292 Comments

you were making the pay of a brigadier general in 4 years?

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I keep thinking that if all the money they withheld because of the sequester or the numerous times they tried to repeal the ACA....

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"flat-rate stipend called the Basic Allowance for Housing (BAH)"

This acronym brought to you by Ebeneezer Scrooge.

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We use full-size dollars.... ;-) I still remember the time I did a trade show in BC when the exchange was CAD10=USD10.25. We give a $10 cash spiff every time someone buys a certain parts display, and I was getting a lot of humour pointed at me about "not giving the full value of the spiff", so I rounded up a bunch of US quarters and handed them out too..... I'm glad Canadians have good dry senses of humour!

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I was thinking of the various tilting-rotor aircraft that were built in the 50s and 60s. The Osprey's direct ancestor was the Bell XV-3, which flew in 1955, and Ryan-Hiller-Vought built the XC-124 transport in 1964, but it would seem that the military preferred just building bigger helicopters.

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Ready Player One?

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Good question. Unfortunately, Turkey was before my time--they would have been there in the late '70s when my older bros were littl'uns. I'm guessing they were at a NATO base too, since that's who my dad was mostly working with while in the Air Force.

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The longest war in American history is the war in Afghanistan, the one that Obama didn't end but foolishly doubled-down on. Iraq was a bipartisan act of idiotic and immoral militarism, made possible with the support of current presumptive Democratic presidential nominee and unrepentant militarist Hillary Clinton.

This diseased military-industrial complex, rotting the American empire from the inside out, is a bipartisan enterprise. Republicans are infinitely more guilty, but that doesn't make our party innocent. To ignore Democrats' part in this is to be complicit.

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That's correct. Contractors stole a massive amount of money during the war and everyone shrugged.

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My best friend's husband is in the military in Canada and he makes a much better living than our service members and their rent tends to be more reasonable.*

*Not applicable to BC

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Soldiers are actually government property, not employees. As anyone who ever went on sick call for a bad Panamanian sunburn learned when they got an Article 15 for "destruction of govt property"

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Yup, once you're in they own your ass. Steady (if shitty) pay and great benefits are nice and all. But most people don't realize how much personal freedom you give up by joining the military.

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Some love him, but most of those are guys who love anyone with an R behind their name. I know a few really conservative sailors who hate his ass though. He was the perfect stereotype of a shitty junior officer and pilot. Then he leveraged that into a career in politics.

No one is going to diminish the utter hell he went through as a POW, of course. But he wasn't a great officer and he was a fuckin horrible pilot.

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"They told me I could be anything, so I became a blueberry ..."

Haha my brother is in the Air Force. He's a mechanic, spends most of his time on airstrips and in shops. They still wear camo. Like he's supposed to blend in with the runway or something.

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Coast Guard wears the same uniform, just in solid dark blue. I actually like that working uniform a lot.

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Most of the time when you're underway you just wear coveralls. I don't understand why they don't just get rid of the camo and let us just wear coveralls instead. Rules for wear are the same. And coveralls are cheaper.

Navy has five different types of uniform minimum sailors have to maintain. There's no fuckin reason for that.

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