I think I see why my job as an Army recruiter is hard. (Mild)

The BBQ Pit
21

[QUOTE=Airman Doors, USAF]
You always accuse recruiters of lying, so when you see something that has zero lies in it you call it unethical. Frankly, I think you people are bizarre.
[/QUOTE]

There’s a big difference between lying and being deceitful. I can tell you that I had a great time in the service without mentioning that 8 of my 10 friends died in the service. I might not be lying to you (see note below), but I’m sure as hell being deceitful. Painting a rosy picture of military service is not going to endear you to people who have chosen not to enlist. Before I enlisted I would want an estimate of the probability that I would be injured or killed while in the service.
(Note that I didn’t check your links because I’m at work. I have also never served in the US military. The example above was purely for illustrative purposes. Thus, I would clearly be lying if I said I had a great time in the service, but the recruiter might not be.)

22

[QUOTE=Jolly Roger]
Well, it could be argued that if you agree to enlist in the army you should already be prepared for the idea that you may be deployed. If you’re in the band though, the chances are lower than that of someone thats in the signal corps or an engineer. (I left out combat arms, because lets face it, you’re getting deployed if you’re in a combat MOS)
[/QUOTE]

True, but why not spell it out? Surely it is dangerous to assume that what seems obvious to some is so to others.
Re the docs making a big deal out of stuff–well, how about that? Stupid doctors and nurses, looking after the health and welfare of the troops. Jeesh, why have medical people in the armed forces at all? Oh, wait–to put Humpty Dumpty back together again and all that. Oh, and to make sure that what Joe Recruit deals with on a daily basis and considers no big deal(“sprung wrist, twice” whatever that means), truly ISN’T when it comes to stressful situations, ie war zones/possible provision deprivations/temperature extremes/close quarters/physical challenges/PTSD etc.

To encourage anyone to LIE to their health care practitioner is unconscionable. That female recruiter lied through omission, prevarication and commission. She’s a moron, IMO. If this is the Army’s best shot at recruitment, it deserves the low level recruits it gets (I mean no offense to those already serving. But holy hell-is this typical recruiter behavior? The defenses posted here lead me to believe that it is. That is sad. Surely the military can do better in its recruitment tactics.)

23

[QUOTE=Airman Doors, USAF]
I don’t get it. Nothing that she said is untrue. Military doctors do make much ado about minor issues. You don’t always get sent to Iraq. If you come into money, you can get out (and quite easily at that).

What the hell do you want them to say? “If you join you will get shot at and you will likely be severely injured or die”? That’s even more of a lie than the things that you people complain about.

Frankly, I’m at a loss. You always accuse recruiters of lying, so when you see something that has zero lies in it you call it unethical. Frankly, I think you people are bizarre.
[/QUOTE]

Are you seriously unable to see the difference? Did your parents raise you that lying by omission and innuendo is okay? How about if they say, “40 percent of new recruits will be deployed at current troop levels. There is a good chance you’ll be able to serve here, but if they need you, you don’t have a say where you will serve.”

Or is that too honest for your taste?

24

I don’t see what it is that recruiters do that politicians don’t do every four years. Promise the moon; deliver the broomstick.

25

[QUOTE=Liberal]
I don’t see what it is that recruiters do that politicians don’t do every four years. Promise the moon; deliver the broomstick.
[/QUOTE]

So its okay to lie when life and death is involved? Way to handwave a complex issue with a soundbyte.

26

[QUOTE=eleanorigby]
Re the docs making a big deal out of stuff–well, how about that? Stupid doctors and nurses, looking after the health and welfare of the troops. Jeesh, why have medical people in the armed forces at all? Oh, wait–to put Humpty Dumpty back together again and all that. Oh, and to make sure that what Joe Recruit deals with on a daily basis and considers no big deal(“sprung wrist, twice” whatever that means), truly ISN’T when it comes to stressful situations, ie war zones/possible provision deprivations/temperature extremes/close quarters/physical challenges/PTSD etc.

