For a time when I was in the Army

[kairos12]

I had responsibility for patrolling a specific section of the Berlin Wall (there was 135 miles of it in total). Too hear Shitler joke with the crowd about shooting refugees...well I don't have the words.

Only actions to continue to resist with everything I have.

[Aristus]

1. One thing I don't miss about the Army: the sheer, ugly, unadulterated, gutter, bottomless racism.

Southern boys who didn't like black people would say so, but usually quietly, since the military has a large black minority.

But every other non-white ethnic group in the world came in for some spectacularly crude, squalid bigotry, often from figures in authority; NCO's, and on very rare occasions, officers.

I'm a white Christian male, but I'm so glad to be out of that racist shitshow, I can't even tell you.

[cilla4progress]

2. Thanks, Aristus

Where and when did you serve?

[Aristus]

3. U.S. Army, 1986 - 1993, although 1986 - 1989 were in the Reserves.

I did active duty from 1989 to 1993. I was a tank crewman, and served in Germany, Fort Knox, Kentucky, and in the Gulf during Gulf War I, but only for a month. And my unit didn't serve in combat.

[cilla4progress]

4. Were you a

medic?

Wasn't Gulf War I only about that long? Bush Sr. kicking Hussein out of Kuwait, if memory serves me? That's why idiot son thought "his" Gulf War would be a slam dunk?

Thank you for your SACRIFICE!

[Aristus]

6. I was a tank crewman, not a medic. I didn't start in medicine until long after I got out.

The ground war was only four days long, but the build-up to the invasion of Kuwait and Iraq started the previous summer, and the air war kicked off in January of 1991. I arrived in the Gulf on Valentine's Day, 1991, and the ground war started not long after. My tank platoon was out on a desert training exercise when the ground war started, and by the time we got back, the whole thing was over. We waited around our tent city for a few weeks, then caught a flight back to Germany. One month was my total experience in the Gulf War.

I didn't really sacrifice much. It was an interesting experience. And the only hostile fire we took was a Scud missile that targeted our base and missed us by a country mile.

[cilla4progress]

7. Thanks for sharing your experience!

Yes, sorry - you said tank crewman.

I couldn't be LESS knowledgeable about military matters!

[soryang]

5. The thing that struck me among the officers was the bible thumping evangelism

The racism was always there implicit in legal procedures and how they were used, NJP, courts martial and the level of courts martial imposed, and the administrative separation procedures and characterization of service upon involuntary separation of service. I say this but can't prove it; I don't know of any studies that examine which racial and ethnic groups porportionately gets the BCDs, DDs, or OTHs or who comparatively gets the most courts martials as opposed to non judicial punishments.

That being said no one will ever convince me that Afro-Americans aren't discriminated against by the military justice system, even by commands with high ranking black officers or jags involved in the military justice process. God help the individual who bucks that system.