It sure did in my case--it only took two days of basic training to make clear that signing up for the US Air Force was the worst mistake of a heretofore untroubled life. It's gratifying to see my proposed method (an untimely hiking accident) so highly praised.
Just out of curiosity for anybody who has gone through this exercise what method(s) did you consider? Extra points for originality.
My biggest problem with basic was keeping myself from laughing out loud at the various antics. Once I was able to control that urge, it was pretty straightforward. I saw it, essentially, as six weeks of necessary bullshit that allowed me to get to the next level.
My term in the USAF as a 3C0X2 (computer programmer) was fantastically beneficial. I'd already been programming for over a decade when I went in. But the installation I landed at allowed me to really learn in a lot of new directions.
Having said that, I know a lot of folks that had a far less productive time. But it's still a pretty good way to bootstrap a life independent from family, in my opinion at least. The money from the GI bill is very valuable, plus, with some measure of self control, single Airmen can save up a ton of money, since the USAF pays in full for food, housing and medical.
1) You get (well, are forced) to mingle and cooperate with people outside your "circle" and bubble (of course this is truer for compulsory service).
2) You are in place where no one treats you like a "unique snowflake".
3) You get to do all the shit people usually have their parents, mothers, cleaning services, etc do for them, even more so than when merely living alone, because there you are forced to do it, and to do it for 100s of people.
In basic training, I ended up being very close to a lot of different people that I would have otherwise never come in contact with, to that level.
And in my opinion, this is a very healthy thing.
One thing I'd like to share that cracks me up, all these years later. Pardon the forthcoming ramble.
I had been handling guns from a pretty early age, but I was still looking forward to training on the M-16.
Well, at least in the early 90s, there is exactly one (1) day of weapons training in USAF basic training.
In the morning, we got on a bus and went to the ass-end of Lackland AFB where the gun ranges were. We then received our weapons, with no ammo in sight, and 'trained' on them in several hours of classes.
Note, this classroom was just a classroom, with desks, with the normal classroom density. And so 50 young men and women were sitting at desks with M-16s. And, on various cadences, we all held them up, put the clip in, simulated chambering a round, aimed, and pulled the trigger.
But we had to aim...kind of up and to our left. Because we were never suppose to point the weapon at another person we didn't mean to shoot, loaded or otherwise.
It was an absolutely absurd scene.
Many of my class-mates were openly afraid of handling these weapons, and it showed.
After lunch we marched, weapons slung, over to the firing range. We were to each fire sixty rounds that day. The first thirty were warmup/practice. The second 30 were for qualification. We each lay supine with the weapon on sandbags. Only then were each of us handed three rounds each, which we pushed into the clip. And then we fired those three rounds.
The young lady next to me was terrified of guns, and had never touched one. I noticed that she was closing her eyes before each shot.
After we fired our 30 rounds into the targets, our final scores were calculated. My target had 30 holes tightly grouped in the middle. But there was another hole, off all by itself, right on the edge of the target.
Somehow I managed to score 31 out of 30 that day, though it was recorded as 30.
The young lady next to me repeated 'gun day' twice more, with different flights (groups), before she qualified.
Sorry for the ramble!
The real punch line came when I asked my training instructor, later on, why we bothered with only a single day of weapon training.
He laughed out loud and said something like, fuck if I know. Think about it, Diederich. What do you think would be going on if Airmen were forced to actually use their weapons against an enemy. The war would already be over!
Indeed! The USAF: where the best chance of direct enemy contact comes from becoming one of the few tens of thousands of officers who actually venture into enemy territory on occasion. The 'grunts', the enlisted, no way.
On the other hand the rifle disassembly and cleaning was taught by a woman who knew the weapon inside and out. She was excellent and a lot more soldierly than any of the dweebs in my flight.
Right...it was my experience that the actual teachers and trainers were pretty cool compared to the TIs. Fortunately, our two primary TIs were among the most chill. Our sister flight's senior TI was terrible.
This was less the case in the past fifteen years, where USAF personnel in certain career fields were often pressed into Army roles. Particularly in convoy and military police operations, the Army had overextended itself and needed the other branches to fill in the gaps of trained personnel.
For most airmen, it can be years before you're even considered for deployment. Less than a year into my enlistment as a Security Forces airman, I was sent to be a prison guard ("detainee operations") at Camp Bucca in southern Iraq. There were Army and Navy personnel, but most of their guards were troops put into a role outside of their usual training...a couple years prior such non-police "augmentee" soldiers without proper use-of-force training were involved in the torture incident in the prison at Abu Ghraib.
During Desert Storm, one of my computer programmer co-workers got yanked to a nearby base where he received a two week crash-course on being an airforce cop, so that the actual airforce cops could deploy to Saudi Arabia.
An 'airforce cop' is basically the same thing as a civilian cop. They drive around on base in police-looking cars, hand out speeding tickets and handle the occasional drunk and disorderly.
He had some pretty funny stories about how many strange situations he found himself in, given his abject lack of directly relevant training.
Fortunately, the goings on in nearly all USAF bases are exceedingly lawful, so his situations were always funny and WTF instead of dangerous.
