Feeling valued and extolling the positives service life has to offer, to the young airmen/women, is increasingly difficult.
I enjoy aspects of military life and having the support of likeminded families around is good.
My husband is working very long hours, has not had a pay rise for several years, and there are less personnel to cover even more exercises and deployments. The standard of the SFA and the estate has decreased over the last 5 years and the morale of serving personnel and the families has dropped significantly.
Despite a sense that RAF families are often taken for granted and rewarded in any way other than pay and allowances, the challenge of service life and the sense of pride in service outweigh the negatives. Service life is exceptionally rich but after some 35 years of service I notice a strong sense amongst colleagues that the there is an ever increasing reliance on good will.
The military community has always been the significant factor in helping me enjoy our military life. Without it, we would have left the military long ago.
We have our own house away from the base, as encouraged by current policy, but we do not feel part of the RAF it is merely a job that my husband has. A job that takes him away from us for over 50% of the year and from which he is unable to take his full leave allocation.
I still enjoy being part of the community but there is a continued drive of doing more with less and reducing the things that make serving worthwhile; coupled with separated living during the working week, the impact of serving grows more difficult to justify.
I love the social side and the opportunities that the RAF offers.
Whilst detachments can be hard, living within the military community provides a vital support network from other families who ‘get it’.
Many of the families that I know put up with the difficulties that forces life throw up due to the fact that our partners have relatively good job security and we benefit from substantial discount on accommodation.
Quality of life is fairly good. We get good pay, dental, healthcare and opportunities for sport and AT. The place it falls down is the length of operational deployments. 3 months away from home was bad enough but acceptable, 6 months is far too long in my opinion.
We have had a couple of years of relative stability i.e. no deployments or excessive time away from home, but this has not always been the situation. Overall I do enjoy life as the wife of a serving member of the RAF and found it to be a mainly positive experience.
Quality of food and accommodation whilst ‘living in’ is on the whole appalling. Given the increases in charges for this balanced against the lack of increases in pay then it is somewhat demoralising.
16
www.raf-ff.org.uk
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24