• kadaverin0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    13 hours ago

    “Why are you wearing a mascot suit on a hot day for a few hours when you could be carrying up to 150+ lbs of military gear in mid-day desert heat on your body as you trek up to nine miles on foot for days at a time while periodically being shot at or bombarded for 35k and a shit-tier job?”

  • jaybone@lemmy.zip
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    23 hours ago

    “You’ll still have to wear a bunch of shit in 96 degree weather. Occasionally you will still have to duck. ”

  • Formfiller@lemmy.world
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    23 hours ago

    My son wanted to take the test but the Air Force recruiter told him that adhd disqualifies him and he won’t even allow him to take the asvab(entry test). He scored an 88% on the practice test. Honestly this is the best case scenario for me because now I can steer him towards a better path without looking like the bad guy. My family has served in every American war for over 200 years and I’m hoping we can finally break this cycle of trauma.

    • sunbytes@lemmy.world
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      15 hours ago

      I didn’t realise it disqualified him. Is that the same for all military roles?

      I’ve heard accounts from people talking about ADHD affecting their work when on active duty (like, literally on a patrol in Afghanistan).

      Obviously it’s something I read on the internet, but I am curious.

      • megopie@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        13 hours ago

        a diagnosis and previous medication used to be a straight up disqualifier. Over the past few years they’ve slackened that a bit, with some branches going to “unmedicated for a year” or a medical waiver. Ultimately the policies around mental health in recruiting are based around conceptions from the 70s, and given that diagnosis methods have moved on from then, now tending to catch a lot more mild cases, way more people are getting disqualified due to things that used to not be noticed. To be clear, a lot of people currently in the US military today have ADHD, but they weren’t diagnosed until after they were admitted except for very recent recruits.

        Part of the reluctance to recruit anyone with any mental health diagnosis is the long shadow of “project 100,000” aka “ McNamara’s Folly”. Essentially a program where people who fell in to the bottom 10th percentile of testing on mental and physical were conscripted anyways to make up numbers during the Vietnam war. This lead to some pretty disastrous outcomes, with soldiers conscripted as part of this program dying at 3 times the normal rate. The movie forest gump touches on this a bit, but it kind of glosses over the real tragedy of it all nor the diversity of fucked up situations this created.

        The institutional memory of this has created a strong prejudice around any sort of mental health diagnosis in recruits, but again, this is in conflict with the fact that mental health is much less stigmatized these days, and much milder situations that were just ignored in the past are now diagnosed.

      • kadaverin0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        13 hours ago

        The military turns down people for a lot of conditions you wouldn’t expect to matter that much. My brother was disqualified from the Air Force for a barely perceptible tremor in his right hand and a case of heavy metal poisoning he had when he was younger (a landlord didn’t inform my mother there was lead paint in the apartment). He didnt incur any permanent neurological damage from the poisoning but they still denied him.

      • bigfondue@lemmy.world
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        15 hours ago

        If you’ve ever been diagnosed and or taken medicine for any mental health condition, you are disqualified barring a waver. It is easier to get waivers when there is war going on.

  • 9point6@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Any recruiter that cold approaches me can fuck off

    If that recruiter is trying to get me to kill people they need to fuck all the way off into the sea

  • PhilipTheBucket@piefed.social
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    1 day ago

    A buddy of mine was leaning towards joining the military, and it was interacting with the recruiters and observing that they seemed miserable that changed his mind about it.

  • pelespirit@sh.itjust.works
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    1 day ago

    This is from 2015, it’s waaaaay worse now:

    The Shameful Way America Treats Its Veterans

    The number of homeless Vietnam veterans today is greater than the number of soldiers who died during the war

    Last year a CNN report showed that at least 40 veterans had died waiting for care at VA facilities in the Phoenix area; the scandal mushroomed when an internal audit found more than 120,000 veterans across the country were left waiting or never got care, even as VA employees were trained to manipulate wait time numbers internally. It’s a scandal that continues to sting. A report published Wednesday shows the VA doled out $142 million in performance bonuses in 2014, the same year it was being investigated for manipulating data. And last month Hillary Clinton came under fire for telling Rachel Maddow the problem has “not been as widespread as it has been made out to be.” (Her remarks stood in contrast to those made by former VA Secretary Eric Shinseki when he resigned last May: “I said when this situation began weeks to months ago that I thought the problem was limited and isolated because I believed that. I no longer believe it. It is systemic.”)

    https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/the-shameful-way-america-treats-its-veterans-52825/

    • DaGeek247@fedia.io
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      1 day ago

      Specifically, because of the past six months. 2024 va was unimaginably better than 2015 va. 2025 va is falling apart at the seams due to Elon and Trump doing goddamn best to destroy the va and federal government in general.

        • DaGeek247@fedia.io
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          1 day ago

          By miles, frankly. It had been on upward trend for a hot minute, actually. 2024 va had actually managed to change most of their issues into things that only sometimes happened, rather than things that were expected to happen most of the time.

          I can’t speak for every va hospital, but the ones I went to actually had reasonable wait times for providers (compared to the average private hospital, they were better) and for compensation it was miles ahead of of where it was in 2015, which was also miles ahead of where it was in 2005.

    • Zwiebel@feddit.org
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      1 day ago

      Isn’t the number of veteran suicides after the war higher than the deaths during?