As a military brat, I can say with certainty that yeah, absolutely.
The military completely fucked over my dad and my family.
The Air Force Academy has a football team, and my dad went to a game when he was 8. When he saw the cool blue and white team, he decided that was what he wanted to do when he grew up. Since he was 8 years old.
We moved around constantly, which was terrible for me and my siblings growing up. Making friends was really hard because what was the point? We’d just leave in a year or two.
Then there were the deployments.
My dad went on three tours in Afghanistan.
One for six months, one for eight months, and one for eighteen months.
My mother was working a full-time job while taking care of three young children. We used to have a rotating schedule for ‘bedtime buddies’, taking turns sleeping in my parents’ bed so my mom didn’t have to sleep alone.
To this day, I have no idea what exactly my dad was doing over there. He won’t tell me and my mother has said that he hasn’t told her much either.
It was definitely traumatizing though. Any time he heard loud noises, especially at night, his first instinct was to duck and cover. Apparently during a thunderstorm, my dad woke from a dead sleep, leapt out of bed, and rolled underneath it. It took my mom an hour to get him to come out.
Fast forward to 2014. My dad has served for 20 years. He could sign up for more years and possibly achieve a higher rank, but my mom wanted out of active military life.
Hey, so all those businesses that say they’re proud to offer jobs to veterans? Yeah, that’s bullshit.
What they mean is entry-level jobs. Minimum wage jobs.
The military works to make its soldiers jacks of all trades. Every job my dad applied for was rejected because he was either over qualified or not qualified enough.
The military had made my dad too proud to accept an entry-level job, but every job he applied for that matched what he did while active duty always ‘wanted to go in a different direction’.
We had to move into an apartment because of his loss of income.
For over a year, my dad spent every day sitting at his computer applying for jobs.
He felt like a failure as a husband and a father for no longer being able to provide for us.
His mental health went down from there. It was awful seeing the light leave my dad’s eyes.
One night about a year ago, after a little too much wine, my dad admitted that he had considered k*lling himself so that we could collect his life insurance.
And don’t expect the military to help you find a job. Once you retire, they don’t give two shits about you. Unless of course there’s a crisis, in which case they can actually call you back in.
Yeah. You can retire from the military, but they can make you come back. They don’t care if you’ve gotten a new job that you genuinely enjoy or that you’ve moved somewhere you’ve always wanted to live. You are expected to quit immediately and be ready for relocation.
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