In The Real World

Last year, on an impromptu trip to Illinois, I bumped into an old classmate. She said several things that stuck with me. One of them was, "make sure your husband knows what he wants to do in the real world, when he gets out of the Air Force."

Mind you, her perception of the military is something you do when you're 18 and "don't have anything better to do". When you're done with an enlistment, you should get out and get on with a so-called normal life. This is a preposterous assumption.

First, in order for our military to function properly, we need people who stay active for twenty years or more. Second, not everyone who enlists does so fresh out of high school. Third, I don't know if she even knew if my husband was enlisted or officer, but that fact remains irrelevant.

It seems antiquated to me to assume that people who are enlisted must be less educated or less worthy. The disparity in pay between senior NCOs and officers should be diminishing. The perception of class based assumptions just perpetuates all those old stereotypes of the enlisted, white trash contingent of the military family.