes, that $35k is actually your yearly salary for that 'job'
The fuck do you mean you make $50k?"
My son wanted to take the test but the Air Force recruiter told him that adhd disqualifies him and he won’t even allow him to take the asvab(entry test). He scored an 88% on the practice test. Honestly this is the best case scenario for me because now I can steer him towards a better path without looking like the bad guy. My family has served in every American war for over 200 years and I’m hoping we can finally break this cycle of trauma.
I didn't realise it disqualified him. Is that the same for all military roles?
I've heard accounts from people talking about ADHD affecting their work when on active duty (like, literally on a patrol in Afghanistan).
Obviously it's something I read on the internet, but I am curious.
a diagnosis and previous medication used to be a straight up disqualifier. Over the past few years they’ve slackened that a bit, with some branches going to “unmedicated for a year” or a medical waiver. Ultimately the policies around mental health in recruiting are based around conceptions from the 70s, and given that diagnosis methods have moved on from then, now tending to catch a lot more mild cases, way more people are getting disqualified due to things that used to not be noticed. To be clear, a lot of people currently in the US military today have ADHD, but they weren’t diagnosed until after they were admitted except for very recent recruits.
Part of the reluctance to recruit anyone with any mental health diagnosis is the long shadow of “project 100,000” aka “ McNamara's Folly”. Essentially a program where people who fell in to the bottom 10th percentile of testing on mental and physical were conscripted anyways to make up numbers during the Vietnam war. This lead to some pretty disastrous outcomes, with soldiers conscripted as part of this program dying at 3 times the normal rate. The movie forest gump touches on this a bit, but it kind of glosses over the real tragedy of it all nor the diversity of fucked up situations this created.
The institutional memory of this has created a strong prejudice around any sort of mental health diagnosis in recruits, but again, this is in conflict with the fact that mental health is much less stigmatized these days, and much milder situations that were just ignored in the past are now diagnosed.
The military turns down people for a lot of conditions you wouldn't expect to matter that much. My brother was disqualified from the Air Force for a barely perceptible tremor in his right hand and a case of heavy metal poisoning he had when he was younger (a landlord didn't inform my mother there was lead paint in the apartment). He didnt incur any permanent neurological damage from the poisoning but they still denied him.
If you've ever been diagnosed and or taken medicine for any mental health condition, you are disqualified barring a waver. It is easier to get waivers when there is war going on.
Yeah even better under this current administration tbh
Any recruiter that cold approaches me can fuck off
If that recruiter is trying to get me to kill people they need to fuck all the way off into the sea
For 35k...
When I first read it I thought it was 35k a year til I realized that was the signing bonus
Way too low either way.
the army recruiters worked across the street from me, and i was underage sweepin a lot. they were barely older than me. foulmouthedness had some effect. never saw them again.
I just told them I wanted to sell drugs. Problem solved.
When I was 18 I had a Marine recruiter chase me down the street.
I was 18 when 9/11 happened. The recruiters would hang around GameStop looking for ~~suckers~~ recruits who were playing the demo consoles they had up. And usually start the conversation with "I wasn't here to recruit, but . . . "
But they actually were.
So my parents tax dollars are wasted on you just standing here?
Being a customer to GameStop, yes.
A buddy of mine was leaning towards joining the military, and it was interacting with the recruiters and observing that they seemed miserable that changed his mind about it.
This is from 2015, it's waaaaay worse now:
The Shameful Way America Treats Its Veterans
The number of homeless Vietnam veterans today is greater than the number of soldiers who died during the war
Last year a CNN report showed that at least 40 veterans had died waiting for care at VA facilities in the Phoenix area; the scandal mushroomed when an internal audit found more than 120,000 veterans across the country were left waiting or never got care, even as VA employees were trained to manipulate wait time numbers internally. It’s a scandal that continues to sting. A report published Wednesday shows the VA doled out $142 million in performance bonuses in 2014, the same year it was being investigated for manipulating data. And last month Hillary Clinton came under fire for telling Rachel Maddow the problem has “not been as widespread as it has been made out to be.” (Her remarks stood in contrast to those made by former VA Secretary Eric Shinseki when he resigned last May: “I said when this situation began weeks to months ago that I thought the problem was limited and isolated because I believed that. I no longer believe it. It is systemic.”)
Specifically, because of the past six months. 2024 va was unimaginably better than 2015 va. 2025 va is falling apart at the seams due to Elon and Trump doing goddamn best to destroy the va and federal government in general.
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Isn't the number of veteran suicides after the war higher than the deaths during?
$35k is barely a poverty wage.
The pay is closer to $43k. The $35k is a signing bonus.
Plus you get food and board paid for so that's another early 12+K
IMO still way not worth it to end up working as the US’s Gestapo.
No thanks.
If I'm gonna be working for an evil empire i'd expect evil empire levels of luxury, yeah? The peons never get that though, so that's even more reason to not be interested
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The food does come out of your paycheck if you live on base, but it wasn't very much back when I was in. Granted the food was bad too lol
The pay is closer to $43k.
Oh, well in that case
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