To encourage anyone to LIE to their health care practitioner is unconscionable. That female recruiter lied through omission, prevarication and commission. She’s a moron, IMO. If this is the Army’s best shot at recruitment, it deserves the low level recruits it gets (I mean no offense to those already serving. But holy hell-is this typical recruiter behavior? The defenses posted here lead me to believe that it is. That is sad. Surely the military can do better in its recruitment tactics.)
[/QUOTE]

Yeah, how about that. My uncle, who was a big, powerful rugby player and a marathoner, got rejected for “flat feet”. My sister almost got rejected for a heart defect at birth that has never given her issues before. I myself almost got rejected for a previously broken collarbone, among other things. Among famous people, how about Rush Limbaugh’s infamous pilonidal cyst, a.k.a. the “butt boil”? People make him pay for that, mostly because he’s a windbag, but also because people want to score points on people who didn’t serve for “questionable” medical reasons.

If it gives you no trouble, why bring it up? The doctors are looking for every little thing to disqualify you, so why help them? Gee, I had bronchitis 10 years ago, I guess I’m not fit to serve? I joke, but that is in some cases how it goes.

The ultimate irony is that you can get shot and then when you recover, sometimes without coming back 100%, you are deemed to be perfectly suited to combat, but the guy who sprained his wrist playing football in high school can’t even get in the door.

27

[QUOTE=Lobohan]
So its okay to lie when life and death is involved? Way to handwave a complex issue with a soundbyte.
[/QUOTE]
You think an Army reserve recruit has more lives in his hands than the Commander in Chief? Way to miss the forest for the trees.

28

[QUOTE=Lobohan]
Are you seriously unable to see the difference? Did your parents raise you that lying by omission and innuendo is okay?
[/quote]

How about you keep my parents out of this? Thanks.

They DO say that. Have you ever been recruited? I was, by all of the services. Not a single one of them lied to me, and I asked pointed questions. Amazingly, I got pointed answers. It’s easy to characterize everything by an edited movie clip (e.g., Michael Moore’s clip about the Marine recruiters in Fahrenheit 9/11), but it’s simply not the case that recruiters lie, cheat and steal just to meet a quota.

Goddamn it, I hate it when people slur good men and women, and by inference call people who are legally adults too stupid to be able to make informed decisions about their own future. All of my fellow servicemembers appreciate the compliment, I’m sure. Excuse me while I go back to drooling on myself and practicing my phonics exercises.

29

[QUOTE=Jolly Roger]
Did they give them a choice to pick up another MOS? If you don’t pass your AIT, they usually just cashier you out. I don’t know about the Music school though. Its a specialized MOS and the band guys get a few perks so I can imagine that its not a cake walk to pass. I find it hard to believe that failure automatically puts you in the infantry. Its a sure-thing washout to put someone in infantry school who doesn’t want to be there.
[/QUOTE]

Failing at the School of Music does not equal automatic out; to my knowledge it never has.

Sure you may not end up an 11B but you are also not going to get an MOS that’s highly sought after–you’ll end up a cook or something that’s harder to fill.

30

[QUOTE=Airman Doors, USAF]
Yeah, how about that. My uncle, who was a big, powerful rugby player and a marathoner, got rejected for “flat feet”. My sister almost got rejected for a heart defect at birth that has never given her issues before. I myself almost got rejected for a previously broken collarbone, among other things. Among famous people, how about Rush Limbaugh’s infamous pilonidal cyst, a.k.a. the “butt boil”? People make him pay for that, mostly because he’s a windbag, but also because people want to score points on people who didn’t serve for “questionable” medical reasons.

If it gives you no trouble, why bring it up? The doctors are looking for every little thing to disqualify you, so why help them? Gee, I had bronchitis 10 years ago, I guess I’m not fit to serve? I joke, but that is in some cases how it goes.

The ultimate irony is that you can get shot and then when you recover, sometimes without coming back 100%, you are deemed to be perfectly suited to combat, but the guy who sprained his wrist playing football in high school can’t even get in the door.
[/QUOTE]

What Airman Doors says is correct. There is a book with a list of conditions that can disqualify you…and its thorough. But if you say you had pink eye in 1st grade the doctor is gonna want every single medical record you ever had. Even though pink eye from 15 years ago isn’t a disqualifier. A recruiter would probably advise you not to mention it. On the other hand I had an applicant that had some kind of brain surgery once. Even his civilian doctor said he was completely capable of joining the military, but I didn’t process him because it was against the big book I just mentioned.

