21st Century Man on…Joining the Military

Joining the military is a little like buying a shiny purple leisure suit. It can entice you into thinking it’s a smashingly good idea right up until you’re actually in it. The difference is, of course, that in your leisure suit, people are merely going to laugh at you, whereas in the military, dudes will be straight up trying to kill your ass.

Sometimes when my clients come to me and admit they’re thinking of joining the military, I find that what they’re really saying, when you read between the lines, is that they’re having suicidal thoughts but lack the courage to follow through. These people simply need a medication adjustment. Nonetheless, you can be completely sane and still find a compelling reason to join the military. For example, if a judge ever offers you the opportunity to serve in the military as an alternative to prolonged incarceration. Depending on the comparative length of the sentences and the conditions at your local penitentiary, joining the military just might be the way to go. Similarly, if you reside in certain sections of Los Angeles, Chicago, D.C., Houston or Miami where you’re getting shot at every day anyway, you might as well get paid for it. You may end up getting killed in either case, but unlike the Latin Kings, your run of the mill al Qaeda terrorist is probably not going to cut your dick off and stuff it in your mouth before you die.

Those are the only two good reasons to join the military. There is another handful of decent reasons to enlist, but these must be weighed against the possibility that you won’t survive your term of service. Or that you’ll be nearly killed. The military can provide you with a broad array of valuable technical skills, but what use will these skills be if you lose your arms and legs in a combat zone. You have to decide for yourself whether you’d rather be a lowly fry cook at McDonalds or a highly skilled limbless electrician. Working at McDonalds, you may wish you got laid more, but at least you’ll be able to jerk yourself off. Another decent reason to serve is to earn money for college. Once again, you have to ask yourself how meaningful that comparative literature class will seem once you’ve developed PTSD and watched several of your best friends die. You know yourself better than I do, so you’re much more qualified to say how well you’ll be able to concentrate in Econ class between the sudden, random flashes of depression and rage.

All the rest of the reasons people join the military are pretty lousy. Here are some of the more common bad reasons:

1. Compelling Advertising
I’ll be the first to admit that climbing up a cliff to battle against dragons seems like a pretty badass day’s work, but unfortunately, these activities are not included in the job description of an actual Marine.

Even some of the real stuff they show in the commercials is dramatically less fun in real life. When you see soldiers jumping out of an airplane, for example, or sliding down a zip line, it looks cool as hell. You don’t realize that it’s 4 a.m. or that the rush of wind against your body is not so much exhilarating when you’re cold and wet and covered in mud as it is excruciating. The commercial probably doesn’t convey the fact that people are screaming at you while you do these things (the good guys, that is) or potentially shooting at you (the bad guys) or that these adventures end with you impacting the earth at cartilage-liquefying speeds.

It probably doesn’t occur to you, either, that the commercials depict only the most glamorous military duties and that 99% percent of the things you’ll actually be called upon to do are dramatically less pleasant. Stirring a barrel of burning shit, for example, has never been featured in a military commercial.

2. Because you can ‘retire’ in 20 years
It is technically accurate to say that you can retire from the military after serving a mere twenty years, assuming you survive that long, of course. It is also true that your retirement pay will provide you with enough money to pay your phone bill every month as long as you don’t send text messages or make long distance calls. So while all your high school friends are still only halfway up the escalator of their lucrative non-lethal careers, you’ll be done with your low-paying first career and looking for a new job in the civilian world working for a company that hires 40 year old chain-smoking trained killers for entry level positions.

3. Because someone has to do it
Yes, someone has to do it. We are, after all, a bloodthirsty species. We constantly need wars to wage or we get collectively irritable. But while someone has to do it, some of us never have to. Lenin once said “a bayonet is a tool with a worker at both ends.” Nothing has changed in this regard. The privileged classes still don’t have to go to war. They outsource all that suffering and unpleasantness to the less fortunate classes so they can stay home and play golf and rape the international financial system and drink $200 bottles of champagne that were paid for by daddy’s money and your blood. If, on the other hand, everyone who wasn’t born on Easy Street decided to stop fighting and dying to protect the wealth and comfort of the rich, they’d eventually have to bring back the draft, and then maybe Charles and Preston would actually learn to fight for their own summer homes and country club memberships. Fore!

4. The desire to be a hero
People fucking love heroes, or at least the idea of heroes. We love to have parades and ceremonies with shiny weapons and fancy, pressed uniforms. Marching bands, and so on. We love to make and hear speeches about the courageous heroism of our soldiers and veterans. It makes us feel good to gather a couple times a year to thank these people for their service and our freedom. And we really, really mean it, too. We mean the hell out of it. For just a second, we wonder if maybe we shouldn’t have sacrificed a little more of ourselves for the nebulous ideals that we stand for. For an instant we feel genuinely bad for those who were killed or broken in the name of their country and our hearts go out to their families, too. But this feeling passes soon enough and we’re left with a general feeling of freshly fucked gratitude and good will. After all, those people are heroes and will always be remembered as such.

Then we go back to our normal lives. And so do the surviving heroes. They have a nurse push their wheelchairs back into the VA hospital for another round of underfunded government therapy. They count the extra coins that were dropped into their cup today and hobble down to the liquor store. Maybe they just gather up their families and walk home past the fashionable Korean and Vietnamese restaurants that line the streets. Or drive home in their German and Japanese cars. Whatever heroic life they return to, things tend to be dramatically quieter until the next big holiday ceremony.

Few callings in life are both idiotic and noble. Come to think of it, military service and the priesthood may be the only things. I would never want to discourage you from signing up if you really have your heart set on it. I just want you to go into it with your eyes open. There’s no question that the military will teach you things you simply can’t learn anywhere else. Things like how to fold a pair of socks into a perfect one inch cube or how to inject yourself with nerve gas antidote while your hands are going numb and you’re vomiting uncontrollably. Better things, too. Like how to not burst out laughing in formation when hilarious shit happens. Like how to take something complex and break it down into a series of simple steps you can perform instinctually. How to trust and rely on the people beside you. What it really means to die and what it really means to live.

Though military life is generally miserable, the life of a veteran is actually wonderful. Veterans are afforded numerous benefits and privileges they might otherwise never have access to. More importantly, once your term of service expires and Uncle Sam is no longer sodomizing your anus on a daily basis, the sun will shine a little brighter. Every day the flowers will smell just a little sweeter, and you’ll discover that you have the mental fortitude to overcome anything, even your divorce and alcoholism.

Good luck to you. God bless you and your country.