So it seems some army recruiters have been telling potential recruits that the Iraq war is over to quell fears of being sent to Iraq. This is just the lowest of the low I don’t know which is worse: Recruiters lying about Iraq, or the fact that a recruit might fall for the lie.
I hope those recruiters suddenly find themselves over here.
Well, yeah. Of course ‘war’ ended a long time ago. It’s now called “shock and awe”. Didn’t you get the memo?
Tripler
“War” is sooo 1991. . .
I saw, on the news, that young woman and, while I think she went way to far w/ her statement, you should understand that recruiters are under tremendous pressure to fill their quotas. That has probably never been more true than in our current situation.
I once considered requesting recruiting duty, until several of my friends dissuaded me.
I think everybody understands that. They just realize it’s no excuse.
Who the heck would believe such a thing? Don’t these people read anything but Junior Highlights? What the heck?
Thats not too much to hope for. I was a recruiter from 2001 to 2005. While I have no desire to go to Iraq, I would have gladly gone rather than be a recruiter. One of my buds from recruiting is in Iraq now, and he prefers it to recruiting. Less pressure he tells me.
Most recruiters are detailed recruiters. Recruiting Command picks them out of their regular army jobs and forces them to become recruiters. If you refuse to go to recruiting school they boot ya out of the army.
And trust me recruiting sucks ass. They were running low on recruiters when I left recruiting and extending people. Guys that had done their 3 year trip through hell in recruiting were suddenly slapped down with another year or 2. I escaped that by two things…one, recruiting had caused my blood pressure to go so high that i literally passed out twice at work. The 2nd time the doctor thought i was going to have a heart attack. The second reason is I would have simply gone awol if they extended me. I hate to admit it, but I would have. I just honestly couldn’t take any more of the BS.
But the average recruiter? You’ll never hear about it, but recruiting command literally threatens to ruin your life and career if you don’t recruit. And they know all of the crooked shit that goes on is happening. They only pretend they don’t when someone gets caught.
I could write pages about some of the crap that recruiters go through. I’m not excusing what the recruiter in this story did, because actually its not even a good lie, but I can understand why he did it. I’ve seen guys try to kill themselves rather than go recruiting. (true story, it was a cowroker, and he called me to tell me he was gonna do it. I got to him in time to get help and his stomach pumped). When I was in the hospital after collapsing at work my blood pressure was 191/114…and stayed there all day. The doctor said I was I was very dangerously close to having a heart attack. You know what my recruiter bosses told me? Take a day off, then get back here and put someone in the army. Literally, they said that. And they didn’t even call my wife ALL DAY when I was in hospital. She only found out 12 hours later because a coworker figured no one had told her and called her.
Vanity Fair magazine had an excellent article about Marine recruiters a couple of years ago. The horrific anxiety that these guys mentioned matches what has been told so far in this thread. Suicide attempts and health problems were not at all uncommon.
Your stories seem like they would be really interesting and informative. Would you mind telling a little bit about what you have gone through.
A colleague of mine was at a PTA event at his kid’s school a couple of months ago. He mentioned to another parent that he was heading back to Iraq and the other parent said, “I guess that’s still going on, huh?”
If the war is over, someone forgot to tell Bush.
Well, as I said, you can’t actually refuse recruiting duty without getting out of the army. Usually they pick recruiters from people that have been in at least ten years….because at that point its more likely that you’re trying to get to 20 so you can retire with full benefits. They got me at that point just before my current enlistment was up. The likelihood of me saying no was low because I was married and had a family to provide for and I was obviously going to stick it out. I have to tell you that I really really liked being in the army at that time. Its not Iraq that has made a bit sour on it in present times, its what recruiting did to my mindset. I’d heard horror stories from guys that were recruiters but I thought “It can’t be THAT bad. I can do this. I’m a soldier!”. Yeeesh.
You work six days a week, from 8AM to 9PM—and often more than not 10PM to make the mission. That’s gonna wear anyone down after a year. I won’t even go into detail about the way you get treated by parents, teenagers and the public….and this was before Afghanistan and Iraq….it only got worse as the shithole we’re in now progressed. The standard where I was to put 2 people in a month, one had to be an “alpha” (meaning they scored over t550 on the ASVAB test.) If you put in 2 people and neither scored 50 you were a dirtbag. So, as I asked my boss once its my fault this guy only scored 36? How can I control how smart he is?. I got yelled at. Like basic training yelled at.
