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Quote: Wire In The Final "
£16,000 p/a and the chance to develop skills, discipline and make friends for live. Alternatively they could come out of education, get a minimum wage job in a fast food restaurant and pee it all up against the wall every saturday night getting drunk and in fights.

I wish we could go back to the days where joining the army was a chance to "see the world", those that join nowadays do so full aware of what they may have to do.'"

The thing is the skills and making friends for life only really applies to those who stay in a lifelong career in the forces. For those who spend time in the forces and then come out then really you get two categories:

1. Ex officers, who are usually middle class, often university educated, and find that they are well placed to get a good business career because employers are impressed by their military background, discipline, leadership etc

2. Ex squaddies, who are usually working class, joined up like you said to avoid having a minimum wage job or being on the dole, were told that they would learn skills and get qualifications etc, but find that they don't transfer over to civvie street (if you've been a communications engineer on 1950s style equipment that the army uses, you're 6 decades behind the civvie private sector). What often happens here is, they get back, find their missus has been cheating on them and left them, often taken the kid, their old mates have moved on because how do you have stuff in common with last who have been spending the last six years getting bladdered down Wetherspoons while you have been doing patrols in Helmand. Plus there is the psychological readjustment of having been in heightened states of adrenaline all the time and now having nothing to do. The type of jobs they tend to get are security guard jobs in a supermarket, standing round watching no scallies pilfer the penny chews. The ex officers who now find that they are in good fast paced jobs, can replace the adrenaline rush that they are used to, and they also enjoy the fact they are treated with a level of respect by their peers because they were ex forces. But the problem for a lot of ex squaddies who come back is they genuinely have no mates here any more. A job I had about 10 years ago had a security guard there who had been in the Falklands and I remember him saying he hadn't had a friend to his name since 1982. Nobody knows who they are. The only way they get mates is being back in action which is why some go to work for private security ventures where they are paid huge money for the risk factor of being targets for insurgents guarding places in Iraq and Afghanistan. But they don't really care about the risk of being killed they just feel that they don't have life on the outside any more.

Really if there's one place for government spending programme to provide jobs its for ex squaddies, they are all disciplined and know how to turn up on time, do the job whatever the circumstances and man up. I would put them on some training programme as teaching assistants or something, or youth workers with kids who don't know how to behave. It's like Shane Webcke said when he retired from RL and then suffered depression for a year, when you retire you can't just have something to retire from, you need something to retire to...
Also some respect for issues like Gulf War syndrome needs addressing, if the MOD uses them as human guinea pigs forcing substances down them in combat, it can't duck out of the responsibility when they end up disabled for life...