United States Marine Corps

The U.S. Marine Corps enters Robert T. Kiyosaki’s story as a deliberate departure from a secure civilian career and as a practical school for leadership. His service in Vietnam shapes the book’s argument that education can mean more than academic credentials: it can involve learning to lead people in dangerous circumstances.

Entry into the Marine Corps

After graduating from the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy in 1969, Kiyosaki took a job with Standard Oil of California as a third mate in its oil-tanker fleet. The position paid about $42,000 a year including overtime, required seven months of work, and left him five months of vacation. He could have doubled his pay by taking a Vietnam route with a subsidiary shipping company, but instead resigned after six months and joined the Marine Corps to learn to fly.

The choice divided the responses of his two father figures. His educated father was devastated by the resignation from a career with strong pay, benefits, time off, and prospects for promotion. Rich Dad congratulated him. Their contrasting reactions frame the decision as a conflict between the security of a conventional career and an education pursued through experience.

Vietnam and leadership

Kiyosaki says that he served a year in Vietnam as a Marine Corps pilot. Although he told his educated father that he wanted to learn to fly, he later explains that his deeper objective was to learn to lead troops. Rich Dad had identified managing people as the hardest part of running a company and encouraged him to learn to lead men into dangerous situations. He warned that a poor leader could be shot in the back, as in business.

The military experience therefore becomes part of Kiyosaki’s business education rather than a break from it. In his account, leadership is a skill developed by facing responsibility for people in danger, then carried into the challenge of managing a company. He presents this as a lesson his educated father, who was exempt from the draft, did not share.

Place in Kiyosaki’s career and argument

After returning from Vietnam in 1973, Kiyosaki resigned his commission, despite loving flying. He then joined Xerox, not for its benefits but to overcome his fear of selling. This sequence places Marine Corps service within a wider pattern of choosing work and training for what they teach, rather than for immediate income or security.

Kiyosaki also recalls that his year in Vietnam brought him into contact with both a brave, daring part of himself and a part willing to beg if necessary. He does not rank one above the other. Instead, his reflection connects courage and fear to his broader claim that financial intelligence requires both technical knowledge and the courage to act. The Marine Corps thus marks a consequential stage in his development: military service supplied a setting in which he studied leadership and confronted his own responses to risk.