Drafted in the Navy at 40?

My name is Brett and I am a veteran.  I served in the active duty Army for 4 years and for 4 years in the inactive reserve afterwards.  I joined to earn money for college and left to go to college.  I would have made a career out of the military if I could have become an officer, but that was not an option.

I say all this as a preface, because today I received a letter from the Navy asking if I'd like to re-enlist, this time into the Navy Reserve.

I am 36 years old.  If I had stayed in the Army, I would be looking at retirement in two years.  I know there are lots of very capable people that serve in the military to ripe old ages, but I do not plan to be one of them.  I chose my path, the decision is made and I'm not changing my mind.  The military made their choice years back at the same time, and they chose not to keep me under the terms I required.

So now that they are in a jam and having to send people from the Navy to go reinforce troops on the ground in Iraq as the Army and Marines are stretched thin, I do not have too much sympathy for the actual organization itself. 

For my fellow soldiers, I have a lot of sympathy, but not for the people in the Pentagon and in Washington that made stupid policies back in the 90's that kicked off the depletion of the military, which was flat out buried in the ground by the even worse policies of George W Bush and Donald Rumsfeld. 

I am not going to go and bail them out for their lack of planning and stupid mistakes.  After I left the military I learned of a term called the 'hero complex'. 

Its the concept that often times when an organization is in trouble, a hero will step up and save the day.  The thing is that when they save the day, the organization might give them a slap on the back, but eventually the organization might also institutionalize the need for a hero to save the day.

When the organization is saved by a hero, and they fail to learn the lessons from what went wrong, what it was that required a hero to save they day, they start to take advantage of that hero and every other hero in the organization.  Today, the US military and politicians of every stripe are raping our heroes in uniform.  They are taking advantage of them backwards, forwards and sideways and they are not learning any of the lessons learned from the organizations failing.

Now, I am definitely not calling for a general strike by our military, but the military leadership is partly to blame here.  Their Can Do attitude and Yes Sir auto response, has served our country poorly and needs to be replaced with a military leadership with a better grasp on reality, one that will stand up and demand the items necessary to bring a successful resolution to a problem.

So I thank the Navy for their kind offer, but I will decline at this time.  Twenty Thousand dollars is not enough to get me off the couch, let alone leave my business and family and go risk my life half way across the planet.  I've been there and done that once already, and its time that the DoD get its act together and stop making their lack of planning my emergency.

All that said, if they don't reach down and find a pair soon, I do suspect we will see the draft reinstated, and in that case, they can call me up when I'm 40.  I'll serve and I'll do a great job at it just like I did before, but in the meantime, they can kiss my ass until they get their act together.  In the meantime, the only travel I'll be doing will happen with the travel deals I find on expedia.

Note. I'm not serving for any organization that condones or practices torture, so they can start their first!