Thread: Eleven Months of Recruiting

Originally Posted by hobitopia

Also, it really gets to me when people complain about how the military is so hard. It's not. There's always somebody telling you what to do and how to do it. When it gets right down to it, unless you hold a leadership billet, all that's required of you is to be where you're supposed to be, when you're supposed to be there, wearing the proper uniform.

I'll speak for myself here when I say that's why it would be hard for me. I have issues with authority, in that I refuse to obey or listen to someone who has shown me they either don't know what they're doing, or I disagree with what they tell me to do. I cannot obey an order I don't agree with, and I will gladly fight and argue with anyone who tells me to anyways. This isn't to say I disobey every order, but if, for whatever reason, I disagree with one or two people in the chain of command above me that directly affect my perceived well-being, I'm going to have some serious head-butting that will result in my leaving. This has happened at pretty much every job I've ever had.

That being said, if I had a leader I respected, I would obey even if I disagreed with what we were doing, but the likelihood of that happening is so slim I wouldn't even try it out.

The military is easy, I for one make almost three times more than I did eight years ago, work fewer hours and no longer come home dirty as hell and worn out. As for the authority part, I used to be and to an extent still am one of the most anti-authority people I know. That said, there are ways to rebel covertly. For example, as a young team leader, I had a completely inept squad leader who used to rely on myself and my fellow team leader to do his job. When things went right he took the credit; when they went wrong he blamed me while placing the other TL on a pedestal. Myself and the other TL started releasing the squad early when nothing was going on. The squad leader would be gone all day doing who knows what, we'd release the Privates and Specialists before noon, and the world was a much happier place. Later, as a squad leader I did something similar; with an inept Platoon Sergeant, I'd release the guys with families and have the Soldiers who lived in the barracks hang out in their rooms all day. If someone was needed who had gone home, his cover was that he was at Fort Myer, Fort Belvoir, or even the Pentagon taking care of something.