If you didn’t make your quota they had an ingenious way of screwing with you in my battalion. They called it “extra-training” but it was really just fucking with you. They’d get everyone that didn’t get their quota together and send you to training at odd hours like 11 PM at a location as FAR AWAY AS THEY COULD. I’m not kidding. Like a 2 hour drive just to get there. Then they’d go through a half hour of bullshit stuff that you learned in recruiting school and send you home so you could go to work the next day. So as you can imagine, you’re now tired, cranky and you got yelled at. After one or two of those sessions you’d do anything to NOT have to do it again. I almost lost my wife because I was NEVER EVER FUCKING HOME! I told a coworker once “Home is just where my stuff is. I never see it. My wife is the invisible person that does my laundry because God Knows I never see her.”. And it was true. You had to make at least 200 cold phone calls a day. It got ridiculous, since in our area people had gotten called a million times. If they said no the first time why call them again? I wouldn’t and got yelled at for it.
You see, theres nothing more frustrating than doing the best you can anfd not making mission because Johnny failed the asvab and Susie got pregnant before she shipped to Basic Training. Yeah, you did your job by the books and you’ve been working all week at it, but because these events you can’t control happened you get punished. Extra training, 1st SGT calling you personally to tell you you suck, the station commander all over your ass……it was a nightmare and I’m giving you the sanitized version.
And hypocrisy….I have been ordered to: Get one of those marijuana hiding drinks to help a kid pass the drug test, rub preparation H on a fat guy so he’d beat the body fat test, stalk a girl that was trying to avoid shipping (she had actually joined….and they made me HIDE IN HER BUSHES to find her.) and suppress evidence I found that a guy had more criminal charges than he told us initially. Yet they expected me to recite the Army values of truth, justice and the American Way. Bah! I was thoroughly disgusted.
I eventually got to the point where I really didn’t give a fuck anymore. Kick me out! My life couldn’t have been more miserable.
I’m sorry, I was rambling. I should have just told you individual little nightmares. It’d be clearer then why you see recruiters getting in trouble. I left recruiting in the summer of 05 and it took me until recently to not have nightmares about it. Seriously. Even my wife tells me it changed me and not for the better.
Typo…its 50 on the Asvab, not 550. I hear that they’ve lowered the standard. (I know for a fact that they’ve lowered a lot of enlistment standards due to current conditions.)
I know that the guys I worked with (including our first station commander) did their best to do everything by the book. When my original SC left we got…well, a guy that would do anything to have the station make mission. But you know what? I know he’ll never see this but I’ll give props to SGT S. He would absolutely refuse to do anything dishonest in the least and he paid for it with the dumbass punishments they had. He actually kept me out of the “dark side” by encouraging me to just take the BS and not do crooked shit. And he retired right after recruiting. I last heard he was doing well in a new civilian job with his family. I hope so, 'cuz he had more balls than most. He flat out said no to any hinky goings on, and he was right. Its a shame that in recruiting you often got in trouble for being honest.
Wow, I really had no idea. I’m sorry you had to go through all that. I would really like to hear more of your stories if you are up for telling them. I don’t want you to have to dredge up old painful memroties, but I think it’s really illuminating to many of use who didn’t know how demanding the job was. Also, based on your experiences, and the lowered standards, what do you think our army will look like in 10-15 years? It seems to be a less and less attractive option for many young people, and that obviously makes the recruiter’s job harder. Is there any way to fix the problem?
Heh….as my wife tells me, I love to tell stories. So heres one that it isn’t as gutwrenching. One thing that is an obvious big no-no, is to take sexual advantage of recruitees. It happens, you just don’t hear about it, trust me. When someone joins the army the recruiters have to see them several times a week to check up on them before they ship off. Especially if they are in High school, because they have to graduate. (we called ‘em DEPs for Delayed Entry Program) We took them to the gym on a nearby navy base once a week for DEP Physical Training, because it was also our job to make sure they were in shape BEFORE they went to Basic Training. One of the DEPs we had was named Helen (not her real name) and I’ll tell ya, she was hot and to be honest she had very big…errr…tracts of land, if ya know what I mean. And she didn’t hesitate to throw them in my face whenever it was my turn to take them to DEP PT. I usually volunteered for DEP PT because then I didn’t have to spend the evening making a million phone calls. But Helen was starting to irritate me with her flirtations. Yeah, I found her attractive, and I won’t lie, as a guy I wanted to touch those…err….tracts of land…but I’m married, I’m pretty honest and I don’t do things like that especially to children. Hell, she was 17! I was old enough to be her father. (barely)
And it wasn’t like I was imagining stuff. Other DEPs told me that she hot for me. After DEP PT I had to drive EACH and every one of these kids home. Helen was always last because to be honest her home was on my quickest route home. So it ended up being just her and me in an “Army of One” Van. So we’re in this van, alone and she leans over when I’m driving (and she lived in the boonies, so there was no one or nothing around us, but empty road and lots of trees. Puts her boobies right in my face and tells me that “she wants to do it with a black guy”….and goes into detail too.
