I was 18 years and four months old (in 1956). I was in college, but didn't think it was taking me anywhere I wanted to go. So I stopped out, and went off to "learn a trade" which I hoped would be in electronics or mechanical maintenance. One look at the mention of college, and the classification specialist put me in a foreign language school, definitely NOT a choice on my part. I washed out, but found the only option remaining to me was to be trained "OTJ", as a typewriter jockey. At the end of some four years, two months and twenty-four days (the four years I figured I owed to my country, the two months and twenty-four days were somebody else's time), I went home, with the attitude that they would have to call up the blind, the crippled, the crazy, the little old ladies, and the small children, before they dragged me back in again (I believe I invented the phrase FIGMO, and its reverse, OMGIF). In later years, the experience was, on balance, much to my benefit, as the mention of the honorable dischrge was well regarded in the early part of the 1960's, and later on, the "Cold War" GI Bill paid for my return to college and eventual masters's degree.
Do I recommend life in the military for anyone? As a personal discipline, honing life skills, few experiences can beat it. But you really learn the meaning of commitment, and eventually you get self-reliant, or suffer horrible consequences. Simply being in an organized unit with stiff demands on your abilities and emotional stability, and because by definition military services means you WILL be around a number of highly hazardous situations, which can develop with incredible speed into a confrontation with one's own mortality, is a stern test of will and fortitude.
Some crack under the strain, others get ground up by the machinery of war, and the majority come away with a much more profound admiration for everybody who has stepped into the breach in defense of their country.
Was that school in Californicate...to study Russian?
I know what FIGMO means but what does OMFIG mean?