DavidS wrote When I enlisted, the pay for E1 under six months was $78.00. Four years later, as E4 over 4, drawing overseas pay and combat pay, I was making a cool $313.00 a month.

It's a little over $1200 a month today.  I made a bit more than $78 a month when I came in back in '58 because I had 18 months prior service in the National Guard, but I can't remember now how much the difference was.  I think it was something like $20 a month. For me in those days that was big money.  I can remember as an E3 and E4 in Germany the older sergeants, married guys, were always borrowing money from me.  They spent that money on booze, incidentally.  Lot of that going around in those days.  But back then a buck went a lot farther than it does now.  A carton of cigarettes in the PX was only $1.20.  Everybody smoked too, that's another big difference.  The German Mark then was four to a dollar. In our unit, a small medical dispensary away up near the Czech border, hiring another guy to take your CQ cost you $2.50 for weeknights and $5.00 for the weekends.  That's right, you'd spend your whole weekend on duty for an extra fiver and we all thought that was a bargain.  I made a lot of extra cash that way.  Also got to handle a lot of DOAs in the small hours of a Sunday morning.  A buddy and I took a leave to Denmark in '60 and the Danes all thought we were being paid far too much for common GIs.