Wearing Your Medals With Your Kilt

[James MacMillan]

We disagree. Heartily. For all of the excellent reasons you've enumerated, I benefited from my term in the Navy despite the fact that I was in no way ready to take responsibility for my life. If you could read my evals from the first half of my Naval service you'd see that my performance was uniformly less than stellar. But then I got myself squared away and life has been much better ever since. I assert that without the Navy to kick my butt, give me meaningful responsibility, and a sense of belonging, I'd have not done as well in this life as I have done.

I'm not sure we really disagree at all. Having had a lot of first termers working for me over the years, some were just unable to make the adjustment. They were just miserable. Sure some, like you, eventually got with the program, and made a life. Others got out as soon as possible, harbored bad feelings and still didn't do very well. To this day, I continue to meet individuals who say that they should have stayed in. But I'm sure you will agree that the service is not for everyone. That's a good thing.

Political questions are, well, political and you know how the mods feel about political discussions.

Yea, you are right. Nuff said.