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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 a

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.
  - hodgesrm 10y ago
    Did your M16 have a .22 insert so you did rifle practice with .22 shorts for ammunition? This apparently helped Lackland save money but meant shooting practice was a lot less fun than some of us had hoped. (We had .22s at home to keep the woodchucks down.) On the other hand the rifle disassembly and cleaning was taught by a woman who knew the weapon inside and out. She was excellent and a lot more soldierly than any of the dweebs in my flight.
    - Diederich 10y ago
      We were using the real deal ammo, though we heard talk about how they were moving to the smaller rounds. Right...it was my experience that the actual teachers and trainers were pretty cool compared to the TIs. Fortunately, our two primary TIs were among the most chill. Our sister flight's senior TI was terrible.
  - snerbles 10y ago
    > The 'grunts', the enlisted, no way. This was less the case in the past fifteen years, where USAF personnel in certain career fields were often pressed into Army roles. Particularly in convoy and military police operations, the Army had overextended itself and needed the other branches to fill in the gaps of trained personnel. For most airmen, it can be years before you're even considered for deployment. Less than a year into my enlistment as a Security Forces airman, I was sent to be a prison guard ("detainee operations") at Camp Bucca in southern Iraq. There were Army and Navy personnel, but most of their guards were troops put into a role outside of their usual training...a couple years prior such non-police "augmentee" soldiers without proper use-of-force training were involved in the torture incident in the prison at Abu Ghraib.
    - Diederich 10y ago
      Yeah, I was aware of this, but didn't mention it. During Desert Storm, one of my computer programmer co-workers got yanked to a nearby base where he received a two week crash-course on being an airforce cop, so that the actual airforce cops could deploy to Saudi Arabia. An 'airforce cop' is basically the same thing as a civilian cop. They drive around on base in police-looking cars, hand out speeding tickets and handle the occasional drunk and disorderly. He had some pretty funny stories about how many strange situations he found himself in, given his abject lack of directly relevant training. Fortunately, the goings on in nearly all USAF bases are exceedingly lawful, so his situations were always funny and WTF instead of dangerous.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
thearn4 10y ago
Yeah people have different reactions to such an odd environment. I had a really bad time the first two weeks of Army basic training, but by week 3 I was actually kind of having a good time with it, in an odd sort of way. Everything still hurt really bad, but it was also kind of hilarious and was glad I stuck it through to the end. Didn't make an extended career out of it, but my years there gave me a needed boost of confidence.
- Diederich 10y ago
  Right. As I said elsewhere, I think that for a big percentage of young people, doing a term in the US military would be a big personal win. For a lot of the young folk in my flight, the confidence they gained by getting through even the wimpy USAF basic training was very valuable. And there are quite a few other benefits as well.
hodgesrm 10y ago
I had a very similar experience to yours -- I was also a programmer and likewise saved up a bunch of money for grad school. I even got my BA while in the service thanks to generous education subsidies to active duty personnel. As for not laughing well most of us have been there. That feeling lasts well beyond basic training. Even though I started this thread by talking about wanting to fake my death being in the military was overall a very good experience. As somebody else already said down-thread it forces you to mix with a wide variety of people, something we don't do nearly enough as a society. For that reason alone I think it would beneficial to bring back the draft though perhaps minus the part about fighting wars all over the place.
- derekp7 10y ago
  Mandatory civil service could be an alternative to the armed forces, for those that don't want to be involved in fighting. In fact, I would like to see a civil service branch patterned after the military branches (or maybe similar to the peace corp), which would be primarily responsible for all infrastructure projects (road / bridge building, govt. office positions, IT services, etc). This would be an excellent way to get young people who are out of high school into the workforce. Then if they can't find private work after their 2-year civil service stint, they can always re-enlist.
  - kaybe 10y ago
    We used to have that in Germany when there was still mandatory military service a few years back. For historical reasons, refusing to serve with a weapon was very common, and in this case one had to serve an equal time in the civil sector, such as help out in a kindergarten, hospital or old people's home. There was a lot of complaining after the service was abolished due to the missing very cheap labour.
- Asooka 10y ago
  Voluntary military service can be beneficial for people, but think about this: what do you get when you put a bunch of 18 year old men together who hate being where they are and feel like getting beaten to death is preferable to taking orders. What you get is hell. That's the only word I've heard used to describe the draft while we still had it and nobody I've asked had wanted to talk about it at length. I've heard "it was hell", I've heard "you become a monster", I've heard of people going in being fine and coming back schizophrenic. I've never once heard anyone ever say that it promotes good habits or discipline. Maybe it can be different in America, but knowing what it was back here I would never wish the draft on my worst enemy.
jcurbo 10y ago
I was an officer, but went to Officer Training School (OTS) which is a 12-week boot camp kind of approach, and I came to post similar thoughts. My dad was in the AF so I knew there was some level of BS to deal with, and just put up with it until I finished. I looked at it as a small price to pay to have an opportunity to get out in the world and do something better with my life which has paid massive dividends ever since.
- Diederich 10y ago
  Yup! I heard from officers later on, most of whom were prior enlisted, that OTS was a lot more rigorous than enlisted basic. It's all way less of a pain than Army and especially Marine basic, of course. I honestly think that for a big percentage of young people, doing a term in the military would be a big personal win.
WalterBright 10y ago
> My biggest problem with basic was keeping myself from laughing out loud at the various antics. My dad (ex military) said that ages <= 18 will buy the bootcamp bullshit. 19 and over won't, but will have enough sense to go along with it.
- Diederich 10y ago
  It was a mix. At 24, I was the second oldest person in my flight. Most of the others were at least somewhat emotionally affected by the bullshit.

