I recently had an email exchange with a fellow officer who reached out after reading some of my articles regarding the state of the U.S. Army, the forever wars, and the difficult decision to leave the military mid-career. With the exception of explanatory parentheticals, the following accurately reflects the uncensored language between two unacquainted, but kindred spirits from the same wayward "tribe:"  Such spontaneous exchanges are, for the author, becoming quite common. The passages in intalics are from me, where explanation is necessary). While I of course am out of the military, he is not and his name has been changed for obvious reasons. 

Sir,

As I briefly mentioned on Facebook, I'm transitioning from active duty mid-career after fairly significant time in service. I returned from a miserable deployment recently. I'll count my blessing as my unit did not lose anyone, however the leadership checked all the blocks for a toxic command; it was a long nine months. To put it into perspective, the unit's second and third in command were relieved for abusing staff subordinates—including, incidentally, a physical fight—over MDMP (powerpoint-based, very time intensive, mission planning) slides. The commander and his sergeant major (the senior enlisted man in the battalion) used awards and evaluations punitively and showed little interest in the advisory mission in favor of more meetings and power point presentations. I'll leave it at that to not come off as a whiny disgruntled soldier. Bottom line, the commander sucked to work for, he's a radical right wing West Pointer who seemed to have an inflammatory Blaze article forever up on his NIPR (unclassified) computer, so your "What I Won't Miss as I Leave the U.S .Army" article really resonated with me since it was released right about the time I was dealing with all this nonsense.