(MOST) People Survive (MANY) Don’t. If you did your job without motive, and were even a bit honest, I wouldn’t have to point it out.
What the fuck are you talking about? I know you don’t have a cite or else you would have posted it. What is your beef anyway, or do you get off on being a dick?
SSG Schwartz
Feel free to start a debate in GD about whether it’s a good thing to join the armed services. In the meantime, however, stop with the threadshitting and the insults.
Your anger is perfectly understandable, but we want you to report the post, only, and not respond in like. Calling someone a troll and a dick–for whatever reason–just ends up with you thumped, too.
I wouldn’t expect you to do something illegal then. It’s just I was in the Army and I met lots of people who had to fight their way into the military. I worked with a girl with an obviously deformed right hand, and she was right handed. She definitely did not have full use of her hand. She said she “faked” her way through MEPS. I don’t know exactly how she did that, but she could do her job, perform to PT standards, etc. She really shouldn’t have been allowed in with a deformed hand, but she could shoot a weapon and do her job anyway. I’ve heard lots of stories of people who simply keep trying until they get in, and I don’t think that’s unethical.
What we are pursuing right now is an investigation as to why she was dq’d. If that fails, in two years she will be able to reapply. She may get in then, or she may really have an undiagnosed skin condition. I am going to help her with her plans anyway, even though she cannot, at this time serve in the Armed Forces. Not Peace Corps, but maybe Red Cross.
SSG Schwartz
I don’t know how much it figures into recruitment policies, but people with eczema are at higher risk of developing a nasty side-effect from the smallpox vaccine. It’s one of the conditions on the Army’s exemption list. Unlike the other skin diseases mentioned it can cause problems even when symptoms aren’t present.
I’d link to the wikipedia entry for eczema vaccinatum, but it has a picture of a diseased baby on it which most people probably wouldn’t want to look at.
I had really bad eyesight too. I didn’t get rejected, but I had a hard time in basic. I wasn’t allowed to wear my civilian glasses and my BCGs had to be special ordered, so I spent half of basic training blind. I still qualified with my M16, using my buddy’s glasses. He was a Mexican doctor who had to go in enlisted until he got his MD. Good times. Half of my memories of basic are a blur. Literally. My “battle buddy” really helped me around at times.
I have a good friend who was in the USAF and has really bad myopia. She couldn’t function without glasses at all. Her brother’s in the army, and has bad vision too.
Excema varies an awful lot. I have a really, really, mild case of it. When I was sixteen, I had slight rashes on my upper feet. I’d never noticed them till someone pointed them out to me. They’ve been gone for a while - not sure how long, because I never noticed them. They had certainly disappeared by the time I was 19 and I’ve never been troubled since.
So it seems to me that a diagnosis of excema should be taken under clinical advice. If she’s had so little up to that age that she’s never noticed it, there’s an extremely good chance that it won’t get worse; excema is one of those illnesses that tends to diminish once you reach adulthood. From other people’s posts, I can see why excema can be a problem, but it doesn’t seem like it will be with this girl. She shouldn’t be barred forever, at least - is there no way of saying ‘come back in two years, we’ll check you out again then’? So many conditions will disappear in two years, especially at that age.
And that’s all considering that she even has excema in the first place. Excema is overdiagnosed, in my admittedly anecdotal experience.
I’m a pacifist and would rather fewer people were sent off to war or trained to participate in war. Still, I can see the arguments from your side and her side that she shouldn’t have her choice denied to her for such a small reason.
Sorry if my comment about her crying seemed insensitive, but it does seem to me that military personnel will have to face the prospect of much, much bigger losses than that.
Sorry, didn’t see this post before (loaded up reply then went away to do other things).
Chances are her excema will be gone by then. If she has it at all. If she still shows signs of it, then she’ll have to accept the rules. You wouldn’t want to send her off knowing that she might end up seriously ill from complications, would you? Hopefully she’d understand that too.
[aside]I wonder how people in really hot countries deal with excema[/aside].
sounds like the good makings for a funny movie 
They were nicer to us officer candidates. I had contact lenses since I was a Junior in high school and was allowed to wear them in training. To tell you how bad my eyes were, the Air Force paid for my contacts as a medical necessity (couldn’t get 20/25 with glasses). This was almost unheard of at the time–you got BCGs and liked them (The only thing worse than BCGs was the BCG SUNGLASSES–you looked like Ray Charles without the cool).
Damn occifers! On the first day of basic my drill sergeant called me into his office, took my contact lenses and glasses from me, put them in his desk drawer and told me I wouldn’t get them back until I graduated. Then he gave me a test to see which was my “strong eye.” It was my right eye. Uh, I’m like 20/600. My right eye is my strong eye???
Huh. I wore my contact lenses throughout all of basic training and every other training I ever did. I feel for you, I would have hated to wear their glasses or use those inserts in the protective masks. The only thing I had to do was switch from using my little heating disinfection machine to chemical disinfection.
I knew someone would come in here with that tired old horse and beat it. Its like the Godwin’s Law of any thread here discussing the military.
BCGs! My brother hated them! He finally got lasik surgery and couldn’t be happier.
(Birth Control Glasses, for those unfamiliar with the lovely black plastic frames the military insists on…).
It might. I was a martial artist. Blind as a bat, I flipped the entire platoon on their ass at one point or another. A drill sergeant or two as well. I managed some respect, blind dunce that I was.
Wrong.
Eczema can go into remission, even for years at a time. I speak from experience.
By the way - if you want to know what can happen when you mix broken skin with microbes search the SDMB database useing “broomstick” and “infection” - I’ve posted two doozy experiences. People with eczema have chronically broken skin. Under battlefield conditions, that could make them more susceptible to infections.
Back in the 1960’s when I was a baby they still vaccinated kids with eczema - that’s how I got the smallpox vaccination scar over my left triceps. So a history of eczema doesn’t mean you WILL get that “nasty side effect” (which has a high fatality rate, by the way) but the odds are higher. If the military is routinely vaccinating against something, and a certain category of people are at risk of a fatal reaction to the vaccine, then from the military’s viewpoint such people are undesirable recruits even if otherwise they are wonderful human beings.
Agreed, my wife also has a chart misdiagnosis that causes all kinds of hell. My point is simply that the individual mistake or error shouldn’t be the source or the target of blame for the trouble, mistakes happen and everyone screws up. The source of blame is the organization and groupthink of the bureaucracy that gives equal value to clerical errors vs documented facts, even when documented facts directly attempt to contradict and correct those errors.
In this case, it still sounds like an organizational fuckup of the army.
Sadly it could be corrected if the poor girl had recourse to courts or lawyers that could support her case with a judgement, and even get the old misdiagnosis shitcanned into a memory hole. Unfortunately, it sounds like being poor means she won’t have the ability to defend herself in that manner.
He does not get off on being a dick. He just is one and can not help himself. He will try and bring you down to himself, but the distance is to far, and that makes him mad so he attacks. He does not have to look far to find trash it is always close.
SSG keep up the good work and keep caring.