American culture seems to be rife with men who went to the Marines and after being discharged of duty went on to either lead successful lives or who's life took a turn for the worse and ended up on the street.
Of c, the two groups are not equal in numbers and the third much larger group lies in between these two groups. Now, I still am interested in the disparity between the extremes. Why do some people who join the Marines go on to create an over represent the Marines amount the successful, while others end up on the street? They are all given a clean slate somewhat and are exposed to the exact same environment, what do the successful learn which the unsuccessful don't?
I keep seeing posts like this, and I have to wonder if OP is a kid or if they just have no real life experience. Do homeless people stay homeless in your mind?
They are all given a clean slate somewhat and are exposed to the exact same environment
OK, try actually imagining this "clean slate" and "same environment". Imagine yourself, right now, going to boot camp alongside someone who's lived a life of relative privilege with lots of educational and exercise opportunities - someone better educated, fitter, even taller than you. Imagine yourself alongside someone who lived a life lacking in privileges - a crappy or unfinished education, not particularly healthy, shorter than you.
Imagine how you and those two hypothetical people tackle the different obstacles this "same environment" gives you - imagine going through an actual obstacle course with them. How easy or hard does each person find each obstacle? Will a short person find climbing a rope or wall as easy as a tall person? How about balancing on a log, crawling under wire, or jumping over a ditch?
A "clean slate" isn't any kind of reset of their abilities and experiences. "The same environment" inherently means it challenges their individual abilities differently. They get different outcomes because they were different people to begin with, so react differently to their experiences, like everywhere else in life.Excellent points. The military is a human endeavor, and is just as rife with all the same issues as any other organization, with all the expected biases. Boot camp is tiny part of overall service, and honestly barely relevant to the day to day. Mostly, you will have the same experience in the military as out, just with added hardships. People are still people, even when in uniform.
An attractive, fit, nuerotypical, charming person will have a much better experience than someone out of sorts with the above.
The military doesnt stamp you and everyone elese into the same person. It just presses you into a specific shape to do the specific task they need. Everything else is still there, if not exacerbated by the trauma of it all. They earnestly dont give a shit if that task destroys or improves you, as long as you do the task for the time allotted.
Different outcomes happen because people are different.
Three things stand out to me:
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The disparity between military and civilian certifications. If you're a mechanic on a specialised machine, it's easy to become a DOD contractor on that same platform. If you're an officer, you can say you've managed X people. If you're a medic, your scope of practice is command-by-command. You might work above an LPN level but leave the military with an NREMT EMT-B certification at most which qualifies you for a minimum wage job way below your scope of practice. There are only a handful of slots for advanced schools that give you any worthwhile certification, and the paperwork required to become an LPN ($55k/year~) is very difficult to amass. If you're a machine gunner, you spent 4+ years mastering a skill that doesn't transfer to any civilian job and you can only sell yourself as a whipped horse with a broken back.
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Military culture itself is traumatic. It's closer to feudalism than it is anything in the civilian world. There's a rigid hierarchy and set of standards for every aspect of your life. You have a pathological obsession with being 15 minutes early because your lord can have you arrested if you don't do everything perfectly. You're supposed to embrace the toxicity of every part of your day, much less being a cog in the demon machine that hates you as much as it does its victims, and tie your self-worth to that scripted performance. The outlet for dealing with any of that is alcoholism and/or smoking. You can't afford or make the time for civilian therapy, while military therapists are inquisitors that can have you arrested or end your career.
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There's no blueprint for civilian life. The allure of military life is that you know exactly what every expectation is. You can turn your brain off because you know what to wear and how to wear it, what to do and how to do it, and how doing A will result in B for your career. Your chain of command is a line of narcissistic older siblings and parents strictly directing you down that path. You have that stick incentive of being arrested if you violate any part of the carrot plan. All of a sudden you're removed from that very traumatic environment and it's replaced by a much more abstract system where nobody follows the rules you're conditioned into.
Maybe you make that deal with the devil knowing you're a good fiddler and you get a golden fiddle for it. If you didn't explicitly do that for that reason and get the right paperwork for that goal, you leave with nothing and probably hate the field you were trained for but not meaningfully certified in.
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Military service is traumatising, but can build up a nest egg of funds, so to speak. If your trauma doesn't turn into a self-reinforcing cycle, you're in a better position than most in our society (materially, not morally). It lends itself to falling in one extreme or another.
That said, I imagine there's a decent number of people who get regular jobs in the middle that you never hear about. Just the people at the bottom get the whole "they sacrificed their mental health and their life, why can't we help them" signal boost