That was my experience doing state-side law enforcement at a Space Command base - night shift was especially fun for the weird calls, like complainants worried about "satellites orbiting San Bernardino County" and the "glowing red airship" suspiciously near some antenna arrays with the usual air collision beacons. The usual response was to refer them to public affairs as our office was strictly limited to a terrestrial jurisdiction.
Definitely more lighthearted than being downrange.
Really? It seems like lying on your back would bring substantial disadvantages and no advantages?
[1] http://firearmshistory.blogspot.com/2012/03/rifle-shooting-p...
In my experience, people commonly use "lie prone" to mean basically any position, but nobody knows the word "supine" except in its technical meaning contrasting with "prone". Thus, I thought this was worth clarifying; I'd be happy to assume that someone using "prone" in a context that heavily suggested another position just didn't think of "prone" as referring to any position in particular; that seemed like an odd assumption for "supine".
Do you have a suggestion for wording the question so as not to sound insulting?
I suppose I did come off a bit unduly bitchy, though, and I'm sorry for that. Some weeks go by in a moment; others feel like they drag on for months. This last was one of the latter sort, but there was no call for me to go and take that out on you.
Didn't make an extended career out of it, but my years there gave me a needed boost of confidence.
For a lot of the young folk in my flight, the confidence they gained by getting through even the wimpy USAF basic training was very valuable.
And there are quite a few other benefits as well.
Even though I started this thread by talking about wanting to fake my death being in the military was overall a very good experience. As somebody else already said down-thread it forces you to mix with a wide variety of people, something we don't do nearly enough as a society. For that reason alone I think it would beneficial to bring back the draft though perhaps minus the part about fighting wars all over the place.
For historical reasons, refusing to serve with a weapon was very common, and in this case one had to serve an equal time in the civil sector, such as help out in a kindergarten, hospital or old people's home. There was a lot of complaining after the service was abolished due to the missing very cheap labour.
It's all way less of a pain than Army and especially Marine basic, of course.
I honestly think that for a big percentage of young people, doing a term in the military would be a big personal win.
My dad (ex military) said that ages <= 18 will buy the bootcamp bullshit. 19 and over won't, but will have enough sense to go along with it.
There's also a few rivers I know of that have a reputation for keeping bodies - one of them[1] took my brother-in-law about five years ago and there's been no sign of him since. But, it's a bit harder to do that one and exit the river without anyone seeing you.
I've never been in the military so I don't know how accurate pop culture portrayals are, but I never got the impression it was supposed to be a walk in the park...
My service was a while back during the second cold war, which was actually pretty peaceful for the US military. The wars in the Middle East have added whole new dimension that I cannot comment on from personal experience.
The reason I say that is because it's becoming much more difficult to be a "nobody" in an urban environment. You can only disappear until your first run-in with police. Even if you've never been arrested you're still in the system.
The trick indeed is avoiding any run-in with the government. If there's one group of people who never jay-walk and always have a valid ticket in public transport, it's illegal aliens.
But the bigger risk is that committing a minor crime puts you into the system. I'm going to guess it is quite easy to assume that getting arrested or fined puts you closer to being caught than not doing so. One is likely taking risk daily just by working and renting an apartment, depending on circumstance. (Naturally, some landlords don't really get information and some jobs skirt legal requirements.)
Heck, even as a legal immigrant, I'm pretty careful not to break laws that I can easily avoid breaking. I know a traffic ticket won't get me sent back to the US, but I'd rather stay on the safe side.
I'm not sure about the comparative odds of having a run-in with the police in a busy urban environment, vs. living off land you don't own.
That said, it's a good idea to not haunt a particular area too long, city or countryside.
I also know that it didn't look particularly fun, either - I think given my options, I'd rather be homeless in a city rather than homeless in the wilderness.
Personally I'm the opposite of you, I grew up playing in the woods and living on a farm so I'd be at home in the wilderness. In the city I'd be too paranoid to be comfortable, especially if I didn't want people to know who I was.
There's also the middle ground: Hike/hitchhike your way across the country, getting as far from "home" as you can. Find a small town or a farm where you can work for cash/room and board, don't ask too many questions and don't answer too many. After a few months or so, move on to another small town and start over. It's a hybrid lifestyle that may work for some people, keeps you mostly incognito but still near the comforts of modern life.
For that matter, you could always go full Munchausen, and make yourself genuinely sick or weak.
But being stuck in BCT for endless cycle after cycle seems like a special kind of hell.
E.g., you change your mind about joining the military. You can't resign or run away, so your best option might be to convince them that you're more trouble than you're worth.
In other words, if you actively want everyone around you to think you're an incompetent fool, then deliberately washing out of boot camp is the sort of thing you might try. I don't see why it wouldn't work. Refusing to accept the training would get you court-martialed, but you can't charge someone with just being a lousy shot, can you?
You really are trapped, and the only way out is even more painful or results in a criminal record. That was my experience, us army 98 to 02
Was it really impossible to just put your hand up and say "uh, guys, I made a mistake, can we please forget about it?"
I mean, what were the consequences of you just sitting on the ground and refusing, or even just walking out of the place? Do they physically own you like a prison?
http://military.findlaw.com/criminal-law/failure-to-report-f...