It's not a rich man's world in The irresistible urge to rant, riff and ramble

A quick calculation, assuming a wage of 8 bucks an hour (comparing me to a cab driver, since I was, at my lowest vocation rank, a heavy truck driver), shows that the army should have paid me in the region of 1800 dollars a month for 4 5 and a half day weeks, rather than the 400 or so I was being paid in my last few months. So that’s a deficit of, shall we say, a thousand dollars a month.

Cut that in half to account for my food and lodging, and the army owes me 500 a month. Over two and a half years of service, the army owes me 15 000 dollars.

That’s a hefty sum. One wonders what one could buy with that sum.

One wonders what I would buy with that sum.

And… I would buy an education.

Wait.

I did buy an education.

I mean, I didn’t get to choose not to go, and I didn’t get to pick my job. (and I’m not factoring my free driving lessons in on that.)

And I didn’t get to pick what I learnt.

All I got to pick was whether I learnt what was in front of me, and what I learnt was the sight of the worst of human nature, and the best of human nature, and the courage to choose which side I wanted to reject.And that’s well worth the money, because until you have seen people in those conditions, you don’t know what we’re capable of, not deep inside you, not in your gut, not where you make the decisions on right and wrong long before you become aware of them

So yeah. Shake it all out, and what the army owes me in money, I owe it, in return, in something other than money.

To each one of you out there who’s been through the army, you could say that the army owes you, in cash, in the region of ten to twenty thousand dollars.

But if in those two years of your life, you didn’t get more than twenty thousand dollars worth of an education in life, you are doing something desperately wrong.

If nothing else, you have wasted twenty thousand dollars’ worth of opportunity, and came out of the army no better than when you went in.