Army battles enlistment shortfall by recruiting autistic teen

The BBQ Pit
41

My recruitment experience was similar to kaylasdad99’s. Although I did not join (the reasons are not relevant to the discussion), I was told that I did well on the ASVAB and what I qualified for. Like kaylasdad99, this was the Navy and was a few decades ago (1976). (Maybe in the decades that have passed, recruiting has become very deceptive or the Navy has the most honest recrutment policy).

As far as medical conditions, you are only given the most fundamental physical examination. The military couldn’t possibly give everyone a full medical workup as it would be too expensive and time-consuming. I’m guessing that basic training would “weed out” those with severe medical problems. Here’s a good example. Dan Rather had rheumatic fever as a child which caused some damage to his heart. Anyway, he decided to join the Marines but his medical problems became evident at basic training, and he was sent back home.
So, some people could fool the doctors but if a condition is bad enough, basic training will certainly make that fact more apparent.

42

Before the recruiters are lynched think about it this way. They have an adult who enlists. He passes the qualifications (note: Cav Scout is not a minimum qualification job, you need at least a 90 on the CO portion of the ASVAB. ) Then the parents of this adult come in and say they don’t want him in the Army. Would you listen? They try to provide the private medical records of this adult. I doubt it is even legal for the recruiters to look at those records without the consent of the adult in question. They probably get complaints from parents all the time because their 18 year babies went and joined the Army without their consent. I not sure how I would react. I think I would start an investigation to see if the recruit lied on his application. But since I’m not there and I don’t have to deal with parents everyday I don’t know.

43

I’m not saying there are any other autistic kids mentioned. You are saying I’m saying that, despite my explicit statements to the contrary.

Look, 1 apple + 1 orange > 1 apple, in value systems where 1 orange > 0. Capisce?

The use of Quote blocks to quote outside sources is a new thing.
[/quote]
Bullshit. I can’t remember a time on this board when it’s been done any other way.

44

Oh by the way this “enlistment shortfall” is not true. I don’t have the stats for April but as of March the Army met it’s recruiting quota 10 months in a row. I’m not saying it’s not difficult but the recruits are signing up. The shortfalls have been in National Guard recruiting which is a whole different issue.

45

I guess it all depends on how you read it:

What I see is that as of the end of March (the halfway mark in their recruiting year), they were over 700 recruits behind their pace for the previous year, when they missed their target by over 6,600.

Since their annual targets for both years were the same, and they hit their targets for the last four months of last year and the first six months of this year, they must’ve either really screwed the pooch in April and May of last year while making their targets in every other month, or between last year and this year, they lowered the targets for October through March, and raised them for April through September.

46

By the way, that’s one hell of a partisan site. Wouldn’t trust anything from there that wasn’t backed up by a trustworthy authority.

47

Aren’t these your words? “Looks like it’s more than just one autistic kid:”

Does not “more than just one” indicate at least one more? Does not the term “autistic kid” mention an “autistic kid”? :confused:

48

You misinterpreting his statement. No, it does not mean he claims there are more autistic kids; it means there are other mentally challenged recruits in the Army, not necessarily autistic. The statement is correct; the problem is not limited to one autistic kid; it includes one autistic kid, and many others with developmental problems that should have prevented them from being recruited. You think you have caught him in a misstatement, but you haven’t; you have only misinterpreted his statement. It is nothing to get worked up about. Give it a rest.

49

Not worked up, not trying to catch him in a mistatement- just trying to understand what the hell he’s saying. :confused:

And, in those quotes I see nothing whatsoever about “many others with developmental problems that should have prevented them from being recruited.” I do see the problems with veterans who apparently developed problems while IN the Military being sent back before they are ready. The quoted section says nothing about bad recruiting practices or recruiting kids who have " developmental problems that should have prevented them from being recruited." In other words, his quote & post seem to have nothing to do with this thread other than a generalized jab at the military.

50

Truckers aren’t stupid. No one said they are.
The truth, however, is that you can be “normal” and do the job.
Normal doesn’t have to mean in the top 50%, either.
Take a look at the following chart comparing IQ trends by job:

http://members.shaw.ca/delajara/Occupations.html

You can be real smart and drive a truck. You can be below average but still smart enough for most jobs and handle a truck.

