{"id":26244,"date":"2011-08-19T12:33:51","date_gmt":"2011-08-19T16:33:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=26244"},"modified":"2011-08-19T13:16:35","modified_gmt":"2011-08-19T17:16:35","slug":"that-retirement-pay-thing-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=26244","title":{"rendered":"That retirement pay thing again"},"content":{"rendered":"

Several of you are upset with a CBS story<\/a> about the planned changes to the military retirement system. I guess they shouldn’t have started the story the way they did;<\/p>\n

It sounds like a pretty good deal: Retire at age 38 after 20 years of work and get a monthly pension of half your salary for the rest of your life. All you have to do is join the military.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yep, that’s “all you have to do”…join. You don’t have to spend months away from your family, live in the mud, climb mountains pulling a 500-pound ahkio behind you through waist deep snow, suffer in triple digit temperatures and no air conditioning in sight. Stand in real torrential downpours, holding a spike lined tree hoping you don’t get washed away. Sleep in a hammock four inches above the swamp water because you don’t like waking up with poisonous snakes in your bed. You don’t have to live for days on a few moments of sleep or forage for your food. You don’t have to arrive at the cutting edge of battle by land, sea, or air.<\/p>\n

You don’t have to be responsible not only for your welfare, but the welfare of 30 other people and 7 million dollars worth of equipment, all before you’re 25 years old. Or you don’t have to move 120 one million dollar-plus vehicles and their crews from point A to point B across the plains of Europe before you’re 30 years old.<\/p>\n

You don’t have to look your country’s enemies in the eye and pull your trigger and then live with the attendant dreams the rest of your life. You don’t have to wake up with night sweats screaming almost every night. You don’t have to deal with the hippies spitting on you and calling you names. You don’t have to intermittently watch your children grow up.<\/p>\n

Your day doesn’t start at 4 in the morning and end at 6 PM on a regular duty day – on one of your short days. And it doesn’t include those days when you get called at 2 AM for an alert and you don’t come home for a month or six.<\/p>\n

And, oh, you don’t have to share half of your pension with that cheatin’ wife who couldn’t wait for you to come home from doing your duty before she divorced you.<\/p>\n

All you have to do is join the military and your future is secured with that anemic pension that presidents and Congress can snatch away from you a portion at a time.<\/p>\n

By the way, CBS, the military pension hasn’t been “half your salary” since Jimmy Carter made it 40% for folks who joined after 1977. Do your research.<\/del><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Several of you are upset with a CBS story about the planned changes to the military … That retirement pay thing again<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,84,118],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26244","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-military-issues","category-veterans-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26244","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26244"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26244\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}