If you need help on the transition I can help. I have never been active, just deployed twice, in the Reserves 99-05 and Guard 05-present in 4 states + worked with 3+ more (and active duty) while deployed. I'm also a SNCO in battalion so I can answer questions from a different perspective. This is better taken to AKO email addys though, either send me yours or ask for mine and I'll give you a better rundown.
Try your base's education office. Sometimes they're more than a bit obtuse, however that's part of their job.
Couple months late, but congrats. I'm currently finishing up Airborne and heading to Bragg immediately thereafter. SOPC, then Selection. I've bent a couple peoples' ears prior to enlisting (notably Brian -- this is CaptCapital from the old board, btw) and have been having a pretty fucking excellent time so far. I know OSUT and the 1/507 aren't representative of the real Army, but I'm still thankful for what I've learned and accomplished. So, thanks to those of you I have talked to. I anticipate hanging out here a bit in the next few weeks.
Good for you. Airborne is stupid. My wife lives in Chapel Hill so I'm near Bragg quite a bit. I met TheRookie when I was there last month for some work stuff, pretty cool dude. During SOPC and Selection you aren't going to have much free time, but if you get selected, I'll look you up.
It was a culture shock. On the morning of the PT test there was a pair of female E-4s from the 82nd who were freaking the fuck out. Shaking, sobbing, begging one of the Black Hats to let them go home. Because they were cold. I kept waiting for the fucking hammer to drop, but it never did. They're both going to graduate.
I know this is going to sound like a very generic question, but I'm curious. What is life in the military actually like? I've been thinking about enlisting for a while now and there was a recruiter for the marines at my college the other day and we chatted for awhile and he gave me some pamphlets about the officer program and some other things, so it kind of went to the next level. What's considered a "typical" day for the most part? How about things like weekends, can you leave base or how long do they give you to visit home, things of that nature? Also, I haven't had much of a chance to talk to anyone yet, but as of now I'm a junior in college in my second semester, I have one more year left, but was considering possibly enlisting now and finishing my last year once I finished my enlistment. Are there any perks, whether positive or negative about doing this? Any help or feedback is appreciated, thanks.
My advice: DON'T. Average day for my marine: -Wake up at 4:30 5x a week for PT, which involves a shitton of running. Seriously, if you hate running, don't even think about joining. The MC runs the absolute shit out of you. -Go to work. If you are in an MOS that is over full, expect to sit in the work bay and wait around, bored out of your mind. Or, be assigned random duties like pulling weeds, sweeping, washing Humvee, etc. This is to say nothing of the power games that prevail, but I think that is uniform across the branches. -Go home. Have possible after work classes or seminars which don't necessarily pertain to you but that are required. There are a lot of volluntold activities during after work hours and weekends. If you want leave, you better hope to God that you have a good chain of command. They will reject it for small/bullshit reasons and not tell you why, or simply wait until the 59th minute of the 11th hour to accept it, which fucks you up considerably if you hope to get air fair at a reasonable cost. On top of all of this other stuff, tracking people down for questions/appointments is pretty difficult, especially since everything closes down at exactly 4:00pm. So good luck getting anything done after work. I guess everyone's experiences are different, but that has been ours. Also if you look at the stats for the different branches, I believe that I read the divorce and alcoholism rates in the Corps are the highest. It's hard to say exactly what causes problems like that, but living a day like I described above could certainly push it in that direction for a lot of people.