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.
- hodgesrm 10y ago
  Did your M16 have a .22 insert so you did rifle practice with .22 shorts for ammunition? This apparently helped Lackland save money but meant shooting practice was a lot less fun than some of us had hoped. (We had .22s at home to keep the woodchucks down.) On the other hand the rifle disassembly and cleaning was taught by a woman who knew the weapon inside and out. She was excellent and a lot more soldierly than any of the dweebs in my flight.
  - Diederich 10y ago
    We were using the real deal ammo, though we heard talk about how they were moving to the smaller rounds. Right...it was my experience that the actual teachers and trainers were pretty cool compared to the TIs. Fortunately, our two primary TIs were among the most chill. Our sister flight's senior TI was terrible.
- snerbles 10y ago
  > The 'grunts', the enlisted, no way. This was less the case in the past fifteen years, where USAF personnel in certain career fields were often pressed into Army roles. Particularly in convoy and military police operations, the Army had overextended itself and needed the other branches to fill in the gaps of trained personnel. For most airmen, it can be years before you're even considered for deployment. Less than a year into my enlistment as a Security Forces airman, I was sent to be a prison guard ("detainee operations") at Camp Bucca in southern Iraq. There were Army and Navy personnel, but most of their guards were troops put into a role outside of their usual training...a couple years prior such non-police "augmentee" soldiers without proper use-of-force training were involved in the torture incident in the prison at Abu Ghraib.
  - Diederich 10y ago
    Yeah, I was aware of this, but didn't mention it. During Desert Storm, one of my computer programmer co-workers got yanked to a nearby base where he received a two week crash-course on being an airforce cop, so that the actual airforce cops could deploy to Saudi Arabia. An 'airforce cop' is basically the same thing as a civilian cop. They drive around on base in police-looking cars, hand out speeding tickets and handle the occasional drunk and disorderly. He had some pretty funny stories about how many strange situations he found himself in, given his abject lack of directly relevant training. Fortunately, the goings on in nearly all USAF bases are exceedingly lawful, so his situations were always funny and WTF instead of dangerous.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

thearn4 10y ago

Yeah people have different reactions to such an odd environment. I had a really bad time the first two weeks of Army basic training, but by week 3 I was actually kind of having a good time with it, in an odd sort of way. Everything still hurt really bad, but it was also kind of hilarious and was glad I stuck it through to the end. Didn't make an extended career out of it, but my years there gave me a needed boost of confidence.

Diederich 10y ago
Right. As I said elsewhere, I think that for a big percentage of young people, doing a term in the US military would be a big personal win. For a lot of the young folk in my flight, the confidence they gained by getting through even the wimpy USAF basic training was very valuable. And there are quite a few other benefits as well.

hodgesrm 10y ago

I had a very similar experience to yours -- I was also a programmer and likewise saved up a bunch of money for grad school. I even got my BA while in the service thanks to generous education subsidies to active duty personnel. As for not laughing well most of us have been there. That feeling lasts well beyond basic training. Even though I started this thread by talking about wanting to fake my death being in the military was overall a very good experience. As somebody else already said down-thread it forces you to mix with a wide variety of people, something we don't do nearly enough as a society. For that reason alone I think it would beneficial to bring back the draft though perhaps minus the part about fighting wars all over the place.

derekp7 10y ago
Mandatory civil service could be an alternative to the armed forces, for those that don't want to be involved in fighting. In fact, I would like to see a civil service branch patterned after the military branches (or maybe similar to the peace corp), which would be primarily responsible for all infrastructure projects (road / bridge building, govt. office positions, IT services, etc). This would be an excellent way to get young people who are out of high school into the workforce. Then if they can't find private work after their 2-year civil service stint, they can always re-enlist.
- kaybe 10y ago
  We used to have that in Germany when there was still mandatory military service a few years back. For historical reasons, refusing to serve with a weapon was very common, and in this case one had to serve an equal time in the civil sector, such as help out in a kindergarten, hospital or old people's home. There was a lot of complaining after the service was abolished due to the missing very cheap labour.
Asooka 10y ago
Voluntary military service can be beneficial for people, but think about this: what do you get when you put a bunch of 18 year old men together who hate being where they are and feel like getting beaten to death is preferable to taking orders. What you get is hell. That's the only word I've heard used to describe the draft while we still had it and nobody I've asked had wanted to talk about it at length. I've heard "it was hell", I've heard "you become a monster", I've heard of people going in being fine and coming back schizophrenic. I've never once heard anyone ever say that it promotes good habits or discipline. Maybe it can be different in America, but knowing what it was back here I would never wish the draft on my worst enemy.

jcurbo 10y ago

I was an officer, but went to Officer Training School (OTS) which is a 12-week boot camp kind of approach, and I came to post similar thoughts. My dad was in the AF so I knew there was some level of BS to deal with, and just put up with it until I finished. I looked at it as a small price to pay to have an opportunity to get out in the world and do something better with my life which has paid massive dividends ever since.

Diederich 10y ago
Yup! I heard from officers later on, most of whom were prior enlisted, that OTS was a lot more rigorous than enlisted basic. It's all way less of a pain than Army and especially Marine basic, of course. I honestly think that for a big percentage of young people, doing a term in the military would be a big personal win.

WalterBright 10y ago

> My biggest problem with basic was keeping myself from laughing out loud at the various antics. My dad (ex military) said that ages <= 18 will buy the bootcamp bullshit. 19 and over won't, but will have enough sense to go along with it.

Diederich 10y ago
It was a mix. At 24, I was the second oldest person in my flight. Most of the others were at least somewhat emotionally affected by the bullshit.