To want to somehow stop Dd from joining the army

[Witchonastick]

Dd is currently y11.
Her choices for A-level are quite academic and at the moment its borderline if she’ll get the GCSEs to be able to do those subjects.

She’s told me her back up plan if she doesn’t make the grades is to join the army!

I know it’s possible to to have a good career within the army, but she’s talking about infantry.

Normally I’d never want to stop her doing whatever she wants to do, but the army?
And infantry?

I could cry with worry over this, but it how or if I could talk her out of it.

@Insaneinthemembury Those are all good things but if we hadn't gone in and help destabilise Iraq for these so called 'weapons of mass destruction' we wouldn't need to help fix their country would we.

Navy are desperate for people.

Esp Submarine Service.

Very unlikely to ever see action.

Big changes are coming in the Royal Navy due to the current first sea lord wanting to shake everything up and reduce costs.

There is talk of merging branches and civilianising desk posts. Not sure where all the extra civil servants / Babcock staff will come from!

Don’t join as a submariner. Good pay but very odd life with months under the ocean. Takes a very particular sort of person. Not an easy life at all. Plus they are all pale and have vitamin D deficiency.

@motherheroic ISIS or similar factions have existed for many hundreds of years. Mt Sinjar woukd have happened with or without iraq

Oh and I dont think we should have gone into Iraq. What a pointless war. But all wars are not created equal. And one terrible decision doesnt rule out the times weve intervened and liberated countries/our kinetic effect has had an overall positive effect on the country (if you're a girl in Afghanistan who finally has an education)

Me, Ex SqnLdr, 16yrs. Dh ex Maj, 22yrs. When I joined, I wanted to join the Marines . I saw a huge change in female personnel serving, and really at the time my main raison d’être was to bloody well prove that as a scrap of a girl at 5’2” I was the absolute equal of any bloke I trained alongside. It IS a different place now. (I joined up a few years before bunny, and women still had to sign to say they would leave if they got married or pg. I served through the EU ruling that allowed female personnel to claim if they had had an abortion to allow them to carry on serving.)
None of mine want to join the services (actually, that’s not true, one does but she can’t as she has cerebral palsy. She’s planning on medicine and psych and working with veterans. One of the others wants to be a military historian.)
At this point, all you can do is help your kids research and make their own minds up.
(FWIW, at one point I considered military police. My dad said no daughter of mine...)
Dh did get blown up actually. (Weirdly, that hadn’t even occurred to me until I was about to hit post . He was given a 20% chance of survival and had to have emergency brain surgery to stop a bleed. I was pg with dc2. It’s a long time ago (said dc is 18 and in Japan visiting Hiroshima with his mate just now) and I don’t think about it much. He had about 64 staples holding his head together and we went through the whole comp A process used to gather family to the bedside when the injured personnel is not expected to make it. The army asked me if I would call his mother or if I wanted them to (they were sending a car to take them to the airport). And the kids’ godfather was also blown up (different incident). Neither of them regret their military service. At all.
I realise that this sort of anecdote won’t help your fears. If she’s determined to do it, and it’s what she wants, she won’t regret it. And neither will you.