Were you stationed stateside or on a ship or something?
I was in basic at Great Lakes. The first night of double ought day as it is called, we got off the plain at O'Hare & the captain announced. "Welcome to the heat wave. We have a brisk minus sixty degrees for you tonight. Enjoy your stay!" I was there from about middle of Feb, graduated basic, had two or so weeks after that as active in fleet yet was stuck waiting on out processing paper work. I could have been called out though during those few weeks.
Had some off hand training in underwater hull repairs. Met a mate there who I really would have liked to kept in touch with. We kind of played save one another's butts as that training kept increasing in difficulty. I was told it was
not B.U.D.S but damned if it didn't seem like it, at least to me at the time. Me being all of 100 pounds back then could wiggle into torpedo tubes real slick like.
My orders for after basic would have sent me into the Western fleet, up into the great North-West. I would have been the guy that made torpedoes and other munitions blow up in a smiley face pattern. That would have been considered ordnance maintaining, disposal, building. Me and wife's dad, who happened to do a lot of ordnance stuff when he was army, often could both think the best thing was something going boom to solve the problem.
I enjoyed military life. Liked the structure of it. Met my wife after having been in and dumped out. She refuses to let me go if they ever did call for me. "They had their chance, rejected you so they can go fuck off now," she says. I think that more than anything fucked me up. I had intended twenty to life, my heart was there for it.
It seemed logical for me to be military, grew up with family having been. Grew up to limited job options too. High school kind of was "okay, get him graduated and pointed to a recruiter". there was very limited discussion of me and college. I would have broken any college out of being bored with it. So yeah, more or less that was supposed to be my life. Then, I'm let go and told medical discharge but it reads out as coded for not educated right. Gee, I dunno, maybe I ought to have gone army instead. Same skill set and infantry only worries if you can dig a ditch and pull a trigger.
Yeah, I think being "let go" from what I thought was going to be my life, yep, it screwed my mind up. And looking at it now. No, I wouldn't go serve for the government. I'd go serve for my oath & the People yes but not the government. There I am again holding two different opinions, tsk, one of these days I'll have to stop that. Until then guess I'll just keep on keeping on, as is said, ... I survive. And yes, like you I think there's more than surviving to be done. But shhh, don't let 'em know we can see that. They'll flip it all upside down again and I'll lose my marbles. Might need to go get my shit kickers on, and you might not like me scuffing them on the floor as I walk.
I can do the walking too, helps some. But then there's also times it doesn't. Again it runs into "well fuck, keep doing that and end up on the deck in pain." Maybe I'll get more sense, eat right, exercise right, be Mr. Right, ... still die anyway.