So we're picking up a lot of new guys out of the IRR. For those you who don't know, the IRR is the Inactive Ready Reserve. Basically, once you're contract with the Army is up, you spend a few years in the IRR. In the IRR you're free from the military, but you can be called back in if the Army feels like it needs you.
Most of the time when you hear people talking about a “back door draft,” they're talking about the IRR. Some folks got called out of it after five or six years of civilian life. It's kind of lame. A lot of these soldiers have only know that they were getting sent to the sandbox for a month or two, some only a few weeks, and very few of them are ready to go. A lot of them haven't gone running or been to the gym in years, haven't even thought about how to do their MOS(Military Occupational Specialty, basically their Army job), basically they just aren't in any sort of “Army mode.”
Anyway, today I got tasked with picking up on of our new IRR soldiers from the airport. Dude's a sergeant, was two months way from being done with the IRR and with the Army forever. But they got him back, got him for as long as they want him.
Let's call him Sgt Drafty. Now, I wouldn't blame Drafty if he was a little annoyed about his situation. I wouldn't blame him if he was furious. The weird thing is, he seems absolutely resigned to his fate. He just feels like there is absolutely nothing that could have been done about it.
Now, I find this a little weird. A good friend of mine managed to fight his call up out of the IRR. Sure, in the three years between his leaving the Army and his being called up from the IRR, he'd had some medical problems. Thing is, lots of folks in the reserves have medical problems. Lot of reservists with medical problems get sent right on along to the sandbox. It's just one of those things that happens. But my buddy, he was able to get out of it. He decided to fight, and he won.
But not Drafty. He isn't thrilled about going to the sandbox again, but he's accepted it because he didn't see any way out.
There's something about the Army, I think, that creates a weird fatalism is people. I know a huge number of people in the Army that will accept any hardship, any inconvenience, any injustice that they suffer because they simply can't imagine standing up against the system.
It's like they've internalized their powerlessness, they've internalized the idea that their fate is on the shoulders of their commanders, the country, the bigger situation in the world. They're the guys who hold onto their out of the way MOS for the sake of it not getting attention, they're the guys who have been or are going to be E-4s for twenty years, they're the guys who show up to formation on time, but spend their entire drill out behind the armory smoking cheap cigarettes or those damn Black'n Mild cigars and wait for someone with more rank to round them up and put them to work.
Now, of course dear reader, I am not saying that that group includes everyone in the Army, or even a majority of soldiers. There are a huge number of Army folks whose life breath is working the system, finding back door, making use of loopholes and connections. Those folks tend to do just fine. But that first group, Sgt Drafty's group, they can be a sad bunch. All they can see themselves as are tools to be manipulated by wider and greater forces than themselves.
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