The doctors at MEPS stations will look you over for everything. I’ve seen guys that are healthy as Hercules get DQ’d for acne,and athlete’s foot…and its actually difficult to overturn those diagnosis. They’ll actually send it to DoD for review.

And its not actually a lie to tell someone they might not get deployed. I know people that have been in the military for more than a decade and they’ve never been deployed. If someone enlists with the expectation that they will never be deployed I’d wonder if they actually had a brain cell in their head or if their recruiter was the Greatest Liar In The Universe.

The ultimate irony is really you could not tell about the pink eye, join up, go through training and go the clinic on your 1st day of duty and declare you had pinkeye when you were in 1st grade. No one will bat an eye.

31

[QUOTE=Contrary]
Failing at the School of Music does not equal automatic out; to my knowledge it never has.

Sure you may not end up an 11B but you are also not going to get an MOS that’s highly sought after–you’ll end up a cook or something that’s harder to fill.
[/QUOTE]

It may be situational, or perhaps things have changed, but in my AIT people that flunked out were cut loose.

32

Perhaps instead of demonizing the docs who make these calls and have this big book of automatic reject past diagnoses, it might be better to have someone (who- congress? I shudder to think of the money wasted if the Pentagon or VA do this) look into recruitment criteria for medical rejection or whatever it’s called. If pink eye can get you excluded --who the hell can be recruited? It seems counter-productive. I imagine the thinking is much like what I posited earlier-a condition may be ok in everyday life, but not in combat. I understand this is frustrating (and agree that some of the stipulations stated, if true, seem outlandish), but that is the system.

The thing is, the recruiter has no expertise to know what should be shared with the health team and what shouldn’t be. Wrong person making the call. I cannot fathom why the docs are so persnickety, but since they are, the issue that needs to be addressed is their requirements. What is happening is that recruiters are telling kids (yes, KIDS) to lie. You were not an adult at 18, neither was I. Get over it. :rolleyes:

33

[QUOTE=Airman Doors, USAF]
I don’t get it. Nothing that she said is untrue. Military doctors do make much ado about minor issues. You don’t always get sent to Iraq. If you come into money, you can get out (and quite easily at that).
[/QUOTE]
The question for me, though, is not whether military doctors make much ado about minor issues. The question is whether it’s ethical for a recruiter to tell a recruit to omit aspects of his medical history because the “stupid” doctors might actually take it into account.

Do you think that it’s official military policy to encourage people to hide their medical history because the military doctors are a bunch of nitpicking pussies? If the military doctor asks a recruit a question about whether he has previously had any injuries, and the recruit says no, is that the right thing to do?

34

[QUOTE=Airman Doors, USAF]
How about you keep my parents out of this? Thanks.

They DO say that. Have you ever been recruited? I was, by all of the services. Not a single one of them lied to me, and I asked pointed questions. Amazingly, I got pointed answers. It’s easy to characterize everything by an edited movie clip (e.g., Michael Moore’s clip about the Marine recruiters in Fahrenheit 9/11), but it’s simply not the case that recruiters lie, cheat and steal just to meet a quota.

Goddamn it, I hate it when people slur good men and women, and by inference call people who are legally adults too stupid to be able to make informed decisions about their own future. All of my fellow servicemembers appreciate the compliment, I’m sure. Excuse me while I go back to drooling on myself and practicing my phonics exercises.
[/QUOTE]

I was recruited after as it happens, and they guy would have sucked my dick if he though it could get me to sign my next four away. Obviously your recruiters weren’t shitheels. But I’m gonna guess they weren’t under pressure to fill boots as hard as they are now. Military people are no more noble than anyone else. Petty, moronic people sign up too, like any other group.

Now wipe the drool off your chin Airman, those phonics exercises aren’t going to do themselves!

