What was the deciding factor that made you decide to leave the military, stay for the full 20, or come back into the military?

I left the Navy to be a Fed. It was a mistake I should have stayed in because adapting to life as a civilian was hard. Grass is not greener on the other side. At least you know where you stand in the military. Being a corpsman was awesome marines treated me right but my civilian bosses were fucken ass holes. Gunnies and chiefs know waz up and mine were locked on.

My whole career field was in flux on the cusp of the digital revolution; many specialties were being deleted. The snot nosed Sp4 that acted as the reenlistment NCO (only in the 1980s Signal Corps) had a flippant attitude towards midtermers trying to change specialties and had a pat response "cook or infantry". I opted to take terminal leave. He followed me out of the company two weeks later as I was heading to Frankfurt whining that I had forgotten to sign reenlistment papers. At battalion, as I was signing out, someone handed me orders to NTC. Two weeks later I returned from a day of skiing and opened correspondence with new orders to report to Presidio. I don't think anyone had any idea I had separated. I checked my DD 214 to make sure the Feds weren't going to show up at my door.

I got out due to my command not trusting my level of knowledge. I was the ships diesel petty officer for over my last year in and my recommendations for the engine didn't mean shit to my chain of command. Two months after I got out and I'm a field mechanic who's sole job is to maintain and diagnose issues on roughly 20 large commercial engines at least 16 of which were the same as on the boat. Here I have full control of operations. Some people will just say I had a bad chain of command, my personal opinion is that they didn't trust me because I didn't have enough rank. Not taking into account I was a diesel mechanic before enlisting.

my tipping point was when senior NCO's at a firebase tried to use me as a decoy for a sniper by forcing me to go outside the wire when we had enemy snipers that would take shots at us, to carry and throw out a dead dog they(NCO's) killed and used as target practice with a shotgun. luckily I managed to get back inside the wire before the sniper noticed me. also when out 2nd LT got one of our guys killed because he didn't want to wait 30 min for EOD to go out in front of us. the result was one soldier dead and 2 wounded. I wanted to kill the LT.

Well, I was in three branches of the service for a total of 33 years. I stayed in because it was fun, and mutually beneficial to myself and the military. I choose to retire when I did because there had been only one promotion to E-9 in my rate in four years.

I enlisted about 10 minutes after signing up at the draft board. Army, to piss off my old man who was a 26 year AF man. Never any thought of going 20, I got out after 1 enlistment that included 22 months in Viet Nam.