So you were an aviation mech? What was your rating if I may ask?
I apologize for the length of this response, but...it got me thinking to why I am so grateful to be an American, and why I will ALWAYS be grateful to my country for what it has done for me.
I was E-5 when I got out after four years which I thought was pretty good at the time back in the Seventies...I went as far as I could go.
I wasn’t a no-load or slacker before I went in the USN, but I had pretty poor self confidence. I was an awful student, got consistently poor grades, and basically felt pretty stupid overall. I wasn’t in a great place mentally when I got out of high school, from a future perspective.
Growing up, I had a few teachers who took special interest in me, likely because I was so poor a student. My parents hired a sailor to tutor me in math, but I spent each session with my head resting on my arms flat on the table, face down because it was incomprehensible to me. It was awful, school was absolute torture to me. I was pretty stupid, I thought. The best day of my life was graduating high school and leaving it behind.
When I got in, I found out to my surprise, that if I was motivated enough to learn, and had subject matter I could absorb that wasn’t dependent on things I DIDN’T learn before (the way it generally works in public education) I did quite well.
I got confidence in myself, and coupled with my pre-existing stubbornness and persistence (two traits I did possess in more than healthy amounts) I did well enough to advance through jobs and rates with increases in responsibility and paygrade.
When I was in boot camp, they chose me as a boot camp “petty officer”, which even though I was only the Laundry Petty Officer, somehow I was selected. I went from plane captain, to mechanic, to flight deck troubleshooter, to liaison for a special project with one of the jet engine manufacturer reps who was aboard (from Rolls Royce-Detroit Diesel Allison) a guy named Jerry Wouters.
I learned a lot, was working on a Mainframe computer (DEC PDP-11) they had brought aboard for the project, and I learned a lot.
Jerry Wouters changed my life in a significant way. I spent a lot of time with him during that deployment, and we became good friends. When he asked me what I was going to do when my enlistment was up, I told him I wanted to go to college for some field in science, but given the highest grade (after years of having to go to summer school) I ever got in a math course was a “C”, I didn’t think I would be able to do it. I was pretty downcast about that, too. The Navy wanted to keep me in, and even offered to send me to Nuclear school IIRC, but I didn’t want to stay in. I wanted to be with my friends and family.
I was pretty downcast, and he cheerfully said that, since he was teaching a college level algebra course aboard during the deployment, if I signed up for it, he would personally tutor me through it.
I couldn’t add fractions or even do complicated multiplication or division at that time, but when I was done, I got a “B” in the course, which changed everything for me. I realized I could do what I wanted to do, and that changed everything.
The reason I tell you all this, is because it was the US Navy (and by extension, my country) that changed my life. They gave me an opportunity and training, and let me go as long as I could advance myself.
That is why I have so little sympathy for those who say people who are disadvantaged economically or scholastically growing up have an insurmountable burden placed on them, and thus will never amount to anything without government assistance.
Well, I got government assistance when I became an adult at the age of 18, in the form of the US military. It is an option open nearly anyone, if you reach out your hands and take it. All you have to do is reach out and take it. Makes no difference if you were an ignoramus like me, or came from a ghetto. You could join, and if you wanted to, you could get ahead and better yourself.
And that is one reason I love this country. It did THAT for me. My country didn’t give a crap what the color of my skin was, what my religion was, or anything. It wanted me to serve, and gave me the opportunity to better myself and serve my country at the same time.
And that is why I am filled with anger at those who want to destroy it. I am not angry, per se, at foreigners who want to destroy it, I expect that from some quarters, and realize we must fight it.
What fills me with anger, is those who are legally citizens, profess to be citizens, and reap the rewards of what this country offers to EVERYONE but who wish to bring it all down in flames...it is THOSE people, those ungrateful assholes and scum, that I feel anger towards on a daily basis now.