Oh, the US Army. So glad that shit is over now. It's just a bureaucracy of inane, monotonous, and constantly demoralizing bullshit.
I was a radar repairer. So they put radar operators in charge of me. Had no support from anyone. My equipment would break and I'd get excuses from leadership and command about why the equipment can't be fixed or replaced. Their solution was for me to buy my own tools. But it didn't matter anyway. If the radar was broken, it was always more important for me to pull a duty or do a detail like staff duty or cutting grass. And after awhile I didn't care any more. When I left all the radar's were broken and they wouldn't let me fix them anyway, so in my mind I was thinking "good riddance you fuckers".
And I had about 8 large toolboxes full of random shit including a fucking lantern from WW2 that all had to be laid out once a month...perfectly...or the commander would flip his shit. Every fucking little wrench and screwdriver had to be painstakingly lined up for some dumbass infantry commander to measure how long a fucking screwdriver was. And he'd measure it and be like "Oh this is 4 1/2 and not 5, so it's not the right item"...It got to the point where my NCO wanted everything bagged and tagged so it could be easily laid out; and then he said that we should never use the tools so the layouts will always be perfect...I shit you not.
Then you have the promotion system. You go in front of a board and answer questions relating to Army doctrine and bureaucracy. They do not give a shit if you know your job or know how to be a leader. They just want to hear you recite a fucking creed and all the Army regulations and programs. You also get to go to a lovely "leadership" school that cares about marching, using a fucking compass and navigating (real hard, right?), Army regulations, and public speaking that they grade with a list of inane and highly detailed requirements.
Then there's your actual leadership. They will tell you that "false motivation" is better than actually having motivation. In other words, they don't give a shit about morale, they just want you to appear to have it. Real intelligent. They will talk down to you and treat you like a strict parent to a child because that's what the Army wants for some reason. If someone does something stupid or messed up, everyone gets talked to. And you can't tell them to fuck off or they will just claim insubordination and force you to listen to them more. The most frustrating thing is when they are wrong, you call them out on it, they will still tell you why you are wrong and you will always be wrong and nothing you can do will change that; all it will do is get you in trouble or have to listen to another "heart-to-heart" bullshit talking where you decide to masochistically torture yourself by intently listening to them, just so you don't have 30 days of extra duty. Some of the leadership will be really strict and make little tasks into a big ordeal and endless lecturing about how to do something like turn a wrench. Other leadership won't do their fucking job, like they are afraid of higher ranks and you'll be the one trying to tell a sergeant first class or 1sgt why you can't do what they ask or trying to figure out how to accomplish something with their help.
Paperwork. Holy shit. Every month your NCOs have to do a sit-down heart-to-heart and tell you what kind of things they think you are doing right or wrong and suggest "improvement". I used to tell them I don't care and I'll just sign the counseling and they'd get mad at me. There's always some annoying training or retraining you have to do online, but since the army contracts everything to the lowest bidders, the systems don't always work right. You have to fuck with anything electronic you do to get it to work right. Most of the time you have to use outdated software to do anything online or do some trick to get something to load and register right. And you need to use a special card to login to the system, which for some reason will just not work sometimes. Really great when you need to do something important and time-sensitive. Even something that should be simple, like dispatching a humvee or putting in for leave requires a lot of paperwork to be filled out. So you want to dispatch a humvee. First you need to check your vehicle for any problems and note it on a special form. Then you need to start the paperwork and track down a mechanic to check that you have all your "safety equipment" with the truck. Then you need to track down their supervisor to sign off that the mechanic checked and filled out the paperwork right. After that, you need to track down someone in the motorpool that does dispatches. If anything is wrong it needs to be fixed. They need to start the dispatch process. Now you need to get the commander or exo to sign the damn dispatch. Good luck finding either one because they are usually busy. Now the dispatch goes back to the dispatch personnel and they finalize everything and send it back to the commander for final approval. So you wanted to go on leave? You need to have all your online training done, valid weapons and PT cards, and have all your personal information up-to-date in S1. And after all that, sometimes the leave would get lost or it wouldn't get signed, until days before you were expecting to leave, so now you're not sure you can even go at all. And you couldn't even trust them to hold on to the signed leave form; you'd have to ask for it and copy it because sometimes it would get "lost" and you then wouldn't be able to go on leave.
