My feelings on the military's recruiting kids, for Bill H. (and you if you care)

The BBQ Pit
1

This started out as a response to something Bill H. asked me in another thread, but turned into it’s own thing.

Some of the military’s recruitment efforts are wrong.

I’ll start by mentioning that one of my best friends let a recruiter push his way into her house and convince her then and there that she wouldn’t be able to afford college and her only route was the Army.

She is at fault for falling for this, but she was seventeen, and these guys are expert salesmen, not to mention in uniform, which is quite intimidating. I love her to death, but she’s not the sharpest, and these guys sniff that out. So, I feel that she was taken advantage of.

Anyway, she went through all the training, took it like a champ, and went to college this past September. Come November, she finds out that right after Christmas, she’ll be heading over to Iraq.

I know what you’re going to say. “Quit your whining kid, it’s what you signed up for.” Well, she is a kid, and the recruiter convinced her to sign up for something else that night, in her mind at least. Not a free ride. She was prepared for hard work. But, what the work was supposed to be for – what he convinced her it was for – was the means to go to college. She put a lot of money into that first year and got pulled out halfway through. She couldn’t even manage to get credits for the work she had already done.

So, I’m bitter.

They are deceptive. They tell you’ll get a certain amount of schooling in before you’re called into duty. Lie. They also tell you you’ll have “Oh, hundreds of wonderful jobs to choose from!” Lie. I don’t have to continue with this because I think it’s fairly common knowledge (to those who’ll accept it, whether or not they agree with it) that the military does lie.

I am very thankful to the people who are risking their lives for mine. Therefore, I understand that they are just people, like me in many ways. Most of them are scared and want to come home, and this rips me up inside. Too many people, who claim to be one hundred percent supportive of our troops, are actually just cowards who see the soldiers as the only thing keeping their lousy asses safe. So, it’s “I support our troops!” when they are being good little thoughtless machines, but when they show a spark of human vulnerability, it’s “You’d better just keep your mouth shut and forget you have a mind, and feelings, and a life that you desperately don’t want to lose. My life is riding on it.”

Can I also say that I think it’s fucked up that a seventeen year old can’t buy a beer or a pack of cigarettes, can’t walk into a tattoo parlor and get a tattoo or miss a day of school or see a certain movie without a note from Mom or Dad, but has sound enough judgement to sign a contract putting his or her life in jeopardy?

I realize that this is a touchy subject, and I hate to make such an awful first impression on the people here. At least try to keep in mind that I was almost this friend who is preparing for war right now. I came pretty close to signing up too, so I feel a sort of weird, strong sense of reality when it comes to this.

If you’re still reading, I’m done now. :o

2

A seventeen year old cannot sign an enlistment contract without parental consent.

3

I graduated high school in the mid 80s so there wasn’t the danger of signing up, but…

I got accepted into college pretty early, even before the recruiters started calling. When I told the recruiters that I already had plans to go to college, they would always give me the spiel about earning money for college by joining.

The army and marines were pretty cool about it, but the Navy guy actually yelled at me.

“You know, this is for your benefit. You have to come down here.”

The Air Force guy was the best. I told him I had been accepted into college and he said, "Well I’m not gonna try to talk you out of that. " He then gave me the number of the recruiting office in case something happened and that was it.

But yes, while I don’t have a problem with the recruiters highlighting the good points of military service, outright lying is wrong.

4

The key to dealing with any recruiter is to get everything down in writing before you sign.

5

Is your friend still 17? IANAL, but I was told (too late to do me any good) that your parents can withdraw their permission for you to serve, even after you enlist. If your friend has turned 18, then she’s basically screwed and I hope she completes her enlistment safely and honorably.

BTW, Navy is really an acronym - it means Never Again Volunteer Yourself. :wink:
ps - my (Navy) recruiter didn’t exactly lie to me, he just avoided telling me certain things which would have benefitted me, but gotten him fewer recruiting brownie points. The Navy itself didn’t exactly lie to me, either. They didn’t need to persuade me of anything, they just made it clear that I no longer had any meaningful choices to make.

Favorite military joke - “You might not like the fucking Navy (Army, Marines, etc), but the Navy likes fucking you!” More true than it should be in too many cases.

6

Whatever.

Don’t know how I got dragged into your whining bitch-a-thon, when all I did was feel your pain in that other thread.

So now I don’t feel your pain quite so much. Going into the military is honorable. And your notion that you’re entitled to money for NOTHING, when others get paid to risk their lives for your benefit is a load of horse dung.

Grow up. And next time, I’d appreciate if you don’t throw around my name so carelessly.

7

In case that last wasn’t clear, our favorite OP said in the other thread that the military was screwing him out of his college aid in the hopes of recruiting him. Or something. I dunno; who cares anyway? This whole thing is a load of crap. Tearing down others who risk their lives claiming they’re taking something of yours. You really ought to be ashamed of yourself.

8

I don’t think the parents can do this. They had to sign their approval before the enlistment took place. “Wait, I changed my mind” probably won’t work in this case any better than it does two months after you’ve signed a contract to buy a house or car.

