Questions related to usa army -need clarification

[sweetdreamssss]

The story I'm currently working has a former usa army person.He is late 50s. He tells an anecdote.

His team had a devout Muslim and the army also made provision for him. Once they were stationed in an East Asian country and the locals gave a feast for thanking them and he accidentally ate pork. When he realised that he ingested pork,he immediately went to bathroom and puked it out".

The question I ask is that ,

What titles can I give to those army men ?

What country can we put ? It can't be Vietnam or korea due to timeline issue .

Also there is a sad story of his wife blowing all his money and had affairs while he is stationed but she files divorce and gets full custody of his son .

How long do army men get deputed ?

How do the wives get money when they are deputed?

How long should you pay alimony to your wife as the lead guy is in late 50s?

The lead guy is working as a security guard and living in a ghetto despite al his service. How much can an army man save if he had a normal family?

 

[TarnishedPenny]

Hi.

Not sure what you mean by 'deputed'.

 

[oggbashan]

This might help with US Army ranks:

https://www.federalpay.org/military/army/ranks

The pay rates are as at now. I suggest no higher than a sergeant, probably Private First Class or Corporal.

Country? Phillippines or Taiwan

 

[oggbashan]

Deputed?

The length of service outside the US is usually 2 years (or 3 if wife and family go as well):

https://www.army.mil/standto/archive_2019-06-11/

 

[SimonDoom]

I'd suggest trying to work out the location, setting, and time of your story first, because that may affect the answers to your questions.

For setting, I'd suggest doing an online search regarding overseas Army bases in East Asia. Pick one, do research on it, and find out how long Americans have been there, what they were doing there, etc., and specifically what Army groups were stationed there.

As Ogg points out, you can research what ranks exist for the Army, as well.

I think you meant "deployed," not "deputed." I don't have a military background, but I think it would depend on the time and circumstances.

You probably can do most of your research on the Internet.

 

[Rustyoznail]

Just for clarification...

Sweetdreamssss is after the normal length of service in the US Army, and where in the Far East would someone be deployed in the late 80's - early 90's.

In India she said general ranks can be deputed (mobilised) for up to twenty years, longer for Officers.

 

[sweetdreamssss]

Just for clarification...

Sweetdreamssss is after the normal length of service in the US Army, and where in the Far East would someone be deployed in the late 80's - early 90's.

In India she said general ranks can be deputed (mobilised) for up to twenty years, longer for Officers.

Sorry for not making it clear..

The average service is around 20 years and longer for officers..

They get deputed to an army post for a year or so I guess and then they will be shuffled to another place..

If that guy is late 50s in late 2010s ,so he must have been in 1980s touring foreign nations . So I want an East Asian or south east Asian country where it's common to eat pork

 

[sweetdreamssss]

Hi.

Not sure what you mean by 'deputed'.

When they get deployed in active duty like war zones or military bases where they don't take their families with them.. like afganistan or Iraq currently

 

[NotWise]

What country can we put ? It can't be Vietnam or korea due to timeline issue .

The US Army doesn't have many bases in East Asia. They do maintain a fairly large force in South Korea.

 

[Vix_Giovanni]

The US Army doesn't have many bases in East Asia. They do maintain a fairly large force in South Korea.

Right. Much of what you may be thinking of as US Army is instead US Forces, or Indo-Pacific Command, or US Navy, or US Marines etc. The US Armed Forces is an enormous operation with many separate, and also huge, branches. Active duty deployment varies considerably among each branch and rank.

It may help, as Simon pointed out, if you first decide the specific year(s), activity and location. Once you know those things, you may be able to better pinpoint this information.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

There are bases in Korea, Japan, Thailand, and the Philippians back in the 80s and 90s.

Deployment to a base unaccompanied is usually for a year. Accompanied deployment is usually for two years. In the U.S. services these are called tours. The only pace that was an accompanied tour was the Philippians and Japan.

Also, the length of time in service in the army was/is 4 years at a time. Every four years you would re-up for another four years. The total length of service is 30 years. After that you retire with a full pension which I believe is not considered in divorce proceedings. I may be wrong on that however.

At 20 years of service they can retire with a 3/4 pension.

Now I wasn't in the Army, but in the Air Force and all the branches are about the same when it comes to deployment out of country and wherever there are Air Bases there are Army Bases.

 

[oggbashan]

The US had bases in Taiwan up to 1979.

 

[BelleCanzuto]

Sorry for not making it clear..

The average service is around 20 years and longer for officers..

They get deputed to an army post for a year or so I guess and then they will be shuffled to another place..