Background: Just over two years in the Corps. I'm a pogue in a very technical MOS. Your mileage may vary. As a whole, it's just like a regular job. You go to work, you do a job, you go home. In most cases, you have a schedule and they stick to it. Here's a typical day for me. I work swing shifts, so I alternate between working from 0600-1400 and 1400-2200. 0500: Wake up, shit, shower, shave, get dressed, etc. 0545: Arrive at work, relieve the poor bastard who got stuck with Mids (2200-0600. He has to wake up for PT at 1400, in addition to the usual barracks duty that I'll talk about later) 0600-1330: Do job as junior enlisted. In addition to my regular job, I'm also a janitor, security guard, amateur carpenter, chauffeur, target for ire, etc. 1330: Drive back to the barracks, get PT gear. 1400: Show up at the PT field, get broke the fuck off. Today we did a 7-mile run. We have a ten-mile run on Tuesday. Other entertaining PT ideas include cinderblock runs, Log PT, buddy PT, low crawl suicides, (Try crawling across a basketball court as fast as you can. It's not fun) and pull-up runs. I actually enjoy PT because I'm in good shape; it's one of the highlights of my day. 1530: Go back to the barracks, shower, relax, hope that someone with rockers doesn't fuck your day up. That's the minimum workday. Gearing up for deployment? You'll be working another six hours a day. Gear breaks and you're the only qualified tech on crew because the other one decided to go home on leave? You'll be up another six hours. Barracks gunny feels like being a douchenozzle and makes a massive working party to make the entire barracks white-glove-inspection ready? You guessed it. Basically, the minimum workday is manageable. If ANYTHING goes wrong, you're going to be working a 16-hour day. Weekends are usually fine, depending on the command. If your command is chill, they say, "You're good until next time you have work." If your command is manned by some DI-wannabe, you end up with a faggot SSgt running through your room on Sunday making sure that you only have the regulation six beers in your fridge. Mass punishment is the rule of the day. I've gotten my liberty canc'd because someone IN ANOTHER UNIT got arrested out in town. This is especially bad in Okinawa. Staff sergeant goes out and brings home a 14-year-old? Everyone's confined to base (and then that SSgt DI wannabe starts barging into rooms writing people up). Leave is a crapshoot. I'm usually lucky with leave, although they pretty much always wait until the last minute to approve it and I'm stuck paying $650 for the last available seat on the flight. You command might be awesome and let you schedule it a month in advance... others will straight-up fuck with you. I've had a sergeant major flat-out tell me, "Why do you think you should be allowed to go home on leave?" Surprise, I didn't get it because I was "too valuable to the shop." Cute. Barracks life sucks. You do field day every week, which is ostensibly an inspection to make sure that you're not being a pig. Instead, it turns into a ridiculous "There's dust in your lightbulb socket" inspection where the sergeant can fail any room he wants to for pretty much any reason. You will watch people marry strippers, hookers, and random girls back home just to get out of the barracks. It's that bad. I'm rambling and ranting a bit - it's not always that bad... but it can be. If you go infantry, you WILL hate your life. Every infantryman I know hates his life. You will have SOCK inspections. As in, the first sergeant will put your platoon at attention and have you lift up your trousers to make sure you are wearing regulation socks. No, I'm not kidding. In general, the lower the job is on the brainpower scale, the more you get fucked with. I'm in an offshoot of avionics; I have a pretty easy time of it. My buddies in aircrew get fucked with occasionally. My friends in artillery and infantry get fucked with all day, every day, to the point that people drink themselves into oblivion just to get a few hours of respite from it. And remember, this is seen as normal. The sergeants all went through the fuck-fuck games as lance corporals, and they'll do the same to you. And when you become a sergeant, you'll get told to do the same thing to your subordinates. My advice: Finish school. Life as a junior enlisted sucks pickled, salted, fermented, distilled donkey cock. Life as a shiny is sunshine and daisies in comparison, although you're held to a much higher standard. Pretty much everything I just outlined is what junior enlisted have to go through; officers get to sit there and laugh at the poor fucksticks having wall-locker inspections before going home to their out-in-town apartments. I have a lot of pride in what I am and what I do, but goddamn, we put up with a LOT of bullshit. Seriously, finish school. You'll be glad you did once you see what enlisted go through. And maybe, if you're a decent guy, you'll try to change some of it.
