When my dad was in boot camp two teenage boys tried to kill themselves by drinking bleach and were caught. That’s how bad the treatment was and guess what happened? They were paraded around and made fun of for being weak before being discharged with zero counseling for the trauma they experienced.
When my mom was in boot camp a girl literally had a mental breakdown over the verbal abuse and tried to hop the fucking fence on the base to escape in the middle of the night with nothing other than the clothes on her back. They were never told what happened to her other than she was caught.
Being verbally abused 24/7 doesn’t make you strong. It makes you numb and traumatized. There’s a reason why so many vets end up alcoholics and drug addicts. They go through so much trauma and a lot of it happens before they’re ever even deployed. Not sure what’s it’s like now but back then mental health access was not a big thing in the military nor was it encouraged. If you were struggling with mental health then you were seen as weak and unworthy of serving.
It’s an incredibly fucked up system and in my opinion it is barbaric recruiting teenagers to go through that. Your brain is still developing at that age and it definitely isn’t capable of properly processing the intensity of the military.
Can’t recommend Full Metal Jacket enough if you want to understand what it’s truly like for teens entering the military. There are consequences to grooming children into becoming killers with emotional suppression. They either go on to hurt others or they end up hurting themselves. Either way, the ones responsible for making them that way never face any consequences.
People make fun of him a lot, but he had a really solid career for a very long time and can still eat off of what he made as a child. A lot of people can’t say that. Also, his birth control is immaculate.