Then there's actual "training". For some reason, even though I wasn't a combat mos and was supposed to just have an M16 or M4, my unit wanted me to have an M240 machine gun. The ammo is more expensive and special, so they'd never have ammo, but they'd want me to qualify. So I remember one range where I just sat around for 3 days waiting for them to get ammo from another unit. It got to the point where I was being told to put 5.56mm rounds into my 240 that expects 7.62mm. I of course said fuck no. That shit probably would have exploded the barrel and perhaps the bolt mechanism and my face as a result, if it fired at all. Anyway, that's not even the most brilliant part. For some reason in their infinite wisdom they would always have the 50 cal weapons fire on the targets first. They would decimate the targets to the point that anyone with smaller rounds wouldn't be able to register a hit on the targets. But they would keep expecting you to try and qualify. It got to the point where I just went out there and fired all my rounds on one target to make a point that we couldn't fucking hit them. They still didn't get it. Eventually they decided you could qualify on non-moving paper targets and that that was good enough, but wow. And they would lie to about shit they weren't supposed to do. If you were forced on a meal plan to eat in the dfac, they were supposed to provide meals during training for you. They would say they were and then not do it and you just wouldn't eat. I remember sitting on a land nav course setting up points and eating berries all day because they didn't bring food and wouldn't let us leave. Eventually your NCOs would just tell you to bring your own meals because they knew the leadership would lie and you wouldn't get reimbursed for it. I mean you could get reimbursed, but it meant filling out endless paperwork that your commander had to approve every time you missed any meals. And something simple like taking people off the meal plan is always denied because the dfac expects that money to "survive" and fund the dfac.
If you join as enlisted, expect NCOs to take time off from work to get personal shit done, but not let you do it because you need to be working. And if you are single and a sergeant or below, you have to stay in shitty barracks and they take some of your money and give it to the dfac, while married people get a lot of money for housing and food, a lot of which they pocket and save or spend how they like. Your family wants to visit you? Well, if you are single they can't and have to stay in a hotel, but if you're married you get a nice house. Some married will actually buy a house with the money they get and sell it when they leave after 3 years at a duty station. As long as the value of the house stays relatively the same, they can pocket that money when they sell the house. And every time a weekend rolls around you have to sit and get lectured about how you're not supposed to beat people and animals and do drugs and shit like that for sometimes up to 30 minutes. I think they try and think of everything that anyone has ever done wrong and try to give a long-ass briefing that covers their ass in case you do get in trouble over the weekend. It's so annoying, especially when you've been sleep-deprived all week and all you want them to do is shut up and let you leave and go to fucking sleep.
And if you join, I hope you like sitting at a desk for 24 hours straight playing with your thumbs. Sometimes you get to do this on the weekend. The best part is when someone else is supposed to pull duty, but they can't for whatever reason and suddenly your pulling their shift on top of your own that you're going to pull next weekend. Really great. You will always be sleep deprived. If you aren't getting up around 5am, it's 3 or 4am. And if it's not 3 or 4, it's 2am. I remember being in training and getting off late to only go to sleep around midnight, waking up at 2am to ruck for 12 miles. Mind you, this is after weeks of being sleep-deprived and physically exhausted and meal deprived.
And don't even get me started on JRTC or NTC. That's where you really get to see how genuinely fucked up your unit is. I'll just say my experience was terrible; the command team had no clue how to do anything and used our radar like it was a recon vehicle. They assumed everything on the battlefield and moved all of the anti-tank weaponry away from the command post, only to get taken over by two light tanks. The opposing force was told to "take it easy" on us two days into the pretend war. Our radar wasn't even aligned and was off by about 180degrees for 90% of the exercise. The only reason it got noticed was because an operator noticed something was off and asked me to look at it and I found out it was misaligned. And the day after that they used that radar to clear airspace for live artillery fire...if I hadn't fixed the alignment they would have been shooting artillery at or around their own helos. And that's the other thing, that operator knew the equipment better than the warrant officer in charge of their air defense. He worked that guy into the ground saving his ass and in the end the operator got nothing for it, except blame for whatever was the warrant officer's fault. I remember he was going to tell the warrant that I fixed the radar and I told him not to because then I would have been in his position. The only positive was seeing a four star general yell at a full bird colonel and every officer under him, telling them how they wasted millions of dollars and have no idea how to fight a war. Suffice to say, that brigade is no longer deployable, thankfully.
Oh yeah and then there's Army "Training Doctrine" where you get treated like a prisoner and forced to do silly things like obsessively clean the barracks all weekend because suddenly you're a piece of shit for accidentally leaving a sock on the floor when you left that morning in a hurry to get to class so you wouldn't get in trouble in the first place. I remember actually getting privileges to leave the place we were at on the weekends and they would try and find ways to take it away. So we put down that we were going into the city one saturday, to get a call saying we had to come back to the barracks because we weren't specific about where we were. So we come back and get yelled at and put on extra duty for two weeks. Really fucking stupid.
Add on top of the fact that there's a lot of psychopaths, adult children, and sadistic assholes you probably won't relate with very much, it's all very frustrating. In the end, even doing my job, which was my only motivation to care about anything, I wasn't allowed to do. I told my commander I just wanted to do my job and asked if he could move me somewhere else and he just denied me, but said I could go to "behavioral health" and tell them I'm miserable and I could get chaptered out of the Army. That's the kind of shit they do. Now granted, supposedly I was at one of the worst units in the Army; at least that's what everyone kept telling me and you may not have this kind of experience, but just don't risk it, unless you want to go crazy like I did. Just don't join the Army. If you must join the military and want to get into ROTC, GO AIR FORCE. They at least care if you know and do your job and supposedly the leadership is more down to earth and less ocd and retarded.
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