I Hereby Resign in Protest Effective Immediately

[noamnety]

115. I followed a similar path

Enlisted under Reagan, had time in, then out, then in when I was recalled. Then was a contractor, and it took me a very long time to make that leap of walking away from a secure defense contractor job, and take a nondefense related job with a third of the pay.

For those wondering why it took him so long: First it seems the surveillance revelations from Snowden may have been the final straw for him. And for that, I give Snowden a lot of credit. When he went public with the whistleblowing, I thought it was a big issue - that everyone would ignore. I didn't fault him for revealing it, but I did fault him for being naive enough to think he could change anything. I am stunned actually to see that it's influencing the actions of both people at the top of the chain (congress) and people at the bottom (the workers).

And second, for the people who think it's an immediate process: you enlist, you see one thing that feels off, you quit the next morning. Looking at the timing and knowing there's an 8 year enlistment contract (even if you are only serving 2 years active), he may have only been released from the national guard as recently as last year, depending on when his basic training began. Most likely, it was sometime during Obama's presidency at any rate - not something where he waited for Obama to become president just to screw him (uh, after waiting 5 years? seriously guys, that doesn't even make any sense.) That's not a thing you can exactly "resign" from. So the consequences are very different. As a soldier, it's not that I consciously decided "no, I'm not willing to go to jail to make a stand." It was just a thing I couldn't consider as a single parent. I didn't consider then reject it - I just didn't consider it an option to refuse orders, in the same way I don't consider stuffing my entire house into a backpack and carrying it around on my bicycle.

Beyond that, even if the enlistment was over, being on the contractor side gives you a fuller picture of the entire system and makes you consider the role of all the cogs, instead of just your own day to day smaller mission. It takes time to process all of that. It took me a lot of time, and I had a time of thinking "yeah, this probably isn't the most ethical job, but it's a job, and if I leave someone else will just fill it anyway." People upthread have expressed the same sentiment. No point in refusing to work for the defense department because someone else will just take over for you anyway. It takes a long time to work through ethics issues like that, when you have to weigh what you are doing with your life personally against the negative effects on you of walking away from a steady paycheck, if it doesn't even ultimately have an impact on the war machine.

I wonder if the people in this thread have all never had a bad relationship, a divorce or something lesser, where they knew they wanted out, but stayed for some length of time first. I wonder if they have any concept of how it is that women stay so long in abusive relationships - and what it takes to get them mentally to a decision point of taking action.