Good on them! Joining up is a scam. You get to trade your life for possibly getting a chance to further your education; that is if you don’t die during your service. And then, who’s freedom do you end up really fighting for because you end up fighting a foreign war? You end up fighting a war to enrich the billionaires more. Once your service is up, if you are unfortunate enough to have real and tangible mental trauma, you’re cast aside like someone who’s shelf life has expired. Fuck #Amurica.

And also the long-term risks to your health. The likelihood of chronic back and knee pain as well as hearing loss is fairly obvious. However, there’s also exposures to toxic chemicals in both open and closed environments that can put you at risk for cancers (especially lung, bone marrow, kidney and bladder) when you’re older. It blows my mind that ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) is unconditionally accepted as a service-connected condition. No one has any idea what exposures might be causing this, but the prevalence of it in former military people as opposed to civilians is so much higher that the VA just accepts it. It’s and awful disease, untreatable (except nursing care) and incurable and the VA isn’t going to have to cover care for long.