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Free-Loading in the Military
This post is probably not what you think it is. It is about what work the military does and what compensation it receives.
In the military, you can expect to work your typical eight-hour day (some duty stations are 10-hour or 12-hour), just like any civilian would. Depending on where you are stationed and what rank you are, determines what extra duties you have.
While stationed in Japan (my second deployment), I was the barracks manager, often requiring me to work strange hours. I was likely involved if there was a problem at the barracks (either personnel or facilities). I could expect to stand watch/duty at least once a month (usually twice), and that is a 24-hour watch. If we had an inspection coming up, you could expect to work late into the evening, cleaning your room and/or a common area. When I say cleaning, that means stripping all the wax off the floor and re-waxing it, cleaning everything top to bottom. If you worked in certain shops, you could expect to stand a 12-24 hour watch supporting the shop you worked at. I worked in the Air Wing (my second duty station), so if the pilots were flying, you were on watch doing your regular job. If you were a mechanic for one of the aircraft, and it was broken, you were up repairing it. On average, you worked 50 or more hours a week. I recall working around the clock with little to no sleep, depending on where you worked and were stationed.
In the late 1990s, if you were an E-3 with 3 years in the Marine Corps, you were making around $7 an hour (assuming you worked a 40-hour week). At that time, the federal minimum wage was $5.15 an hour.
Now, what “perks” do you get in the military? Many civilians think that we have a lot of them.
What do you need to purchase and maintain in the military? First and the most expensive are your uniforms. In boot camp, you are issued a basic set of uniforms, but you also wear those uniforms, and depending on your drill instructors, you might have done stupid things like PT in your dress uniform.
You will wear your cammies to death in boot camp, and you will be lucky if they are serviceable (usable) after boot camp. When I was in boot camp (1988), we were issued two pairs of cammies, two short-sleeve “Charlie” shirts, two long-sleeve “Bravo” shirts, two pairs of wool pants, two pairs of poly pants, and an Alpha jacket.
I might be off on a few numbers, but I can tell you that some of your uniforms will not survive boot camp. So you can expect to have to purchase at least one set of cammies, which were like $60-$70 a set back in the day. You will also want to buy the nice corfam dress shoes so you don’t have to polish them all the time. And any other uniform items that you need. Uniforms were not cheap, plus if you got promoted, you had to purchase all the rank insignias and have them sewn onto your uniforms and then dry cleaned. It was not cheap, that is for sure.
You get to use the chow hall four times a day (depending on the duty station and whether you are accompanied or not). And if you are single, you get to stay in the barracks, which isn’t always a good thing. Many of the barracks are in disrepair and need to be remodeled. If you are married, you will live off base just like a civilian will, which isn’t paid for by the military. There is a housing allowance (BAH), but often it does not keep up with the local rental prices.
You can use the military Exchange and the Commissary. The Exchange is a department store similar to Target, and the Commissary is a grocery store. The only added benefit is that the grocery store is tax-free, but you do have to pay a surcharge for the baggers (and you can’t bag it yourself). The pricing for the Exchange and the Commissary are based on the base population, meaning that if you have a ton of officers on the base, then the rates are higher than if you have a ton of low-ranking enlisted. Remember, this is all based on my time, some 35 years ago.
It is not uncommon for a Marine to have a side hustle and, if they are married, for their spouse to work full time as well, just to make ends meet. I know that when I was stationed in South Florida as an E2, I made a couple of dollars too much to collect food stamps and still didn’t have enough money to pay the rent, and bills, and eat much more than boxes Mac n’ Cheese.
The barracks does have laundry machines that may or may not be working. In my experience, they are more likely not to be working than to be working. You would share, say, 10 machines for every 50-60 rooms, with most rooms having 2-4 people per room. So the machines were usually in use all the time. I set an alarm for 4 a.m., did my laundry, and it was done, around the time it was time to start my day.
Now, you do get to use some of the facilities on the base, like the gym and the pool (only at certain times). Some bases have an auto hobby shop, a place for you to work on your car, and offer loaner tools. Things like the restaurants on the base, or golf, movie theater and bowling all cost you to use. Remember, when I was stationed at MCAS Cherry Point, around 40,000 or more personnel were on base, all trying to use the same facilities.
Now, the one thing I did not touch on is that you signed a contract with the U.S. Department of Defense. You either complete your contract, or you risk getting put in jail. This means that if we go to war, you can pretty much guess where you will be. This is dependent on your MOS (job), but a majority of them go to the country during wartime. This means that your life, both physically and socially, is at risk in the military.
There are also a ton of military duty stations and deployments that you can not take your spouse or family with you.
So, I’m fairly certain that the military is not free-loading off your tax dollars, and the average person in the military is fairly well educated. Dozens of studies show that enlisted military members are better educated, get higher test scores, and come from higher socioeconomic backgrounds than their similarly aged peers in society.
