Also, if you are not fighting a war and your workplace is so toxic that you have to take military grade advice on stress reduction then you should look for a new job.
That's fun, luckily most people in such situations tend to be pragmatic task solving types and few are loose cannon BP observers bouncing about screaming "I'm a teapot!" and "The pirates will get us if we don't drown!"
You don't have to be in the military to get caught up in surprise popgun atomic testing twixt India and Pakistan - you just have to be the bunny that took on a radiometric survey contract at third hand.
In hindsight these, and other adventures, are all part of the job and not worth quitting over.
As long as you're not the type that gets in a flap about every shipboard fire and runs about like a headless chicken, of course.
That reads like a scene from a distater movie. I am talking regular people with day jobs!
Also, your use of India / Pakistan while you could have used any other nuclear power smells of prejudice.
That was my day job, designing building, field testing seismic mapping systems. Lots of coding, lots of firmware, some hardware.
> Also, your use of India / Pakistan while you could have used any other nuclear power smells of prejudice.
Or simply that I'm not old enough to have been over the Monte Bello's test site when it was live, whereas we were contracted to fly radiometric surveys over the Pokhran-II test site on the day of the first explosion, and crew were detained until after the completion of the Chagai-I response.
If it helps, I've flown over many a former test site, many a tailings pond for a uranium mine in many parts of the world. It's a dull fact that the Pokran-II site is the only such place that went 'live' on a work day (in my experience at least).
- Developer building software to process/secure billions of dollars worth of transactions.
- Fire fighter, policeman, judge, etc..
- Driving on the road in a neighborhood with lots of kids.
Many jobs involve direct consequences on other people.
Then sometimes I get involved in seagoing expeditions or trials as part of it, and it changes a lot. Still very much a day job. I am not (that much of) a trained mariner. Definitely become witness to (and involved in) high-pressure situations, like "we have to winch this big yellow thing onto the deck, but it's too close to the aft and we can't reach it with the grappling hooks, it's dangerously close to getting sucked into the propellers, please please figure out how to fix the networking so we can send the CHANGE_HEADING command to get it to drift to a safe grappling distance".
It definitely does wonders for honing your Calm Problem Solving mode.
Just like with space exploration - it's good for the secondary benefits of observing humans at the limits to filter back to everyday life. In this case stress management
As you said, one main difference is that you can quit your job but not the war. There is a detail: you can experience these feelings even if your job is not toxic.
-- Hawkeye Pierce, M*A*S*H
<https://www.quotes.net/mquote/790330>
War is the job you can't quit.
There are plenty of ways to quit. E.g. deserting, self-wounding. You also got different forms of mutiny and "fragging" officers (not really quiting, but refusing to do the job).
For the last, consider unexploded WWII ordnance routinely uncovered in Germany and the UK (an example of the latter only this week); mines in Vietnam and elsewhere in Southeast Asia, among many other theatres; Agent Orange and other chemicals utilised in various locations (including a sunken trove of mustard gas munitions aboard a US Liberty ship, the John Harvey, lost at Bari, Italy, during WWII); depleted uranium in Iraq and Afghanistan, amongst others; and the political disruptions of national borders drawn either ignorant of or to deliberately exploit local rivalries across the Middle East (Sykes-Picot), Africa, and the Indian subcontinent.
Even barring that, and allowing that there are long-term employment conditions (shipping, remote development, expeditions) which might be difficult to quit on a moment's notice, military service at the least has legal proscriptions on arbitrary quitting not found in civilian service.