If that guy is late 50s in late 2010s ,so he must have been in 1980s touring foreign nations . So I want an East Asian or south east Asian country where it's common to eat pork

There have been US Army bases and troops stationed in South Korea since the 50s. So, Korea isn't necessarily out (there are soldiers stationed there currently).

Japan would also be an ok choice, though Japan is more likely associated with US Navy and Marines. At least among Americans with a passing association with the military, it is. For other people, that might well be too fine a distinction to worry about.

A standard enlistment for any US Service person is four years (typically). People can re-enlist as many times as they like, and a lot of soldiers have 20 or 30 year careers. Two or three years at each duty station seems to be standard (btw, they're Army Posts and most of them are called Fort "Somethingorother" {the US Navy has "bases"}).

Some soldiers who go through specialized training (i.e medical school or other kinds of school, or who have their college educations paid for by the service) are obligated to serve a certain number of years to pay back.
Officers are commissioned, and can resign their commission at any time after they complete a minimum amount of service (google says 8 years, and that seems right to me). Almost everyone who is commissioned as an officer has a college degree, and you have to get advanced education to get promotions after a certain rank.

(I have more experience as the child of a career Navy guy, but my sense of the US Army is similar.)

 

[BelleCanzuto]

When they get deployed in active duty like war zones or military bases where they don't take their families with them.. like afganistan or Iraq currently

Then South Korea is really your best bet as a country. Even though it's not an active war zone, most of the time families don't accompany soldiers when they're sent there.

 

[ruddygore]

There are bases in Korea, Japan, Thailand, and the Philippians back in the 80s and 90s.

Deployment to a base unaccompanied is usually for a year. Accompanied deployment is usually for two years. In the U.S. services these are called tours. The only pace that was an accompanied tour was the Philippians and Japan.

Also, the length of time in service in the army was/is 4 years at a time. Every four years you would re-up for another four years. The total length of service is 30 years. After that you retire with a full pension which I believe is not considered in divorce proceedings. I may be wrong on that however.

At 20 years of service they can retire with a 3/4 pension.

Now I wasn't in the Army, but in the Air Force and all the branches are about the same when it comes to deployment out of country and wherever there are Air Bases there are Army Bases.

This is where time frame comes in to play. When I originally enlisted in the army you had a choice of two years active and four years in the reserves, or three and three. Twenty years to get get a pension, but if you stayed past twenty your pension increased a little bit each year. Also, the army had an up or out policy. If you hadn't reached a certain rank by a certain time you weren't allowed to re-enlist. At the time you had to be at least a staff sergeant to get to twenty years.

 

[sweetdreamssss]

Thank you Zeb and Ruddy

But was it common for the local people to give a dinner to American soldiers to thank them ?

 

[NotWise]

Thank you Zeb and Ruddy

But was it common for the local people to give a dinner to American soldiers to thank them ?

Thank them for what?

My son-in-law (call him Pete) spent two tours in Iraq with the Marines. At the end of his second tour, which was spent in a small town on the Syrian frontier, a local cafe owner hosted Pete and a group of his friends who'd been eating there for a while. It was his way of saying, "Thanks for your business. I'm a good guy, send your friends to me before you leave."

Pete was an interpreter, and he was well-aware that some of the locals believed a US Marine had to kill his own mother to qualify for duty. They were more terrified than they were thankful.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

Thank you Zeb and Ruddy

But was it common for the local people to give a dinner to American soldiers to thank them ?

Not when I was stationed in Korea they didn't. I can tell you that a quicky was $5 and a long time (staying over night as there was a curfew from 12 until 7) was $10. A bj was $2. This was back in the 70's though. I believe the prices have gone up since then.

Also the price of a suit was $25 and was as good as a $200 suit in America. What the locals wanted was your money. At most bases the town just outside the main gate was lined with clubs and shops that would sell you anything you wanted.

Also, Korea was considered a war zone as the there was no peace treat ever signed, just a cease fire agreement.

The day I arrived at my base four migs flew over the base. Six Phantoms had scrambled just prior to our plane landing.

 

[Voboy]

The story I'm currently working has a former usa army person.He is late 50s. He tells an anecdote.

His team had a devout Muslim and the army also made provision for him. Once they were stationed in an East Asian country and the locals gave a feast for thanking them and he accidentally ate pork. When he realised that he ingested pork,he immediately went to bathroom and puked it out".

The question I ask is that ,

What titles can I give to those army men ?

What country can we put ? It can't be Vietnam or korea due to timeline issue .

Also there is a sad story of his wife blowing all his money and had affairs while he is stationed but she files divorce and gets full custody of his son .

How long do army men get deputed ?

How do the wives get money when they are deputed?

How long should you pay alimony to your wife as the lead guy is in late 50s?

