Cracked.com on the military

One of my favorite humor articles ever: 5 Myths About the Military You Believe (Thanks to Movies)

5. Boot Camp Is Like Full Metal Jacket

YES and NO. I actually didn’t see Full Metal Jacket until I had gotten out of Basic Training (all those jokes made sense all of a sudden). The military is indeed much more humanitarian than it once was. But because of the echo chamber effect in the military, much of Basic Training, on both the drill sergeant’s part and the recruit’s parts, was recreating that movie.

4. War = Combat

One of the lamest things about my deployment was seeing the United States take credit for NOT doing anything combat-related. The Status of Forces Agreement had been signed, so all movement out of the base had to be done with Iraqi defense forces. The idea was that they would do everything. So what would happen was, ideally, our forces would sit around the base while the IDF did everything perfectly (this rarely happened). Still, there were a lot of young infantrymen, boys, who had come to Iraq want to kill, kill, kill, and were doing so in their hooch, while playing Call of Duty and drinking energy drinks. I recall even our general had the itch: on Thursdays, he would play Risk with his lieutenants in his office. And then when we got home, our friends and family would ask us if we had killed anyone. Sigh.

3. War Vets are Burned Out Ticking Time Bombs

Cracked cites a lot of the research that complicates this stereotype, but I still believe that there is something about the military experience that makes mental health issues worse in ways we don’t fully understand.

4. Everyone in the Military Is Proud and Has Unshakable Camaraderie

Everyone hates everyone not in their clique. It’s why hazing and and other intiation rituals are so stupid. It resembles high school in many ways. This was a realization that hit a lot of recruits hard in Basic Training. They had come in with romantic notions of the SQUAD. Many of them were running away from shitty high school memories. And then they asked to have a nickname and everyone decided to hit him with socks as they sleep. So it goes.

5. You Go to War, You Go Home

I came to war, and then I came back home. That said, there is a specific word that shows how much active duty life sucks. That word is redeploy.

As I was getting ready to come home from deployment, I wondered about this word. I eventually dismissed it as a bit of stupid military jargon. Why not undeploy? I thought.

A visit to Germany some years later showed me why. For active duty soldiers, the end of a deployment only means the beginning of a deployment somewhere else: Oklahoma, Germany, Hawaii. Not home, in other words. A short while is spent at this base, enough time to reunite, and then the soldiers are off again.

It is, indeed, hell on relationships.

These are some of the things that civilians often don’t realize about the military. Cracked, here, I think does a fun job of exploding these stereotypes. And the best part, it seems, is that they do it with just the right amount of dick jokes. It’s a heady balance, but they nail it.