What happens when they are forced to leave service?

What happens when they are forced to leave service?
Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
January 11, 2014

Zack Mayo (Richard Gere) had a rough life but thought he found what he needed when he enlisted. Sgt. Emil Foley (Louis Gossett Jr.) had other ideas.

In this clip from An Officer and a Gentleman Mayo is doing whatever he can to stay in. He screams, "I got no place else to go!"

Young men and women join the military for many different reasons. Some, like Mayo saw military life as their chance to have a better life. No real family, no support and no other option. For Mayo, leaving was giving up on any hope he had left.

For others it was a matter of being able to go to college afterwards, again for a better future than they could obtain otherwise.

Some never thought of doing anything else and committed to a lifetime of service. Some felt the same way however they were either wounded or worn out. They had to leave what they always wanted to do.

What happens when they are forced out?

It isn't a job they can just decide to quit and move on. This stays with them the rest of their lives.

When they are wounded, in a perfect world anyway, their wounds are taken care of and they are compensated for whatever damage military service inflected. None of this answers the question of what happens when they can no longer do what they wanted to do, especially when they never had a dream of being anything else.

At a young age, military becomes part of their identity. They are trained physically and broken mentally so they can do what they have to do to stay alive. How do you erase that? How do you take all they were conditioned to become without the same kind of training to condition them to become veterans? They will never again be a civilian after everything is said and done.

When do we understand that training them to come back into the world the rest of us live in is just as important as training them to leave the civilian world?