The lead guy is working as a security guard and living in a ghetto despite al his service. How much can an army man save if he had a normal family?

Where to start? There's a lot here.

The Army has a thing called TDY, which means you get sent away from your permanent duty station for a training period somewhere. US soldiers often go TDY to places like Thailand, the Philippines, etc. There's also Korea, as others have said.

Once you figure out your soldier's rank, some internet sleuthing should tell you how much his monthly pay was during the period your story was set; rates are all Congressionally set, and depend on pay grade and time in service.

He'd have enlisted for 8 years, of which a certain amount would have been spent active (usually 2-4 years) and the rest in one of several types of reserve status. He could have reenlisted after his initial enlistment, often for a bonus that would have depended on whether the Army was short people in his MOS (job). So, you see, several of your questions are meaningless: we can't know how much he saved without knowing his time in service, his grade, the amount of his TDY pay, his bonus (if any), the saving of any of several kinds of hazardous-duty pay... all these things are easily researchable.

He could have set up an "allottment" at any time to deposit part of his paycheck in his and/or his wife's account. The Army was almost entirely Direct Deposit by 1994, when I joined, but before this there was a whole ritual on payday when they paid you your check and then took various bits of it back in the form of forced charitable contributions to the CFC. You'd fall in for a special pay formation, usually in your Class B uniform, and the first sergeant would run the pay ceremony. I didn't ever go through this, but knew people who did. Do some research.

I think you're probably being needlessly accurate, and frankly you're risking tripping yourself up. Based on how you've phrased your questions, no real veteran will believe you know what you're talking about (frankly). So I'd keep everything vague.

 

[BelleCanzuto]

I think you're probably being needlessly accurate, and frankly you're risking tripping yourself up. Based on how you've phrased your questions, no real veteran will believe you know what you're talking about (frankly). So I'd keep everything vague.

I think this is a very good point from Voboy. The more you can keep things vague and focus on the parts of the story that are needed for the telling of it, the better off you'll be. It's easy to get down in the weeds of too many facts, and that can invite trolls who have nothing better to do than google pay rates and call you out.

 

[Voboy]

I forgot to add: the idea of a feast isn't beyond belief. I'm thinking of, say, a company-sized unit on a RUE with the Filipinos, say, training with them for two weeks or so, and then the Filipino soldiers giving them a pig roast at the end. I can easily see that.

I also remember being given pigs in Kosovo when the Serbs were leaving their livestock and the Albanians were coming back. The Albanians, being Muslim, had no use for the pigs, so they gave them to us. We went ahead and slaughtered them on the 4th of July with the help of some of our soldiers who'd grown up rural. And our Puerto Ricans all seemed to know how to roast them, whole.

Delicious.

I'll put it this way, OP: I had almost ten years in the service, and even I shy away from writing military fiction. There's too much I know I don't know, and I do not want to be inaccurate.

 

[sweetdreamssss]

Where to start? There's a lot here.

The Army has a thing called TDY, which means you get sent away from your permanent duty station for a training period somewhere. US soldiers often go TDY to places like Thailand, the Philippines, etc. There's also Korea, as others have said.

Once you figure out your soldier's rank, some internet sleuthing should tell you how much his monthly pay was during the period your story was set; rates are all Congressionally set, and depend on pay grade and time in service.

He'd have enlisted for 8 years, of which a certain amount would have been spent active (usually 2-4 years) and the rest in one of several types of reserve status. He could have reenlisted after his initial enlistment, often for a bonus that would have depended on whether the Army was short people in his MOS (job). So, you see, several of your questions are meaningless: we can't know how much he saved without knowing his time in service, his grade, the amount of his TDY pay, his bonus (if any), the saving of any of several kinds of hazardous-duty pay... all these things are easily researchable.

He could have set up an "allottment" at any time to deposit part of his paycheck in his and/or his wife's account. The Army was almost entirely Direct Deposit by 1994, when I joined, but before this there was a whole ritual on payday when they paid you your check and then took various bits of it back in the form of forced charitable contributions to the CFC. You'd fall in for a special pay formation, usually in your Class B uniform, and the first sergeant would run the pay ceremony. I didn't ever go through this, but knew people who did. Do some research.

I think you're probably being needlessly accurate, and frankly you're risking tripping yourself up. Based on how you've phrased your questions, no real veteran will believe you know what you're talking about (frankly). So I'd keep everything vague.

Thanks voboy , I'll keep that in mind .. the story involves a mid 50s veteran who is currently working as a security guard as his wife blew all his savings and then divorced him ..

The pork story is to demonstrate how physical pleasure is different from your ethics. Your body might enjoy the pork but if you think it's a sin then you won't try again even after getting the taste.