Hacker News Reader

Comment by Magridal | Hacker News Reader

You are making an assumption that a person dropping out of school at 13 in the ~1960s would have the same education level as someone dropping out of school at 13 today, let alone that the conditions and circumstances one would find themselves in having dropped out are equivalent to the 1960s. Frankly, especially with the crumbling and cracking discipline, order, and hierarchy in the U.S. military now, you are also making an assumption that they would gain the benefits you surely assume based on a historical perception.

View on HN

Whatever you think might be going on with the overall discipline of the US military today, it has nothing on how bad things were in the Vietnam era. Enlisted men slipping grenades into their officers’ tents after getting high as a kite in a combat zone was a regular occurrence.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragging

This comment just shows you to be ignorant and contrarian.

Fragging was more often a rational act of self preservation than drug-induced madness. It was mostly soldiers getting rid of officers who were likely to get them killed. Heroin and weed don't just turn otherwise good men into murderers.

Maybe my phrasing implied too much causality, but a mixture of psychoactive drugs, extended sleep deprivation, and combat stress could turn anyone into a murderer.

And recent research absolutely has shown that heavy cannabis usage in adolescence and early adulthood does have a clear association with an increased risk of developing psychosis and schizophrenia. Just because the war on drugs lied about the effects of less harmful drugs like cannabis doesn’t mean they can’t be hazardous to your health like any other substance.

Regarding heroin - one may not be particularly murderous while zonked out, but addiction can make people surprisingly aggressive.

I’d also like to add that the company-grade officers stuck in the mud alongside enlisted were less at fault for the needless deaths than the incompetent general staff or the political actors who got us and kept us over there in the first place. You might enj the novel “Matterhorn” by Karl Marlantes, a Marine infantry officer who served with distinction in Vietnam. Or you might prefer “Dereliction of Duty” by Lt General H.R. McMaster, a renowned commander of the GWOT era who wrote his PhD thesis on the failures of Westmoreland and the other generals who mangled Vietnam.

All I know is that my army captain was the first real role model I ever had. Perhaps it doesn't work out that way for everyone, but I bet it does for many.

Do you have a source on the 'cracking discipline, order and hierarchy' of the US army? I know a 35 yo French artillery officer (now he's teaching new officers) who has worked with the US military for 15years, last year he told us that the US army is the only western army that didn't stagnate and became better, organization-wise, in the last 15 year.

That makes sense, it's one of the few armies which has been involved in one war or another, at scale, for the last several decades. Practice makes perfect. And this is probably the only way such an organization can evolve, just like a muscle will only evolve if used, and will atrophy otherwise.

I think the original reason for requesting the high-school diploma is two fold. On one hand the person can come back and pick up where they left off, with a better chance of serving society. But maybe the more important one was that it lowered the chances of teens enlisting it the pit of desperation, seeing themselves as failures, with no other way out. Those may not be the people you really want because those may not be the people who really want you. This is the kind of deal that's hard to pull out of, and the Army would probably not want to be in the situation to have a wave of desperate teens realizing they just made a rash decision. The Army also doesn't want to be drained of new recruits, so here they are, taking what's on the table. It's a clear sign that young people are sending to the Army though.

Two things. I didn’t say anything about school in the 1960s. I only said, they used they’ve used the IQ test for about a century to good effect. When they abandoned it for expediency, the results were tragic. That’s why they’ll stick to the IQ test, correct or not.

You’re saying that the US military has issues and it may well have. I’m no expert on that. But I still believe that a person who has dropped out of high school has a lot to offer society. It seems like the US military is coming around to the same line of thinking, as long as the person passes the IQ test. I think that’s a reasonable compromise.

The program might fail but if we never try then we’ll never know.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com