What you can’t do is be really, really stupid and do rocket science all day.
Even if you’re really smart, if you happen to be crappy with numbers, you may have real problems being a rocket scientist.

The military tests will effectively let anyone smart enough to enlist at all into certain MOS, while they’ll keep most recruits out of jobs they probably can’t do because the job wouldn’t fit the recruit.

By the way, in case you’ve never taken it, the ASVAB has a bunch of scales on it. It’s not just like an IQ test that spits out one number.

51

My American cousin got kicked out of the marines on grounds of idiocy: he hurt his ankle during boot camp, didn’t mention it for fear of getting kicked out, fell on that foot again the next day, hurt it worse. This time the DI didn’t just notice he’d got hurt but also that the ankle had bruises it could not have grown instantly. His discharge says “medical”.

So I imagine the discharge for those people would be a medical as well. Not “honorable” since they didn’t complete their enlistment period, but not “dishonorable” either - “medical”.

52

I knew a fellow who complained that truckers were stupid. One day, as we were walking out of the bush where he had stuck a golf cart, he started going on about how stupid truckers are. I asked him what he did for a living, and he replied that he was a mechanic, not a trucker. I pointed back to the golf cart (we had been teamed up in a golf tourney), and asked him if his driving off the course into the bush was a stupid thing to do, and he admitted that it was. He then told me how he had been drummed out of Canada’s Armed Forces: upon seeing a red Lada parked in the lot (turned out to be a Canadian Brigadier-General’s) at his base in here in Canada, and figuring that since red was a Soviet colour, and since Lada was a Soviet car company, the driver must therefore have been a commie. With a great show of valour and determination, he patriotically ran over the car with his tank recovery vehicle, following which he was tossed in the brig for a couple of weeks, and given a mental disability discharge. But to him, truckers were stupid.

53

They also had David Hackworth before he came down with a severe case of the deads. He was about the biggest critic of the admistration and the military brass around. It is a site that tries to have a wide range of information for those who are in the military or are veterans. One part of the site links to online op-ed columns from various people from different parts of the political spectrum. Of course they only pick people with a military slanted column. I don’t see how that makes it partisan. So it links to Ollie North’s column. It also links to Joe Galloway. So what.

54

Oh and the article quoted was from the AP. Is that partisan too or is that good enough for you?

55

I’m as anti-military and anti-recruiter as you can get and… I agree with this statement (and DrDeth’s above it). Let the kid live his own life. There are certainly people who have been diagnosed with minor physical health problems (flatfootedness, eczema, etc) who did not inform their recruiting officers, passed the physical, and had no real problems functioning in the Army despite those problems. Why can’t autism be treated the same way? The kid must be pretty high-functioning to pass the physical no matter how glossed-over it is. If there are any problems they will come out in basic training and he’ll get a discharge. And if he manages to survive the rigors of training, then he’s good enough to be in the Army, just like those thousands of people who are not perfect physical specimens yet somehow manage to make it through with their flaky scalp or whatever.

Also, in this day and age of increased attention to children’s mental health, some kids are going to be misdiagnosed, with HFA or ADD or whatever. (Note: I am not saying HFA, ADD, and other developmental problems don’t exist. Although people will interpret that from this post anyway.) Unless I’m wrong, a diagnosis like Guinther’s would also prohibit him from being a cop, fireman, or pilot. Is it right to permanently close off a multitude of career paths to people just because they got a note on their chart when they were a kid? Especially when developmental disabilites have been known to improve on their own over time? I would think that Guinther’s parents would applaud his desire to stretch his boundaries, and wouldn’t just sneak around with reporters in an effort to control him. I’d be furious if I tried to do something and my parents went behind my back and said “oh no, she can’t handle it, we know her better than she knows herself” instead of letting me fail on my own.

56

Look, you know what I’m saying; you just can’t let go of being bothered by the way I initially said it.

