RedLdr1 said:
"The military was welcome for their money but was was often treated as second class citizens to be preyed upon. That observation didn't change when I was on active duty."
When I was a kid, my dad was a civilian contract primary flight instructor at Graham AFB in Marianna, FL. Marianna had a population of about 5,000 and the base brought in at least 3,000 more. I understand that kind of sudden population increase causes all kinds of problems for local infrastructure, but the citizens did treat some people with something less than warmth. After about a year, there came a time when Graham (the civilian contractor) decided to pay all the civilian employees with silver dollars and asked them to use those for all their local transactions. When the locals saw how many silver dollars they had in their cash registers, their attitudes changed quite a bit.