Debt of Service: Personal Finance in the Military
The wrong dress blues for this Marine
"Jarhead" author Anthony Swofford recalls how, despite needing to save money for college, he just couldn't schlep deep dish in the desert while still a member of the world's most elite fighting force.
Anthony Swofford (Dan Winters / Simon & Shuster)
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TEXT OF ESSAY
TESS VIGELAND: Anthony Swofford served in the first Gulf War as an elite sniper in the Marines. His bestselling memoir, "Jarhead," shares that story. When Swofford came back from months of active duty, where he marched through burning oil fields and sifted through bombed Iraqi corpses, he prepared to enter civilian life -- and faced a grim economic reality.
ANTHONY SWOFFORD: As a corporal in the U.S. Marine Corps, I made less than $800 a month after taxes. My car payment was around $180 a month -- I drove a modest Nissan 4x4 pickup. The rest of the money I spent on car insurance; food; that mainstay of the Marine diet, beer; and the gas I needed to escape from the desert Marine base at Twenty-nine Palms to Los Angeles on the weekends.
We'd been back from the Gulf War for a year, but combat still haunted us, and we were always ready to fight the next battle. It should come as no surprise that many of us looked over our finances with aggressive irresponsibility, if not outright malevolence.
If you might die very soon, why on earth should you care about your bank balance? They can't squeeze car payments from a dead Marine, can they? Then borrow the money for the car at a criminally high APR from one of those jalopy dealers outside the base. Say yes to that credit card. And yes to that one as well.
I'd always planned to leave the Marine Corps after four years to attend college. I was in that fourth year and I'd saved exactly zero dollars beyond the $14,000 in my GI Bill. I'd lived with the fantasy that the GI Bill would see me through an undergrad degree and on to graduate school and that I'd not have to work.
When I started looking seriously at colleges, I realized that that government money wouldn't pay for more than a few semesters of tuition and rent. Beatnik fantasies cost more than I'd ever realized.
I began to panic.
A Marine I knew who had three kids and an unemployed wife had been delivering for a Pizza Hut out in town. The moonlighting Marine was a common enough sight. They worked as bartenders, taxi drivers, and motel clerks, but most of those guys were married with kids.
One afternoon I headed out to the Pizza Hut. The manager looked like a cousin to the Mario Brothers. He hired me on the spot and gave me a uniform and told me to report the next day, a Friday, at 4.
Depressingly, the Pizza Hut uniform shared a color scheme with the vaunted Marine Corps dress blues: the polyester pants were blue and the shirt was blue and red with blue piping.
After a 5K run in the morning and an afternoon on the rifle range, I shed my battle dress camouflage uniform. I made the horrible mistake of donning the Pizza Hut threads while still in the barracks. At the time I was a co-leader of my platoon, and as my men changed into shorts, T-shirts and flip-flops, and prepared to party like it was 1999, I walked a reverse walk-of-shame from the barracks to the parking lot. My subordinates howled in delight as they watched their fearless leader scamper off to deliver pizzas.
I could find my way on foot, with a map and compass, through any landscape on earth, but in my truck I was rather lost in the sprawling exurbs of the high desert. I bungled more than a few deliveries and received multiple cold pizza complaints.
I delivered to a number of military families, and I recall these people averting their gaze when something in my bearing or my haircut tipped them off that I was a Marine.
As I recall, I made about $40 that night.
When I got back to the barracks after midnight my men were sufficiently drunk and passed out that I was able to slip into my room unnoticed. I looked at myself in the mirror, hair askew, a little puffy at the eyes.
The pizza-stained uniform made my combatant's body look like a sack of bloated dough. I did the simple math: In eight months I'd be out of the Corps and my moonlighting would have netted me a few thousand dollars at most.
I never went back. Better to be a very broke college student than a member of the world's most elite fighting force schlepping deep dish on a Friday night.
VIGELAND: "Jarhead" author Anthony Swofford's latest book is the novel, "Exit A."
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From Liberty Twp, OH, 03/05/2009
As many service members both present, and past, I too moonlighted as a pizza delivery guy. The place was Wahiawa, HI, also known as the ghetto of Hawaii. Yes, everywhere has a ghetto. Just off base from Army Schofield Barracks where I was stationed. I was also married and we had just had our second child.
We moved to Hawaii after my deployment to Bosnia for a year. Being a soldier, you learn to do what ever it takes to survive and apply it to many factors of life. When after 6 years of service, and a pay rank of E-4, you learn quick that your less than $1000 a month pay you earn in the mid 90's also qualifies you for food stamps and WIC, you do what it takes. Pizza Hut was not a disgrace to work for being a military moonlighter, but a break from the normal and and an extra hand. I enjoyed the experience, interaction with locals and the extra income. Military or not, smart family members learn to improvise, adapt and overcome.
02/27/2009
Thanks for this interesting story from Mr. Swoffard. I'm sure that he made the right decision in deciding not to moonlight in pizza delivery and deal with his future struggling student finances in another way.
One throwaway line in this short article made me wonder about how much experience he had in the school of life, "A Marine I knew who had three kids and an unemployed wife . . ."
I guess it is a financial misfortune to have an unemployed wife when you have an underpaid military job. And it would be really great to have a wife who earned enough to afford child care and netted a profit after paying for that. However, not all wives are that fortunate. I am just wondering, and I hope Mr. Swofford will also assess the situation rationally in the future, if the caretaking required by those three children was something that the wife had primary responsibility for and this was the primary reason she was unemployed. Categorizing one half of a couple as unemployed makes them sound like a slacker, but anyone who takes care of three kids is on duty more than full time and fully occupied.
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