I hated that 'institutionalized ignorance'
Plus a chain-of-command of functional alcoholics, their heavy-handed approach to 'camping out', the willingness to shoot at people who pose no threat, the idea that having shiny boots was more mission-critical than aviation maintenance (my actual job there, and one you couldn't DO without getting your boots soaked in JP-4, transmission fluid, etc.).....don't get me started, bbill! The mission was (and always will be): Kill people and destroy property until so-and-so capitulates; that's NOT the province of sensitive or particularly literate workers. A lot of us (those with dreams and aspirations beyond surviving firefights, who spoke standard English with good vocabularies, and were capable of doing our own critical analysis of dynamic systems) were not going to fit in with that crowd. I finished my first enlistment, but the military and I were both glad to be rid of each other. That was the 1970s. I never heard 'ballsticks', BTW; it was 'blast-ics'......'nucular blastic warheads'.