I practically kicked her out of the van onto her front lawn, turned back and drove BACK to the recruiting station. (even though, I could have gone home from there.) I told my boss that I would NEVER, EVER, be alone with her again, period. I didn’t care if a direct order put me alone with her under any circumstance, I just wouldn’t do it. Then I went home. Too many guys get smacked down when they didn’t do it just because the girl said they did in recruiting. (I know, I was accused of getting another girl pregnant…which was false of course, she only said it hoping she wouldn’t ship. The investigation revealed that I had never touched her, and her no account, jobless scumball boyfriend got her pregnant….so she didn’t ship anyway)
It will take a long time to fix the recruiting problem. A lot of people think that every job is combat related which isn’t true. For instance my job is really Graphic Design. Seriously. I worked on publications early in my career, I’ve worked in Public Affairs, and currently I do a bit of web design and troubleshooting at my current location. I’ve been to combat, but that was in Desert Storm and I was in the back….rear echelon. Yeah, I had a few scary moments, but you get the idea.
Some of the former standards were too harsh IMO, but lowering them to the levels I’ve heard about is pretty much admitting the current government has screwed up. Who wants to join the army to go to a ridiculous war that we started under a pretense? I wouldn’t let my kids join right now, to be honest. I don’t know how to fix that other than time and a change in the crap that’s going on, but I would relax the hell they put recruiters through. I often said before I left that I’d be inclined to work harder if I knew I wouldn’t get it in the neck for BS I can’t control. Since I expected the punishment anyway I stopped caring. I’m a non commissioned officer in the army. I don’t need to be sent to the principal’s office so to speak. But if you’re gonna treat me like a dumbass basic trainee private, don’t expect me to gleefully do what you want.
This all goes back to the current government. Bush has fucked up a lot of shit and some of the fallout has fallen on recruiting for the military. I retire in 2 years and to be honest, I look forward to it. It used to make me happy to serve the country, but after recruiting it just makes me feel empty. Sorry, I’m rambling again. I shouldn’t speak on this subject much, since it does make me a bit angry and resentful. As I said earlier, recruiting changed me and I’m not very happy with some of the changes.
I can’t tell you how happy I was to hear from my youngest brother that he’s going to DI school instead of recruiting. In the Marines it seems that you have to do one or the other to keep moving up past Staff Sargent. He totally lucked out on that one.
The only experience I ever had with military recruiters was when I was a senior in high school. He called my house and asked if I wanted to join the army and I told him no. He asked what my future plans were and I told him I was going to be a theater major in college. He then proceeded to tell me that the army has a theater program and that I could flourish in their theater department. I think I hung up on him at that point because either he was lying or the military has decided to start wasting money by performing Shakespeare in between attacks. :rolleyes:
I am pleased that I once suggested to a high-school age friend that he ask the recruiter to take all the promises he was making (trained in a specific field, within a year, assigned to a non-combat location in Europe), put them in writing and sign them. That recruiter backtracked so fast he damn near left skid marks.
(Even if the recruiter had done that, I understand it would have no legally binding effect.)
P.S. I find it hard to muster much sympathy for the poor, poor pitiful recruiters posting here.
So you’re being ‘forced’ to work long hours telling lies to high-school kids, and trying to fool them into signing 4 years of their life away. And that makes you feel bad inside. [So don’t do it!]
The kids you sucker into the service may be on duty all 24 hours of the day, risking life & limb occupying a foreign country for god knows what reason. With a damn good chance of coming back with physical or mental traumas. They’re the ones I’d feel sorry for, not you. You participate in an evil enterprise, then whine about how bad it makes you feel.
Nice sentiments, but they ignore reality. If your in the military you follow orders. There may be some rare instances where you question orders, but recruiting duties sure ain’t one of them. Do you enjoy your fresh fruit and veggies? How much thought do you give to the field workers. Do you like a thick juicy steak, or some fresh sausage? Do you think about how the sausage is made, or what goes on in a slaughter house. Shop at that big box store? Do you care that the checkout girl can’t live on her low wages. I could go on, and on. Get real, you want a strong military to protect this country? Then the military needs recruits. Getting people to sign up in peacetime is hard enough, during a period such as we have now makes it a hell of a challenge.
These guys are giving you a peek at some of the more difficult parts of military life. Too many people take the military for granted, they thing that you just wear a uniform, keep your nose clean, and you get a nice pension after 20 years.
T’aint so my friend, so don’t shoot the messenger! :mad: