I am a member of the military. Will I get paid?

A shutdown would also affect pay for members of the military, said senior government officials familiar with the planning. If the current funding expires on Friday, in the middle of the military's two-week pay period, the Defense Department would distribute paychecks for the first week, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly. In an effort to avoid such disruption, House Republicans introduced legislation that would pay troops if a deal isn't reached. Congressional aides couldn't say whether such a bill would pass either chamber before Friday.

First of all sometimes soldiers do go without pay, because we move around so much and the units who are responsible for processing our wages change..and those people change commanders and soldiers working there too, it is inevitable that they will eventually really screw up your pay and you will eventually yell at someone and your family will be freaking out a little bit :)

Secondly, deployed soldiers have extra protections that other Americans can only dream about when they are stressfully job engaged.  We have the protections of the Soldiers and Sailors Leave Act.  You can't just throw a deployed soldier's family in the gutter, you can't foreclose on their house, often you can't even get a damned divorce from one if you are sick of them :)  I don't think you can repo their car either if they are deployed.  All of the spouses have been trained in this, and we keep several sets of our spouses orders to deploy around and some copies of the Soldiers and Sailors Leave Act around in case any legal difficulties crop up and we need to inform someone of all this stuff.

We also qualify for getting a full month's wages interest free loaned to us if we put the paperwork in.  We can't get that when everything is shutdown, but we can get extra funds other people cannot quickly get as soon as things crank up again if we need them to cover anything crazy that happened.

Reminds me of those awful parents whose fallback position is, "you want something to cry about?  I'll give you something to cry about...[craaaack!]"  

Can you imagine someone shooting at you in Iraq and then getting an email from a spouse explaining that he/she can't pay rent because both parties need to take an absolute stand and concede nothing on the budget.

We have this.

Despite the President's and the Senate Democrats' rejection of another short-term funding compromise, Speaker Boehner is putting his one-week CR, along with military funding for the rest of the year, to a vote in the House today.

Boehner's new CR cuts $12 billion and it also funds the military through the end of the fiscal year.

If the House passes the CR today, it's up to the Senate Dems. They can either agree and avert the "dire" shutdown for at least another week or they can be left with responsibility

link

And this.

... the House of Representatives passed a bill on Thursday that would fully fund the Defense Department for the rest of this fiscal year -- eliminating any threat of delayed military pay -- and would also keep the rest of the government funded for another week.

But the bill, HR 1363, already has been rejected by Senate leaders because poison-pill riders have been attached to the measure that are unacceptable to many Democrats -- such as preventing the District of Columbia from spending its own money on abortions -- and because Democrats don't want to separate the Defense Department from the rest of the federal budget out of concern such a move might make it even harder to get an complete federal funding agreement.

Link1

Look, international travel shows us a lot. We learn a lot, grow a lot. The ability in this age to go beyond our own boundaries is...stupendous. Yet, both sets of grandparents immigrated here for a better life. They found it. Not perfect...but, good.