Posted on May 5, 2016
What are your thoughts about civilians (such as family) members on RP?
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I read the original response to this question two years ago, and almost unanimously service members and vets were against the idea, and yet it persisted. Now that it has been about two years, and the number of non military people on here has drastically increased, what are the thoughts of service members and veterans?
Personally I would still rather they were not here.
Personally I would still rather they were not here.
RallyPoint
RallyPoint
Civilians
Edited >1 y ago
Posted >1 y ago
Responses: 12
Great questions. The short answer is about six months ago we debated opening up RallyPoint to everyone. We decided to try it with the understanding that if civilians began to overrun the network and detract from it as a Military site, we would close it down. That did not happen and the civilians have been a small minority of contributors and positive additions to the community. As SSG James J. Palmer IV aka "JP4" said, we have much stricter requirements and standards for Civilian accounts as well.
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There are civilian recruiters on this site and that helps our members. There are also civilian supporters, and we can appreciate their support. We also have potential recruits, and if we can answer questions and support them, we are doing what RallyPoint should be doing: supporting past, present and future members of the military family.
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I remain opposed. While there are many military family members who might be very nice people and who might like to be on the site, I like RP as military only because we share the oath of service, we have a common bond...and when the rhetoric gets hot or the arguments move toward unprofessional, we can return to the common bond and be brothers again.
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Tyra Lynne Wahl
I think it is disingenuous to assume that spouses (specifically) on RallyPoint who identify themselves as such have not actually served themselves just because we choose not to denote ourselves on RP as veterans .... Personally, my time as a military spouse trumps my time in the Army tenfold+ (2 years active duty vs. 21.5 years as an active duty spouse).
With only a 2 year peacetime enlistment I hardly view myself as "operational", so I have come to identify with my time as a A/D spouse more because that experience was so much longer and diverse. However, that doesn't undo or minimize the fact that I too made it through basic and MOS school. It just means that I have a longer and broader perspective as a military spouse than I ever did as an active duty service member. So I can speak to that experience more cogently than I can being active duty.
But I will say this, my time in the Army, albeit short, still made me a much better active duty spouse because I understood the demands and that is something that has never been lost on my husband.
With only a 2 year peacetime enlistment I hardly view myself as "operational", so I have come to identify with my time as a A/D spouse more because that experience was so much longer and diverse. However, that doesn't undo or minimize the fact that I too made it through basic and MOS school. It just means that I have a longer and broader perspective as a military spouse than I ever did as an active duty service member. So I can speak to that experience more cogently than I can being active duty.
But I will say this, my time in the Army, albeit short, still made me a much better active duty spouse because I understood the demands and that is something that has never been lost on my husband.
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