First let me apologize for the very palpable anger I showed there. I still have a deep well of bitterness reserved for the military. (as many vets do I'm sure.)
I did live on base the majority of my time in the military (all but a year out of 7) and let me say, it's the furthest thing in the world from a priveledge. Same with free meals. These are literally amenities offered to convicts, and frankly the level of privacy and respect we get is comparable. Not only that, married military men were perfectly capable of eating on the boat, some chose to, to save money.
Living on Guam I had more than one instance of having my day off interrupted by an E-6 barging into my room and yelling at me because my trash wasn't empty. That's what living on base was, being at work 24-7. Never knowing if you were going to catch the consequences to somebody else's bad day.
When I was training in Great Lakes, as an E-5 I was in a similar circumstance, but worse. Having already served 4 years, I had to share a room that was subject to daily inspection. I literally left my bed made and slept on the top blanket like a prisoner I woke every morning to reveille, even on weekends. Meanwhile married guys who just made their way out of boot camp were given a free house. Women were not allowed inside my room. Civilians weren't allowed inside the barracks building at all (unless they were military wives of course.) Imagine having any kind of relationship during that, it would look a lot like a guy not having any kind of relationship for 18 months.
On Diego Garcia, I met men crafty enough to get married to girlfriends before they left. One guy married someone in New York, so he was given a startling 3000 dollars a month tax free, to pay for her housing. He had been in the military less than a year, and made more than twice as much money as I did. His wife, in the meantime, lived with her mother.
In short, my military experience was often miserable because the military assumed that you were somehow more adult, or more deserving of independence from the military experience if you were married. This was considered more important than actual seniority.