Say It Ain't So

Next you'll be telling me that this isn't the real Santa.

Army Recruiters Accused of Misleading Students to Get Them to Enlist

Nov. 3, 2006 — An ABC News undercover investigation showed Army recruiters telling students that the war in Iraq was over, in an effort to get them to enlist.

ABC News and New York affiliate WABC equipped students with hidden video cameras before they visited 10 Army recruitment offices in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.

"Nobody is going over to Iraq anymore?" one student asks a recruiter.

"No, we're bringing people back," he replies.

"We're not at war. War ended a long time ago," another recruiter says.

Last year, the Army suspended recruiting nationwide to retrain recruiters following hundreds of allegations of improprieties.

One Colorado student taped a recruiting session posing as a drug-addicted dropout.

"You mean I'm not going to get in trouble?" the student asked.

The recruiters told him no, and helped him cheat to sign up.

During the ABC News sessions, some recruiters told our students if they enlisted, there would be little chance they'd to go Iraq.

But Col. Robert Manning, who is in charge of U.S. Army recruiting for the entire Northeast, said that new recruits were likely to go to Iraq.

"I would not disagree with that," Manning said. "We are a nation and Army at war still."

Manning looked at the ABC News video of his recruiters.

"It's hard to believe some of things they are telling prospective applicants," Manning said. "I still believe that this is the exception more than the norm. … I've visited many stations myself, and I know that we have many wonderful Americans serving in uniform as recruiters."

Yet ABC News found one recruiter who even claimed if you didn't like the Army, you could just quit.

"It's called a 'Failure to Adapt' discharge," the recruiter said. "It's an entry-level discharge so it won't affect anything on your record. It'll just be like it never happened."

You know, I gotta admit--recruiters were always square with me. They didn't bullshit me much, if at all. Of course, even though they were straight with me, I still couldn't understand what they were saying (no proper context for the info dump I got, etc.). However, overall, Sandle & Johnson did right by me.

That being said, do these clowns in this article really think they're doing the Army any good? I mean, anyone stupid enough to believe that "We're not at war. War ended a long time ago," is only gonna get other people maimed and killed. We've tried having stupid people in the military before. It don't turn out so well.

I know that recruiters are under enormous pressure to meet their quotas, and that recruiting is one of the shittier assignments that doesn't involve shitting in a slit trench and dodging bullets.

But god damn, this is a bad idea. Stupid soldiers fill body bags with themselves and the soldiers around them. I hope these schmucks get called on the carpet and fuckin' keel-hauled for this.

Thanks to Angela for the article.