From my limited knowledge and even more limited experience I might argue with those 6 "green thumb" donors. We all know that before people join the armed forces there is VERY intensive screening. These people are accepted due to a clean bill of health and copings skills, and subsequent training to be able to contend with adverse conditions so it is evident to me that their compromised condition upon release just
might be due to adverse conditions of extreme magnitude. To lump them in with waitresses and salesmen is just plain ludicrous.
I'd joined the military quite easily. Physically, I was healthier than most on the team. In the interview, I played the holiwood card and said I wanted to serve my country.
Mentally, I found it very difficult to live with thirty other guys. Working together was one thing. Living together was something else entirely! The culture clash was too much. Due to a lack of other positions, I'd gone infantry, and to be honest, essentially joined the military because my father wanted me to.
Some of the guys had joined to 'kick some azz,' one dreamed of eventually going to the US to train the freemen, and n i g g e r and Jew and long haired greesy civvy intended as an insult were common. One of the instructors liked to collect Nazi-era paraphernalia, and another man on the base had 'skin head' a British flag and a Neo-Nazi flag tattooed on him, though ironically his immediate superior was black.
One of our officers was black too, but strangely enough we never heard a peep about the word n i g g e r when he was arround.
Drinking was the main passtime, and until I started drinking, I was pretty much ostracized. Looking back on it now, it was as if I had entered an insane asylum!
In the end they could see I didn't fit in and let me leave.
But to get in is the easy part. Living together with a group of strangers is a different matter.
It might just have been the batch I happened to find myself in of course and might not have been representative of other recruits, but that was my experience.