Page 2 of 5
Steve Wolford with the Military Rights Hotline and The Quaker House in Fayetteville, NC -- a nonprofit organization of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) that provides support and counseling to military personnel who are conscientious objectors -- says his organization fields calls every day from frightened and stressed-out members of the military who joined up looking for money for school, or a decent job with benefits, but who are disappointed by how they are being treated. Wolford says an overwhelming number of callers have gotten into the armed forces and realize they're not able to kill, but are reluctant to face the ridicule and being called a coward if they stay in the military.
Most of them also need to stay in and get their honorable discharge in order to get their promised money for college. The Montgomery GI Bill is used as a recruitment tool, not a social services program. Advertisements can be seen everywhere offering "up to" $50,000 for college when you join, but there's a lot of fine print. The recruit expecting college money in return for his service in the armed forces has to contribute $100 per month to his or her education fund for the first year of service out of the average base pay for an E-1, which amounts to about $1,104 per month. (An E-1 is an entry level recruit who has been in the armed services less than four months.) This contribution is non-refundable. If the soldier decides not to go to college or is one of the 20 percent of soldiers not honorably discharged, the money stays with the military. Although most new recruits sign up for college money, about 65 percent receive no money for college from the GI Bill.
Chuck Fager, director of Quaker House, says that in the short term the military does have something to offer a poor kid from a run down mill town or the inner city, but the long-term costs can be high.
"For young persons from backgrounds of limited opportunity, the military can be an avenue of upward mobility," says Fager, "provided several conditions pertain: 1. the person is not killed or disabled in combat or extended service in an overstrained military force; 2. the person gets training in the military that is truly marketable on the outside (some military skills are; many are not); and 3. the person maintains personal discipline that keeps her/him out of the clutches of the many social and financial parasites who cluster around military bases. (For example, consider Fayetteville, with 40+ pawnshops, 100+ used car dealers, plentiful high interest credit from local retailers, and six pages of color ads for "escort services" in the Yellow Pages.)
"America's cities and towns have many hundreds of thousands of veterans who may have done relatively well for the brief time they were in the military, but who have paid for that with decades of official neglect," continues Fager.
The Bush Administration has included a 3.5 percent pay rate increase for the military in the 2005 budget but is making up the shortfall on the back end by increasing drug co-payments and enrollment fees for veterans' healthcare and cuts in long-term health care funding for veterans. In addition, some base commissaries and schools will be closed, 50,000 VA home loans will be cut, and funding for VA medical and prosthetic research will be cut by $50 million dollars. Support our troops, indeed.
Low Pay, Uncertain Length of Service
When US citizens join the military to improve their lot in life, do they jump out of the frying pan into the fire? One of the sobering realities of the US military is that the greatest fighting force in the world doesn't make a decent living wage. Yes, they make enough to live on but should those who carry guns on our behalf in a foreign land make the same wage as a fry cook? (No offense to fry cooks.)
If you are authorized to live off base, you might get a housing allowance and/or a food, or subsistence, allowance. If you're being shot at in Iraq, you don't have to pay taxes and in its 2005 budget proposal, the Bush Administration has magnanimously decided that the combat pay soldiers get (around $150 monthly) will no longer count against food stamp eligibility. An E-1, the raw recruit, makes a little over six dollars an hour. According to the National Compensation Survey of 2000, that puts them on the same level as amusement park operators and dry cleaning machine operators.
In times past, military service was a way of life in which, essentially, a serviceman's entire family served. Military wives weren't paid for their endless support, relocations and holding down the fort while their spouses were gone for months or years at a time. These days, spouses of military personnel are much less likely -- and less able to afford to -- give of themselves, uncompensated, to such a degree. Many simply have to work to make ends meet, and others might even have the audacity to have careers of their own.