What I’m saying is that I’ve got more than just an apple in this bag; I’ve also got a club, and I’m going to hit you over the head with it. Geez.

You’re right. Nothing could be more unrelated than autism and another mental or psychiatric disorder. :rolleyes:

I wasn’t talking about the $9 billion that they can’t account for, or Abu Ghraib, or that the insurgency seems to be stronger each year no matter what they do - that would be unrelated, and a general jab at the military. I included this because it appeared to me that the military was responding to similar phenomena in a similar manner.

57

OK, I concede that I may have been basing my claim on a small sample. But I still found it a rather surprising sample.

It doesn’t ‘link’ to Ollie’s column; it published the column on its site, with its logo, and included (on top of the biographical blurb that they give everyone) a whole bunch of Ollie-promotion along with.

Ollie, of course, is a man whose main claim to fame was to look heroic for having placed devotion to that decade’s Dear Leader and his causes over obedience to the laws of the United States. Can’t imagine anything more antithetical to upholding the Constitution, which was what he swore he’d do.

But enough of Ollie. It was the other piece that seemed to say, “they’ll publish anything, if it’s got a right-wing slant.” I didn’t know who Buyer was before I clicked the link; that anyone would publish that sorry-ass piece of junk is astounding.

From the opening clause (“How unfortunate that Nancy Pelosi, House Minority Leader, chose to play politics on the day of Sonny Montgomery’s death” - yeah, the world should’ve stopped the day Sonny died, and yeah, I knew who he was, and have a certain degree of respect for him) to the rest of the article (a claim that some procedural disagreement means Pelosi and the Dems want to “relegate veterans to the back seat” which if that’s the case, then the GOP is busily stuffing them in the trunk), it’s a pile of fact-free manipulation.

Geez, if I write something about the military, will they publish that too?

I don’t see where it says that either of them was from the AP, but JFTR, the AP’s job is to sweep up practically everything that someone might want to republish. That’s what a wire service does; they don’t really exercise editorial judgment. Pretty much everyone else does have to make some calls on what to include, and what to leave out.

58

Here is a quote from another article on this that pretty much seals the deal:

“Jared didn’t speak until he was almost 4 and could not tolerate the feel of grass on his feet.”

The not being tolerant of the feel of grass indicates that he has an aversion to high levels of stimulation.

This is a common autistic trait. I have a little stim aversion, but apparently this guy is pretty severe.

No way you want a guy like that to serve. A couple of rounds go off in a firefight, he’s liable to go into honest to Og shock.

59

Because even if you have flat feet, you still have the same level of judgment as someone with normally functioning arches. You’re aware of the risks you’re taking, and can make that choice on your own behalf.

Autistic people don’t have the same judgment skills as the rest of us. If you had even a high-functioning autistic kid, and scraped together a trust fund to help support him for the rest of his life, would you just turn the money over to him when he turned 18? Probably not. So why should you turn an even bigger decision over to him?

60

Should we also take away his Right to Vote? His Driver’s License?

There are these things called “Competency hearings” where dudes that are thought to have severely impaired judgement are brought before a Judge and given a fair hearing, complete with Expert Medical testimony. Since no one mentioned that Jarad was ruled incompetent by a fair legal process, it’s EXTREMELY doubtful that he was so ruled.

Thus, he is legaly as “mentaly competent” as you or I, and has exactly the same rights under the US Constitution. Right to make his way in the world, and a right to fuck up. That’s America.

It’s UnConstitutional to take an adults rights away without “due process”. It’s also morally wrong.

Mr. Slant: Although your opinion has the same value as mine, here both of ours is meaningless. “Jarad” might well have changed quite a bit since then, and as my cites have shown, Autism is extremely difficult to diagnose properly. And, of course, that statement may also be incorrect.

Certainly I’d hope that the Army would take this information to heart and do some more tests, but I also hope to God we havn’t got to the point in this nation where a Family Physicians unconfirmed diagnoses can take an adults rights away without the due process every adult is entitled to in the USA.

Until Jarad is ruled “incompetent” through due process, he’s got the same rights as anyone else. Let him live his life for godssake.