Advice From Your Dad
Should I enlist or should I…?
I get this thread of questioning every week, so I thought an article was in order.
TL;DR - It’s complicated. You need to grow up; 18 year old boys are idiots. But how you grow up has consequences. Every situation is different.
The dilemma is that if you want to go 18X but you have to wait until you’re 20. I’ve written pretty often about why we demand a more mature person, and my analysis still stands. So the question becomes what do you do to fill the time. 18 year old boys are some of the most retarded creatures imaginable. You have unlimited energy, but zero judgement. You have no understanding of consequences, but you believe that you know everything and are infallible. You need to be disciplined but you have authority. You are a fucking menace. But it’s not your fault, it’s human nature. Your daddy and mommy have enabled you to become this tortured creature of power and potential and now you need to be pointed in the right direction. You have, essentially, 4 options:
1- Go to college
2- Get a job
3- Enlist
4- Go Option 40
1- Going to college is a great option because it feels like the right thing to do. It signals the successful completion and transition of your high school efforts, it makes your parents proud, and it guarantees that you’ll get a good job when you graduate. Except…none of that is true. High school is high school. It is designed as a terminal degree for a successful life. You can walk out of high school and head right off into a trade school or job, regardless of your high school achievements. In fact, a trade school has an incredible return on investment…far greater than all but the most productive (STEM) college degrees. Unless your parents are independently wealthy you are likely saddling them and/or yourself with tremendous financial hardship…and they are either guilted into taking on that debt or even worse leaving it to you. And the job market is saturated with under-educated college graduates that couldn’t pour piss out of boot if you put the instructions on the sole. So, college ain’t the panacea that you have sold it be.
And I would be remiss if I didn’t address the ideological battlefield that is a college campus. I come from the academy, and I place a tremendous value on education, but only at very select schools. Most schools are a swamp of effete, Marxist, narcissistic sociopaths that circle jerk to their own credentials with virtually no redeeming value outside of the campus. COVID put a spotlight on this, and the recent history of intifada marches and plagiarism scandals is laying bare the corrupt nature of these institutions. It’s near criminal that we require all officers to endure that struggle session, it would be very difficult to defend sending everyone.
But you only get to be 18 once, and going off to campus and sowing your seeds, pickling your liver, and earning your letters is a once in lifetime opportunity. College isn’t for everyone and you should approach that opportunity with caution and a spine. Yes, you’re burning time until you’re eligible for that sweet guaranteed 18X golden ticket, but you’re also burning a shitload of money and a part of your soul. You’d better know who you are, because the world is going to ask and if you don’t know, the world will tell you. If that world is on campus, you may not like who it tells you to be.
2- Getting a job is a great option. Everyone should have the character building experience of being cheap labor. You should understand how shit gets done in the world, so you appreciate it later on in life. Someone has to clean that toilet that you just exploded in Taco Bell, and it might be you. But you could also go into a semi-skilled position where you learn something. Something perhaps valuable to an ODA. Even better if you learn a trade. If you took advantage of your high school vocational education opportunities, you might even get a decent head start towards making good money. And you won’t be pissing away your parent’s nest egg. So a job, preferably a skilled job, is a great option.
3- Enlisting, as anything, is perfectly acceptable. It gets you out from under your parent’s roof, gets you earning money, and gets you building valuable experience. The Spec-4 Mafia is an information rich environment that can serve you well. But, you are cannon fodder. The lowest of the low. You will be doing someone else’s push-ups and you will be subject to the whims of the Big Green Weenie. You will get dicked down and proper. And if you end up assigned to a unit of shitbags then you’re very likely to be a shitbag. It’s hard to escape the shitbag gravity well. But you’re in the system and you’ll have access to great medical care, training facilities, and cultural enhancement.
If you can put up with the bullshit, life for a Soldier is pretty good. You get paid a decent wage, expectations for performance are essentially limited to *right place, right time, right uniform*, and your benefits are about as good as they get. You could spend your first enlistment taking advantage of tuition assistance, building a little nest egg, and fucking around in the Bs with the Boys. But you also might die.
4- Option 40 is the high risk/high reward option. Option 40 is a contract option that gets you a shot at RASP and assignment to the 75th Ranger Regiment. It’s available (usually) for any MOS in the Regiment, but 11X is the prestige option. The reward is that you get forged into a unit culture that builds competence, confidence, and character. You will learn your job to a level of proficiency that is the absolute highest possible standard. Your mission, while diminishing with the end of the GWOT, is still relevant, exciting, and rewarding. Simply put, the Ranger Regiment is the most lethal infantry fighting force on the planet and Rangers have earned their reputation. You could not ask for a better preparatory training experience for SFAS.
But, the risk is also very high. RASP boasts a ~50% attrition rate, a junior enlisted man in the Regiment is as close to indentured servitude as you could imagine, and the penalty for poor performance is immediate expulsion and ostracism. The Rangers eat their young. But if you survive you are perfectly postured to do well at Selection.
So the answer to Should I enlist or should I…? is that it depends. It depends on your means and your constitution. It depends on your family circumstances and your living situation. It depends on how ready or not ready you are for hard living. It just depends on so many factors that you can’t really convey in a DM. This is the sort of stuff that you should be talking about with your Dad. I know that he’s still out getting that milk, so you are pressed to seek advice from randos on the interwebs.
For the record, my son went to college. I forced him. He wanted to enlist right out of high school and my wife told me that she was heartbroken. She didn’t want him to endure the lifestyle. So I forced him to do at least 1 year. As I said, you only get to be an 18 year old college freshman once. So he obeyed and went off to sow his oats. He came home at Spring Break and announced that he had honored his commitment and he wanted to serve. He enlisted in the Infantry and had a short but successful life as a grunt. I was never more relieved when he called me one day on my way back home from a particularly brutal day at Camp Mackall. He told me that he didn’t want to go SF, he wanted to forge his own path. I almost cried with relief. I’d just spent the day watching young men get destroyed by the Sandman and I was so relieved that I wouldn’t have to watch him endure that torture. He’s a Warrant Officer pilot now and I couldn’t be more proud…and relieved. He *is* the Downed Pilot, not carrying it.
At the end of the day there is no perfect answer. In many ways it’s a bit like being a Green Beret. I often joke that there are no perfect answers in the operational environment that we live in. Everything is a bad choice, and your job is to pick the least bad option. This is certainly true at SFAS. So pick the least bad option for you, and then execute it violently. Fortune favors the bold.
