I have a few good stories from my nine years in the U.S. Navy, but if I tell them I am going to try and be careful not to hurt anyone or divulge information that might damage someone's character. But like you, I want to be truthful about military life and I'm not afraid to say that the military and certain members of the military in key positions are prone to lie, leave out key important facts, or manipulate a situation for personal gain. Anytime you put a faulty human in charge of other humans, they will make mistakes, they will sometimes allow prejudices and bias affect their decisions, and they will show favoritism. Personally, I have never met a person in real life who did not have faults and character flaws, that is one of the big reasons for so many strict rules in the military and few major decisions about a service members life or career are left to just one person.

The bottom line for potential enlistees is that when a person joins the military they are no longer their own person, their body belongs to the military and that military can do whatever they want to with it as long as it is within the rules that have been established. Once you are no longer of any value to the Government or the military then they would rather you went away and never be heard from again. The slogan "We take care of our own" is a huge lie, especially after your usefulness has ended. That part changes a little if you stay in until retirement, it seems to me that if you retire with honors they tend to have a lot more respect for you.

That is just from my experiences and personal observations, I'm sure that there are others that have a more cheery viewpoint and experience. Even after saying these things I'm certainly not telling people not to serve in the military, I do not regret my own military experience and I have benefited from those experiences and from the training that I received. I just want those considering military life to understand what it means, it is big sacrifices and it is hard at times. In military service, you will have difficulties that mirror the outside world but there are a far different set of rules that govern the ways those difficulties can be handled. The first of which is that if you don't like your job you can't just quit and find another one. So sometimes you have to tuff it out doing something that you don't like to do or following orders from someone that you don't respect and might even hate. It is just the way that it is and you have to get used to it.