I have a question for the Military Recruiters that post here.
My friend has a 19 year old grandson. The boy is a fine physical specimen, a sweet kid, but he just isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed.
He graduated from high school and just recently flunked out of trade school. From what I gather, he had attendance problems, due too laziness.
He has decided to join the Army and has passed all of their pre-entrance exams.
I think this will be a great thing for him. He needs a little discipline and I think he will respond positively to the structure.
My friend thinks he will go directly from boot camp to Iraq or Afghanistan and be on the front line of “the war on terror”. I told her they don’t put the greenhorns in that position right away and I would love to show her some proof to ease her mind.
I’m not a military recruiter, but I can answer from my own (sort of) experience. My nineteen year-old daughter’s boyfriend is in the US Army. He enlisted during the summer after high school graduation. He went to basic training in Georgia and now is posted at a fort in Colorado. He has been trained as an infantryman. He is currently scheduled to be deployed to Afghanistan in May. If that goes off as planned, he will have been in the army for about ten or eleven months when he is sent overseas.
He too is in excellent physical shape but is not the brightest apple on the tree. My daughter plans to marry him in three weeks. If they reproduce, he will dramatically dilute the family gene pool. My wife and I are not excited by this impending union.
The Army does not work like it did in WWII. They don’t send replacements to the front to fill in for casualties or other reasons. Personnel are deployed with their units and come back with their units. Someone who comes out of training might go to a unit that will deploy soon or they might go to one that has just come back and won’t be going anywhere for a while. There are also training and support units that do not deploy. It is impossible to say where he will go. Of course it greatly depends on what job he is going into.
ETA Drum God said he was infantry. That would be MOS 11B.
Just as a clarification for non-military types that’s Military Occupational Specialty 11B Meaning a rifleman as opposed say to an 11H witch used to be Mortars (a little further back from the front lines).
I’m not a recruiter, but I am currently serving in the US Army, and Loach’s post is pretty much spot on. He could spend his 2-4 years in the army at a location where he will never have to deploy, or he could get deployed straight out of Basic Training.
More useless army trivia: There are two types of infantrymen in the modern army as noted by chacoguy420, although mortars are now 11Cs. Although both are technically infantry when people say infantry 99% of the time they are referring to 11Bs
Loach, chacoguy420 and, AmunRa, thank you so much for your insight.
I was of the impression that a newbie did not get sent “to the front” till they had some “seasoning”.
Thanks for fighting my ignorance and I hope that others will share their experience(s).