35

[QUOTE=mhendo]
The question for me, though, is not whether military doctors make much ado about minor issues. The question is whether it’s ethical for a recruiter to tell a recruit to omit aspects of his medical history because the “stupid” doctors might actually take it into account.

Do you think that it’s official military policy to encourage people to hide their medical history because the military doctors are a bunch of nitpicking pussies? If the military doctor asks a recruit a question about whether he has previously had any injuries, and the recruit says no, is that the right thing to do?
[/QUOTE]

May I have permission to channel you?–you said what I struggled to say, but you said it more succinctly and eloquently. I’ll stop talking now and just cheer you on!
:slight_smile:

36

[QUOTE=Jolly Roger]
It may be situational, or perhaps things have changed, but in my AIT people that flunked out were cut loose.
[/QUOTE]

Which AIT did you go to? Sorry to be unpitty here, but I’m really curious–also what branch of service?

37

[QUOTE=Slithy Tove]
In a dialed-down DrDeth, a lot of us are reading the boards while at work, and while our employers are Ok with us keeping up with current events, they can’t have us using up bandwith on non-work-related streaming video.

Standing in the dark as I am, I will repeat whe’s been argued on these boards and elsewhere: We have a military only of people who volunteered fighting wars that were started only by a few people at the top. If we have a military where everyone might have to join, maybe we’d only have wars that everyone would have to agree are necessary.
[/QUOTE]

We can’t have a military where everyone might have to join.

According to the CIA World Factbook we only have about 109.2m military manpower “fit for service.” (This figure includes males and females in the age range 18-49 who are not afflicted with some sort of disability preventing them from serving in the military.)

That’s only around ~36% of the U.S. population.

38

I was not trying to imply that the Army Band never gets deployed. I was stating that there are members of the Army that play music for a career. If you fail the audition, you do not get reassigned to infantry or whatever the Army needs. You will, based upon your qualifications, be given a chance to pick another job. Fail out of that school, and then you will be involuntarily given a needed job. BTW, it probably won’t be infantry or cook, it would be parachute packer, or whatever the Army needs at that time.
There is more than one type of music played by the Army Band. I saw a concert in Iraq that played Limp Bizkit and Nickelback. These were Soldiers that had auditioned and been given a job playing for the troops.
There is also a chance you may be killed because you chose to be a Soldier. There is a chance you may be killed working on the line at a Detroit auto assembly plant. What job has the higher percentage of being killed in the line of duty, I have no way of knowing. But, as one Poster has suggested, 80% is ridiculously high.

As to the doctors, there are some things that can’t be overlooked. Asthma, you should get looked at by a doctor before you join. A broken bone that you had properly set 10 years ago? What difference could that make? For all the childhood injuries and illnesses that people admit to the doctor, all it does is require an exception to policy. Usually, the applicant will have to pay to have an examination done by his doctor, submit paperwork, and delay his date to report to Basic Training. Most ethical recruiters know what is safe to admit and what is not.
Fuck, I have 4 screws in my knee. The MEPS doc would have disqualified me. When I had an x ray three years later the doc who saw me admired the skill of the doc who put the screws in.

SSG Schwartz

39

[QUOTE=SSG Schwartz]
Most ethical recruiters know what is safe to admit and what is not.
[/QUOTE]
Simple question: if a MEP asks a recruit about past injuries or medical issues, and the recruiter has told the recruit that the condition is not “safe to admit,” should the recruit lie to the doctor?

I thought you military types were believers in chain of command and in following the rules. If the MEPs have been following the guidelines laid down for them in evaluating recruits’ medical histories, what business does a recruiter have undermining or sidestepping that procedure?

Your position seems to be that the definition of an ethical recruiter is one who condones only a certain amount of dishonesty.

40

[QUOTE=SSG Schwartz]
There is also a chance you may be killed because you chose to be a Soldier. There is a chance you may be killed working on the line at a Detroit auto assembly plant. What job has the higher percentage of being killed in the line of duty, I have no way of knowing.
[/QUOTE]
If someone asks you about the chances of dying, is this what you say?