I'll give you a day in the life from a Marine Helicopter Pilots Calender. Flying day: 0500: Wake up, shit shower, shave, eat. 0540: Drive to work. 0615: Start preflight prep. Weight planning, route planning, maneuver prep. 0700-0830: Brief the flight systems and procedures. 0900: Preflight prep the aircraft. 0930-1330: Fly. 1400: Complete postflight briefs and write up postflight info. 1500: Complete unfinished desk job tasks that were put off from yesterday. 1700: Go home, eat, hit the books studying for the next day.weekemd 2200: Sleep. No fly day. 6: wake, yatta yatta. 0730: sit at desk checking email and studying. 1200: eat lunch. 1330: check email, study a bit more, BS around the squadron. 1600: gym. 1730: home, eat, study more. 2200: sleep. As an officer, I don't have to deal with a lot of the BS that omega has to. But we get our own shit from the higher ranking guys that's pretty stupid looking back. If anyone has any problems, they come to us to get a solution if they didn't figure it out for themselves, and their subbordinates or higher ranks can't help. In the aviation community, we're kind of useless except that we break the aircraft that the maintenance guys fix. We do our job, so they can do theirs, but ours is probably more fun...flying vs repairing a nose gearbox? Friday nights are usually relax and drink nights, Saturdays are recover and study, Sundays are pretty much studying all day. It may seem kinda cool, but there is a ton if time with our noses in the books. We're all closet nerds and we sit around talking about flying and aircraft systems all day quizing each other about limitations and emergency procedures. When we get a week off for maintenance, we get ahead studying, brush up on our knowledge we lack, and prepare for later flights. I can't remember a time I studied more than now, even finals weeks in college have nothing on the time I spend studying now. All this was after four years of college, 10 weeks of officer boot camp, 6 months of basic infantry school, and two years of flight school. And I'll agree with omega, finish school first and find a specialty that you enjoy, then either enlist, or officer into that specific field. And the enlisted definitely get more shit than the officers, as shit rolls downhill.
I was gonna say join the Air Force, the guy that pilot's Helo's pretty much summed it up at the end of his last post.
Average day in the life of an SF guy: 0600: Alarm goes off. Hit snooze. 0609: Alarm goes off. Hit snooze again. 0618: Fucking alarm. Realize that you have to be out the door in 12 minutes or you will be late. Brush your fangs, grab your bag, and head out the door. 0700: PT at the gym, where you have full-time personal trainers. Throw up after you push prowler sleds around. Laugh at the trainers who have to clean it up. 0900: Team room meeting. Discuss how much bullshit admin crap there is to do, and how no ranges are available. 0902: Hear a knock on the door. It's a guy from the B-Team asking for ammo forecasts for ranges 6 months away. You have no idea, so you tell him "25,000 5.56, 18,000 9mm" knowing you'll maybe get 1/4 of that. 0905: Start trying to do the 2 hours of bullshit admin work you have, but there is only one computer, so you have to wait. So you play Words With Friends intermittently while organizing your equipment and labeling it with a fancy label maker. 1103: Finally get to use the computer. It doesn't recognize your CAC card. Spend 20 minutes with the Group S-6 help desk getting it sorted out. 1130: Lunch. 1300: Computer works. Spend 90 minutes speeding through required training on sexual assault, equal opportunity, and drunk driving. 1430: Realize you have nothing else to do until a range comes up. Have a 30 minute conversation with the team about the current climate of the military, and how it is stupid. 1500: Go to the gym out of boredom. 1600: Go the fuck home. Deployed to Afghanistan: 0000-2359: Work your fucking ass off. Deployed to Iraq: 0000-2359: Eat, sleep, play XBox, try and find a mission, chase easy FOB pussy. But seriously, where I work, there is no such thing as an "average day"; the longest I've ever had a routine in the past 6 years was 6 months, and it was when I was doing a language school refresher.
