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In reply to the discussion: Navy Seal who allegedly shot Bin Laden says US military has abandoned him [View all]Alcibiades
(5,061 posts)He's a homemaker. Might not admit to the job title, but it's a full-time job.
It is a shame about the disability. My whole family has been career military & civil service, except for me, and I'm a homemaker, too (my wife is a GS-13). My first ex-brother-in-law started off with something like 10% disability, claiming back problems (which were legitimate, but not really debilitating) and foot problems he said began as a logistics sgt in the 1970's and 1980s. He kept going back to the VA again and again, and now he counts as 100% disabled and lives in Vegas, where he pretty much gambles full time. Nice guy, best of my sister's husbands so far, but he is one of the folks that people who like to say benefits ought to be cut would hold up as an example of someone who is working the system.
And yet here, ironically once again, we have someone else who who would certainly qualify but won't, because of pride or something else. I can understand that. My grandfather was the youngest master sergeant in the army in 1940 at age 19 and later served in heavy combat in Italy, where his Lts were killed twice and he served as a Lt. temporarily: he could have gotten a battlefield commission but refused because he was 20/200 in one eye and was afraid they would find out he bribed a doctor to get into the Army in the first place. He always played it off, saying he was part of a career NCO culture and wouldn't have deigned to serve as an officer, but the truth was it was his one great regret, besides having to see his boys die (the only time he really talked about that was when he got dementia and suddenly he was in Italy again). My dad was a career army pilot, finished up as a Chief Master Warrant Officer 5, with 2 long tours and 3 short tours in Vietnam. Shot down 3 times by ground fire, light injuries. The most severe injury he sustained flying was during a hiatus in his service when he crashed a crop duster a few months after I was born, which caused him to have sciatica for the rest of his life. He never admitted to this to a doctor, and still never has (he now flies civil aviation) because of flight physicals.
It seems to me that a lot of the desk jockey types are the first to put "combat veteran" bumper stickers on their cars and apply for benefits, and many of the folks for whom those benefits are actually intended never apply and just want it all to go away.
Anyway, I hope he feels better.