BTW, I enlisted a few days after my 17th birthday. The Air Force helped me get my GED. I served my four years and got the promised assistance with college after I got out, so it doesn’t have to turn out badly.

9

A verbal contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.

10

By the way, the Montgomery GI Bill pays for 36 months of college. Do regular college students take off three months a year, or is it a screw-job?

11

Well, I was lied to up and down by my recruiter (AF). I scored a 99 on my ASVAB, had a year of college down (computer science), and was told that I had a lock on a computer job. Since there were no computer jobs open at that particular time I was told that I should join up as “open general” and I would get to choose from hundreds of jobs once I was in basic. Sounded like a good deal to me. Long story short, I am now a cook. The best part is that I have people in my chain of command asking me why I am a cook instead of some computer programmer or something :rolleyes:

12

I assume that’s because of summer vacation which, at the schools I’ve attended, is about 3 months long.

13

Sometimes its true. Sometimes not.

14

I’ll speak to my own experience with this, from a college administrator’s POV. I think that recruiters are vultures that are morally on par with cash advance and rent to buy scams.

They sometimes request booth space on campus to put up a display, and as a courtesy, we allow it. Thing is, since a lot of our kids are already enlisted, and we’re currently at war, there are not a whole lot of rubes left to meet their quotas. So what does our enterprising young recruiter do? He requests a washout list- a list of all of the students that have dropped out of school in the past year so he can hunt them down. Fuckers.

15

I had a really amusing relationship with a recruiter in high school and college. At 16 I had no aims at all so I called up the local Army Recruitment office (this would be about 1983 or so). Went down there and took some tests at 17. The recruiter told me I’d tested better than anyone he’d seen that year. Called me ‘officer material’ and such.

Then I didn’t sign up. He kept calling every few months through high school, alway politely asking if I’d change my mind. We got quite friendly about it.

When I got accepted to college he asked me where and when I was there the ROTC commander would occasionally look me up to extol the virtures of life in the service.

Not unpleasant at all. More amusing than anything.

16

Why “fuckers”? Seems reasonable to me that there might be a mutual advantage between some college dropouts and the military services.

Unless, of course, you simply hate anybody and everybody associated with the military. If that’s the case I can understand why you made the above remark.

17

I’ve had three contacts with recruiters.

When I was about to turn eighteen, I called an Army recruiter to ask if I still had to register for the draft. He checked and replied that I did not (this was 1977, and the draft had ended a few years before). He also politely offered that if I was interested in enlisting in the Army, he could help me. I thanked him for his help, but told him that I was not.

A few years later, I got a call from a recuiter (I don’t remember the service branch). I told him that I wasn’t interested in enlisting. He asked me what my career goals were. When I answered ‘musician’, he wished me luck and bade goodbye.

A few years later, I went back to college (in engineering), and I got a call from a Navy recruiter in my senior year. He was calling to tell me about the NUPOC program, which involved going to OCS after graduating and working aboard nuclear submarines. I thanked him for calling, but told him I wasn’t interested in military service. He was very aggressive, and used plenty of obnoxious sales tactics – I had to repeat myself several times before he gave up.

As with any occupation, there are good eggs and bad ones.

18

Hardly that. If not for the pleading of my mother, who had picked up stakes and moved her whole family to avoid the forced conscription of all boys of age going on in her home country, I’d likely have gone down that route myself, or at least ROTC. So please don’t try to paint me as some sort of hippie.

I respect our soldiers for the work they do…that respect just doesn’t extend to the failed used car salesmen that are uniformly used as recruiters around here.

I just don’t like the idea of hunting for vulnerable populations for any sort of exploitation (review my ‘cash advance’ example), much less the sort that ends with you putting your life on the line.

19

WHenever I hear these stories about unscrupulous recruiters, my response is pretty much always “duh”. When I was in high school, I had some friends in the Guard. One of the recruiters pursued me pretty relentlessly. I was polite at first and told him I had no intention of joining the service(stupid was talking to a long-haired, earring wearing kid). When he wouldn’t leave me alone, I told him I had asthma, and that I knew I’d never make it past MEPS. THat apparently wasn’t good enough for him, so the last time he had a go at me, I told him about my epilepsy-and he actually told me it wouldn’t be a problem.

I remember hearing of a guy who joined the military specifically to be a combat medic. He told the recruiters that was the only way he’d even consider joining the military. When he completed his basic, he was assigned to an infantry division-not as a medic, but as a grunt.

I forget the details(obviously), but as it came down, it turned out that whatever division of the military he had joined didn’t actually have full-fledged combat medics and his recruiter lied to him.

Then there was the time I was hunted down by a pack of new recruits at the behest of their recruiter because I had said something bad about one of the recruits.

So I really don’t have a terribly high opinion of military recruiters and their tactics.

Sam

20

I had a Marine officer call me at home once when I was about 20. He told me he’d heard that I was a musician in high school and wanted to know if I wanted to be in the Marine Corp Band. I told him I was in the choir. He couldn’t get off the phone fast enough. :rolleyes: