8 ms·

Fun article. The idea of faking your death has probably occurred to a lot of people in military service. It sure did in my case--it only took two days of basi

• morganvachon 10y ago
  I've never seriously considered it, though there were times during my previous marriage that no one would have faulted me for trying. That said, if I were going to it would be hiking or camping, outside of the state I'm in now, and I would have to prepare incrementally over a year or so. Buying or making survival gear, stuffing away $5 at a time here and there, and preparing myself to live off the land for the foreseeable future. The reason I say that is because it's becoming much more difficult to be a "nobody" in an urban environment. You can only disappear until your first run-in with police. Even if you've never been arrested you're still in the system.
  • Someone 10y ago
    Yet, many people staying illegally in a country manage to live in cities (yes, they aren't in the system, but that isn't advantageous, as 'not being in the system' already is a cause for locking you up) The trick indeed is avoiding any run-in with the government. If there's one group of people who never jay-walk and always have a valid ticket in public transport, it's illegal aliens.
    • bruceb 10y ago
      Except cities don't arrest people for being in the country illegally. Most don't hold them after they serve their time for minor crimes.
      • Someone 10y ago
        That depends on the country. If citizens are obliged to carry an ID, any finable offense, no matter how small, can trigger the more severe offense of not being able to show ID. When subsequent research leads to the discovery that one doesn't have an ID, it can get you locked up or kicked out of the country.
      • Broken_Hippo 10y ago
        In the US, some will call the correct authorities. Others simply refuse to spend their money on it. But the bigger risk is that committing a minor crime puts you into the system. I'm going to guess it is quite easy to assume that getting arrested or fined puts you closer to being caught than not doing so. One is likely taking risk daily just by working and renting an apartment, depending on circumstance. (Naturally, some landlords don't really get information and some jobs skirt legal requirements.) Heck, even as a legal immigrant, I'm pretty careful not to break laws that I can easily avoid breaking. I know a traffic ticket won't get me sent back to the US, but I'd rather stay on the safe side.
  • pavel_lishin 10y ago
    > You can only disappear until your first run-in with police. Even if you've never been arrested you're still in the system. I'm not sure about the comparative odds of having a run-in with the police in a busy urban environment, vs. living off land you don't own.
    • morganvachon 10y ago
      I'm basing that on what I've seen of police interactions with homeless people in the cities versus my own experiences hunting, hiking, and camping. If you're out in the woods in a place you have a right to be, and you appear to know what you're doing, the ranger will usually just make sure you look like you'll live through the night. By contrast, a homeless person is likely to face a presumption of guilt in a city cop's eyes and at the very least be questioned, which can lead to identity issues. A ranger is likely to just say "carry on" without asking for ID if you're just camping. That said, it's a good idea to not haunt a particular area too long, city or countryside.
      • pavel_lishin 10y ago
        I'm going to assume you know more about this than I do, because I know virtually nothing; I just sort of blindly assumed that you'd build a semi-permanent shelter and do some light farming in the area - but like I said, what I know about survival I learned from a handful of television shows. I also know that it didn't look particularly fun, either - I think given my options, I'd rather be homeless in a city rather than homeless in the wilderness.
        • morganvachon 10y ago
          Well, if you're not hiding your identity and you just want to live off the land, go ahead and sell your investments and car and buy some acreage to homestead. It's a rough life but it's doable and enjoyable if you have the right mindset. If you're hiding your identity, you don't want to put down roots; a nomadic lifestyle is a must. Personally I'm the opposite of you, I grew up playing in the woods and living on a farm so I'd be at home in the wilderness. In the city I'd be too paranoid to be comfortable, especially if I didn't want people to know who I was. There's also the middle ground: Hike/hitchhike your way across the country, getting as far from "home" as you can. Find a small town or a farm where you can work for cash/room and board, don't ask too many questions and don't answer too many. After a few months or so, move on to another small town and start over. It's a hybrid lifestyle that may work for some people, keeps you mostly incognito but still near the comforts of modern life.
  • ufmace 10y ago
    Seems pretty clear to me that being a legal nobody is pretty non-viable long term. If you were really going to do something like that, you'd have to build a new identity from scratch for yourself that's good enough to stand up to at least basic interaction with police and government agencies.
• kragen 10y ago
  3. Don't Answer Comment Threads Asking for Advice on How to Fake Your Own Death
• Diederich 10y ago
  Funny you mention two days of basic training being your worst mistake. My biggest problem with basic was keeping myself from laughing out loud at the various antics. Once I was able to control that urge, it was pretty straightforward. I saw it, essentially, as six weeks of necessary bullshit that allowed me to get to the next level. My term in the USAF as a 3C0X2 (computer programmer) was fantastically beneficial. I'd already been programming for over a decade when I went in. But the installation I landed at allowed me to really learn in a lot of new directions. Having said that, I know a lot of folks that had a far less productive time. But it's still a pretty good way to bootstrap a life independent from family, in my opinion at least. The money from the GI bill is very valuable, plus, with some measure of self control, single Airmen can save up a ton of money, since the USAF pays in full for food, housing and medical.
  • coldtea 10y ago
    I did compulsory service, and the most important lessons for me from it are: 1) You get (well, are forced) to mingle and cooperate with people outside your "circle" and bubble (of course this is truer for compulsory service). 2) You are in place where no one treats you like a "unique snowflake". 3) You get to do all the shit people usually have their parents, mothers, cleaning services, etc do for them, even more so than when merely living alone, because there you are forced to do it, and to do it for 100s of people.
    • Diederich 10y ago
      Yes, this is all well stated. In basic training, I ended up being very close to a lot of different people that I would have otherwise never come in contact with, to that level. And in my opinion, this is a very healthy thing. One thing I'd like to share that cracks me up, all these years later. Pardon the forthcoming ramble. I had been handling guns from a pretty early age, but I was still looking forward to training on the M-16. Well, at least in the early 90s, there is exactly one (1) day of weapons training in USAF basic training. In the morning, we got on a bus and went to the ass-end of Lackland AFB where the gun ranges were. We then received our weapons, with no ammo in sight, and 'trained' on them in several hours of classes. Note, this classroom was just a classroom, with desks, with the normal classroom density. And so 50 young men and women were sitting at desks with M-16s. And, on various cadences, we all held them up, put the clip in, simulated chambering a round, aimed, and pulled the trigger. But we had to aim...kind of up and to our left. Because we were never suppose to point the weapon at another person we didn't mean to shoot, loaded or otherwise. It was an absolutely absurd scene. Many of my class-mates were openly afraid of handling these weapons, and it showed. After lunch we marched, weapons slung, over to the firing range. We were to each fire sixty rounds that day. The first thirty were warmup/practice. The second 30 were for qualification. We each lay supine with the weapon on sandbags. Only then were each of us handed three rounds each, which we pushed into the clip. And then we fired those three rounds. The young lady next to me was terrified of guns, and had never touched one. I noticed that she was closing her eyes before each shot. After we fired our 30 rounds into the targets, our final scores were calculated. My target had 30 holes tightly grouped in the middle. But there was another hole, off all by itself, right on the edge of the target. Somehow I managed to score 31 out of 30 that day, though it was recorded as 30. The young lady next to me repeated 'gun day' twice more, with different flights (groups), before she qualified. Sorry for the ramble! The real punch line came when I asked my training instructor, later on, why we bothered with only a single day of weapon training. He laughed out loud and said something like, fuck if I know. Think about it, Diederich. What do you think would be going on if Airmen were forced to actually use their weapons against an enemy. The war would already be over! Indeed! The USAF: where the best chance of direct enemy contact comes from becoming one of the few tens of thousands of officers who actually venture into enemy territory on occasion. The 'grunts', the enlisted, no way.
• cylinder 10y ago
  Couldn't you just fail basic training?
  • augbot 10y ago
    From what I saw in basic training (94-96, Army: Cavalry Scout), the people trying to fail made it 10x worse for them.
    • thearn4 10y ago
      Yep. Honestly the only sure-fire way of getting kicked out of army basic it seems is to either repeatedly fail rifle qual, or to repeatedly fail the final PT test. And by the time you get to either, its clear that the easiest way out is to just do your thing and graduate.
      • nradov 10y ago
        When my father went through US Army basic training during the Cold War era the recruit next to him couldn't pass rifle qualification. So the drill sergeant just took that guy's ammo away, gave half to my dad and half to the recruit on the other side, and told them to shoot his target. Presumably standards are a little stricter now.
      • CamperBob2 10y ago
        I dunno. What could be easier than failing a marksmanship test or a PT? What are they going to do, charge you with sandbagging? How do they prove that you really can shoot accurately or do X # of pullups? For that matter, you could always go full Munchausen, and make yourself genuinely sick or weak.
        • thearn4 10y ago
          I think the idea is that you get recycled a couple of times into a new platoon, until you fail enough times that they cut their losses. But being stuck in BCT for endless cycle after cycle seems like a special kind of hell.
• tlrobinson 10y ago
  Out of curiosity, what were the biggest differences in your expectations vs reality of basic training? I've never been in the military so I don't know how accurate pop culture portrayals are, but I never got the impression it was supposed to be a walk in the park...
  • hodgesrm 10y ago
    The biggest surprise was the feeling of being trapped. In the US military you volunteer for a period of years and once you sign up you are in for that long unless you get kicked out (really bad and career limiting), get discharged for administrative reasons (unusual at least in my day), or die (see above). This only fully sinks in after a few days of basic training. My service was a while back during the second cold war, which was actually pretty peaceful for the US military. The wars in the Middle East have added whole new dimension that I cannot comment on from personal experience.
• grecy 10y ago
  > it only took two days of basic training to make clear that signing up for the US Air Force was the worst mistake of a heretofore untroubled life Was it really impossible to just put your hand up and say "uh, guys, I made a mistake, can we please forget about it?" I mean, what were the consequences of you just sitting on the ground and refusing, or even just walking out of the place? Do they physically own you like a prison?
  • PeterisP 10y ago
    Well, if you try to simply walk out of the place they can and will stop you at gunpoint, and can imprison you without resorting to the civilian justice system - the military can try, convict and punish you on their own according to their own regulations.
  • thret 10y ago
    In the Australian military there is a cooling off period and you can do just that for the first few weeks. One person from my course signed up and never got on the bus (changed his mind in like 3 hours). Another quit on the second day. If you AWOL in that first week or two they aren't going to waste resources chasing you, because they don't want you back anyway.
  • gricardo99 10y ago
    Yes, it's called desertion, and penalties are pretty serious. http://military.findlaw.com/criminal-law/failure-to-report-for-duty-awol-and-other-charges.html http://military.findlaw.com/criminal-law/failure-to-report-f...
  • funkysquid 10y ago
    Yeah, you're pretty much stuck. Come to think of it, there's no reason you should be. Asking someone to commit to something like military service before trying the (degrading) training is total BS. If they think letting people leave in the middle would loose them too many recruits, they might actually have to start training people humanely.
    • dsfyu404ed 10y ago
• EdwardDiego 10y ago
  Yeah, back when I thought about this (I'll disappear, and _then_ my ex will be sorry! 19 year olds aren't overly wise) the plan was to disappear while tramping (hiking). Although making it authentic would be hard - you'd have to pick an area where it's too dangerous to thoroughly search by foot, if they can get in there with dog trained to find corpses, then they'll be able to discount the area - and you have to be able to leave sign that makes it look like you entered that area, but not leave sign that showed you exited. Footprints are the big one here, so my thoughts were to exit on deer trails in socks, carefully. There's also a few rivers I know of that have a reputation for keeping bodies - one of them[1] took my brother-in-law about five years ago and there's been no sign of him since. But, it's a bit harder to do that one and exit the river without anyone seeing you. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_River https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_River
  • toomanybeersies 10y ago
    Plenty of people have disappeared in the bush in NZ and have never been found.