Not the PLA either...
Made a new account to hopefully minimize self-doxing, but here's some background. I haven't lived with him in 10 years and I left the country 4 years ago. We don't really talk all that often, but he had messaged me with some questions about photography and then brought it up.
I said something like "I'm sure you're aware I don't have a very fond opinion of the military". He said "I'm not too enthused with the idea either, but I need the security and discipline that it will provide while I try to find something to dedicate myself to and I've been in this dead end job for about 2 years and my soul is decaying".
I told him he can come live with me, that it's easy to get a 1 year visa and I'd happily pay for flights and I have a spare room. He said he'd think about it but "needs physical activity and more friends and connection in general". I tried to explain that I go climbing multiple days a week, volunteer for search and rescue, and play board games with friends every week that he'd be able to hang out with.
I get the impression though that he thinks visiting would just be putting his problems on hold for a year; maybe he's right about that, but I think living somewhere other than our shit hometown would give him a lot of perspective on the world and help him maybe realize that what he actually needs is a community of some kind. I don't want him to make a huge fucking mistake because he feels hopeless and gets pressured into it by our conservative step dad or some recruiter or whatever.
I also briefly tried explaining some issues with the US military, but it's a bit hard to undo decades of american "education" in one conversation. He said "my moral code is also not nearly as strong as yours, and I have very little strong feelings toward very much at all outside of just trying to be a good person". I assume he reached out to me because he's having some doubts.
Anyway I tried to make it super clear that if he wanted to come live with me or if he wanted to do a work visa somewhere else I'd pay flights and anything else and help in any way I can; I'm not rich, but I have a small emergency savings.
I think I've heard there are organizations of leftist / anti-imperialist veterans? Maybe one of them has information I could send him. Any advice or ideas would be appreciated.
I'm not a vet, but I've rubbed shoulders with plenty of vets.
Every vet I know (10+) suffers from some physical ailment, be it tinnitus (very common), knee problems, back problems, and so. One dude I know is getting colonoscopies in his mid 30s because he slept right next to a giant pit where they burn their trash. And this isn't even considering the PTSD. And the really fucked up thing is that most of the vets weren't even deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq. Just being a MP in some random base at Louisiana was enough to give them brutal tinnitus or being a glorified truck driver in Germany was enough to give them knee problems because they jumped off a ledge that was too high that one time.
The VA isn't going to do shit. At best, it's a completely underfunded byzantine system where you have jump through Kafkaesque hoops and basically know the right people who know how to game the system in order to actually get them to do what they should be doing. And every vet is going to have some physical ailment from their service (see 1).
He will basically have no rights as a soldier. All that shit in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, not that we should seriously consider them, completely goes out the window when you enlist. To give you an example, in courts martial, you're guilty until proven innocent. And this is also not getting into the fact that fragging isn't just done for anti-war reasons. It's very scary to be surrounded by people with guns who all understand that dead men tell no tales.
SA is completely rampant and being a dude is not going to save him from being SA by his superiors. And going through the proper channels will not save him from "accidents" (see 3).
What branch is he thinking about enlisting? Not all branches are equal.