In my country we serve to the army for 1 year totaly free. Yes, without a payment. I was asking my father to give me 50 bucks to buy a box of cigarettes and drink a beer in the bar. How I felt? Garbage... But here is the worst part. We had a commander A and All day we were serving ourselves. We were taking care of the gardens, making parade, straw broom stuff for hours and many other stupid things with very little education. Every day (and night ofcourse) we had service in the watchtower and every second day we were free and we could go out to town. But some day another commander came. The first day he said to us (he was just arrived in the camp and we were there for months) that the services were many and probably we would not have many "free" days. suddenly we started to have free of service days every 15 days! The law which they were abusing was saying that for the needs of the battalion we could make as many services in a row as it was needed. 15-20 days in a row for 1 day out. And this is a very small example of what army means. What was the diff from Commander A to B? You can spend many many hours thinking but noone can give me back that 1 lost year with all those people. I know them very well. First I thought that only my country's people were like that. But then I realized that everywhere is the same. "Incredibly gifted individuals" are always living in their world. I was lucky to meet some of them. They didn't even know what an FFT is and we were serving in the electronic intelligence.