Stop whining

I am fuming after reading this article in the New York Times. Titled “For Citizen Soldiers, an Unexpected Burden”, it’s the story of some folks from an MP company in the California National Guard. They got deployed to Iraq, and their tour has now been extended. This is another in a long series of reports featuring people who signed up and took the king’s shiling taxpayer’s money and now claim they didn’t know they might actually have to do their jobs!
I vividly remember sitting in a college English class in 1990, a week or so after Iraq invaded Kuwait. Thanks to my nifty haircut, my classmates knew I was in the military, and on this particular day they peppered me with questions. “Will you have to go?” “Are you worried that you might get deployed?” “Did you know this might happen when you enlisted?”
Of course I knew it might happen. Anyone who says “gee, I never thought I’d be activated” is either fooling themselves or you. For example, take this fellow:

Specialist Jory Preston, 30, of Pleasant Hill, Calif., signed on with the National Guard in January and was assigned to the 870th. He was working at a small telecommunications company and, having served in the Army in the 1990’s, saw the National Guard as a way to earn extra money. He was married in February, and his wife was already pregnant by then. The next month, he was on his way to Iraq.

Here we have a 30-year-old with prior Army service. Undoubtedly he knew that, in the Army, people get sent overseas, away from their families. He enlisted in January, after it was already crystal clear that US forces were heading to Iraq. Then he acts surprised when he gets deployed.
I don’t want to minimize the difficulty of being separated from loved ones, or the financial impact of going from a good civilian job to crappy military pay. But don’t act surprised, people. It’s not like you were drafted; you knew, or should have known, what you were getting into.