Originally Posted by
hindsight2020
The military you grew up in is not the military I grew up in. The military I belong to actively conspires every day of the Lord to ensure I don't make it to retirement and treats me with the same callousness they do any civilian airline pilot.
Even though that is the most personal thing anyone can do to somebody (mess with their livelihood) I don't take it personally, just as I wouldn't take an airline furlough personally. This concept of military loyalty, beyond the brother-in-arms peer level, is beyond foreign to me. It simply hasn't been my experience. I too hope to get some retirement out of this life commitment, but it's getting harder and harder to accomplish.
Timing and luck. Loyalty what?
I will agree with you that YOUR military and MY military were different animals.
Some of it my be personal, some of it may be the times, some of it may be the service we each came from; but I DID HAVE TREMEDOUS loyalty to my service and my peers.
My above post was MY personal struggles I brought to the civilian world and on top of that - my contract job was in many ways very military - so it was easy to give the same to them that I had given through my 20 previous years.
I'm still not happy about it on a number of levels.
First I still wish I were doing the same flying - aircraft and mission - from my old job, but with the security of my current job (even with its' recent problems) and second I wish I could have given them even more time before moving on, but NOT being a contractor and being tied to a flight hour = money is golden.
I am truly saddend by some of the stories I hear of people's experiences in the USAF and I am very thankful that those were not my experiences.