Your experience in the military is dependent on your branch, MOS/AFSC, base, etc etc. A lot of it is what you make of it, but if you really want a good idea of what you may be getting yourself into ask people in your desired field what life is like. The Air Force has been good so far (approx 1.5 years in) and seems much more relaxed in-general than the other branches. We get s.hit too and endure a lot of the stuff omegaham mentioned but not necessarily to the degree he described. I'm able to "forecast" leave months out. That doesn't mean it can't be canceled last minute, but it hadn't happened to anyone in my flight. I've worked 5 weekends in the almost year long period I've been at my current base. I work between 9.5 and 10 hours every day 5 days a week (I'm an aircraft maintainer) and almost never has there not been a steady supply of work, real work, not picking up pinecones or taping brooms together so you can get the cobwebs that are high up.
This. I too am in the Air Force. My AFSC is one of the support career fields (3DXXX Cyberspace Support) and I for the most part work Monday through Friday 0730-1630. However, that can vary exponentially from AFSC, installation, down to individual units. Right now I am stationed at a relatively low operations tempo base so things are semi-laid back. I've met people within my career field who work 12-hour shifts, six days a week. It all depends on what unit you're assigned to and/or what mission you're supporting. My advice? Definitely finish school first and try and shoot for a commission, if possible. Enlisting with a degree gives you an advantage against your peers when it comes time for early promotion or awards.
My advice is to join as an O or Special Operations (18X or RASP, whatever the equivalent is in the Marines) if you can. Nothing against the enlisted or NCOs but with a college degree and life experience you could be miserable for a long time having to deal with dumbass E-5s who are your age and younger treating you like shit, not to mention your "peers" who will be 18 and straight out of highschool and dumb as a box of rocks. Not that there aren't amazing NCOs--or idiot officers for that matter--but depending on your branch and MOS you could be setting yourself up for a miserable first couple years. The flipside of that is that OCS and ROTC, at least in the Army, has gotten extremely competitive because of the economy. If you have a criminal record, forget it. Expect to wait at least a year before you actually start training at the least, that's if you get accepted. I'm talking from experience in the Army but I bet the other branches are similar. The drawdown is only going to make it harder. Good luck.
Not being in the US Army or Marine Corps I can't claim to know exactly how it is to be an infantryman there. But I can only agree. Yea, you will get a lot of shit in the beginning. You will not be listened to. You will need to go through inspections constantly. But in the beginning, you need a lot of shit. You don't say anything worth listening to, and you will need inspections in order to keep your shit together. But put in the time, go on deployments and climb the ranks and you will be not be given (a lot) of shit. You will be listened to, because you know what you are saying. And you won't be the one getting subjected to inspections (you may well be the one inspecting). EDIT: Soldiers bitch because soldiers bitch and are bitter fucks.
That's what really struck me going through OSUT (the Army's infantry school). Initially, things like locker inspections and getting screamed at about how to properly stand at attention REALLY pissed me off. You feel like you're getting picked on for no reason. But the more it happened, the more you realize; there are mouth-breathers in your platoon who do not know how to hang a shirt on a hangar, and who can't stand-up straight to save their lives. They'll give you an 11B contract with a 33 ASVAB score (<-- that's legally retarded in most states). And it's those guys - the ones who can't listen to or follow the simplest possible instructions - who will have your back in a firefight. So... yeah. Yell and scream and make me do push-ups until everyone is on the same page. I'll just get better at push-ups... and hopefully be a lot less dead when shit hits the fan downrange.
I haven't been on this board in a long time but, I'm an E-4(Senior Airman) in the Air Force with MC-12's where I'm a sensor operator. Currently on my second deployment in support of OEF... and it's still a shit hole.
Anyone ever been to Korea or currently stationed there? I'll be heading there in the next few months. Just curious, what do people do for phone situations there? I've heard some people get prepaid phones and some people just skype. Also, anything I should see while in the country?