A small quibble with “If they had left my pay alone and let me keep what they deducted, then I would have made a little more...”
If they had left your pay alone and allowed you to keep what they deducted from you and the employer (12.4%) and you had put it in a S&P index fund during that period, you probably could have really retired when you left active service and not needed another job.
So true - but that presupposes that I had enough brains to do that. I was the idiot with the Corvette.