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January 26, 2006

So Are They Really Mercenaries Then?

When I enlisted in the USAR following my junior year of high school, it was for the money. They gave me an enlistment bonus of $1000 and the pay was far and away better than any other employment that a 17-year-old high school kid could get in the way of a summer job. Plus shooting automatic weapons, running obstacle courses and such seemed totally cool to my overheated adolescent spirit. And so I enlisted. But it was also for the filthy lucre too.

Now comes this news story that I saw on the Drudge Report today from the Sacramento Bee:

“Most military reservists”, says the article, “who left their civilian jobs to fight in Iraq or Afghanistan made more money there than in their regular jobs, according to a study that contradicts the notion that citizen soldiers lose money when they go to war.”

Now even excluding the super-patriot goofs and such types I would bet you that most of the National Guard and USAR troops are ordinary guys in lower paying jobs who decided to drill once a month and two weeks each summer simply for the extra dough. As I remember they were nearly all honorably discharged from active duty in the Army or Marine Corps already so they didn’t need to do much else after signing on but show up and play soldier one weekend a month and then collect the money. And if you could stick it out long enough a pension after twenty. Which again is a real incentive given the turbulent and unsettled prospects for ever being able to retire given today’s turbulent economic prospects for the low-end middle class.

We were all patriots of a sort, but then we all needed the money too.

Posted by Ali Massoud at January 26, 2006 08:21 AM

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