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the military begins recruiting ‘soldiers’ before they grow out of their booster seat
four year olds have toy guns and green army men
by grade school you’ve memorized the star spangled banner and the pledge of allegiance
in middle school you’re old enough to play first person shooters set in war times. you and your friends brag about how many kills you have, what guns are your favorite
in high school, rotc comes to visit. you get letters in the mail detailing scholarship and housing opportunities you could have
and if you’re poor or unsure of your future or in love with the idea of ‘protecting your country’ like the men in call of duty
every branch of the military has a sponsored blog on here because they want everyone 13 and up to know that soldiers are heroes and they should join them
To those of you who were wondering, this is a very US-specific post. What gets done to you guys is terrifying, and it’s really unfair.
Ah yes I remember how the different military branches visited my high school at multiple times throughout the year and set up their little pull up bars and had little competitions and the strong little ones got lanyards so the recruiters could pick them out
I dont even know if you’re joking or not
We’re not
We’re really not. What’s super terrifying, that I learned in my kinetic imaging major, is that our military actually hires game designers to design video games promoting our military, and markets them to kids as young as ten or twelve. Our government made friggin reality TV shows out of taking high schoolers and teaching them about the “awesome shit” that they could do for the military.
We watched one of the episodes in my Critical Media class, and it made me so physically ill that I actually had to leave the classroom and heave over the toilet while sobbing my eyes out.
This level of propaganda can and does lead to violence even amongst said children. Ask any Puerto Rican child that’s ever refused to say the “pledge of allegiance” (that’s the real name for what most kids are asked to recite every day before school starts) what happens to them exclusively via the other children who consider this blasphemy.
I took the ASVAB (an intelligence test that the military uses to see which branch you would do best in) as a joke in 10th grade to see who would score higher, myself or my boyfriend. He scored a 91, I scored a 93. The next thing I knew, I had recruiters calling my house and visiting my school. I was pulled out of class to talk to recruiters who came to my school specifically to see me. One recruiter from the Marines showed up at my house after school. When I told him that my mother wasn’t home and I wouldn’t allow him inside he tried to push open the door and said “That’s okay, she doesn’t have to be here for us to talk.” I had to tell him numerous times that I would not talk to anyone without my mother present. Then he sat in his car and waited for her to come home. Keep in mind that I am an overweight female and these recruiters were still trying to get me to sign. They were talking about special diets and training programs that would get me in shape in time for my 18th birthday so I could join. It was ridiculous. My mom said that she had never seen anything like it, and she had scored a 92 during college when she had taken it. (Then again, she had joined the Air Force almost immediately after taking the test, because that was her dream.) Shit is scary.
Oh god yes this brings back memories. I took the ASVAB on a lark to skip classes. I scored a 92 and my GOD the effort they put in to try and recruit me… This was pre 9/11 when I did it, but afterwards (post 9/11) they got WORSE. They told me whatever I wanted to do for a career they could help me but they were so PUSHY they freaked me out. I hid whenever I saw the recruiting staff on campus
I started getting a recruiter contacting me when I was 26 goddamn years old, while married to a PTSD’d out twice deployed vet.
Eventually I responded to an email with “I’m fat, asthmatic and married to a human y’all ruined so leave me the fuck alone” and he did.
At the same time he started sending my then husband letters about how they were going to call him back to service if he didn’t re-up in the National Guard (who also get deployed to the Middle East), which is actually a lie. nevertheless, my ex was terrified he’d get brought back in and burned all the letters so there’d be no record of him receiving them.
Turns out that recruiter won a bunch of awards in the state for his recruitment statistics. Interesting ways he went about it, huh?
the marines kept calling my house and mailing things to me and my little sister (who is 12) trying to get us to sign up and my mom finally had to talk on the phone to the dude and tell him that i was a chronically ill trans kid and i would not nor would i ever be joining the us military and they finally quit calling
ive also been singled out and yelled at by multiple teachers in school for refusing to stand and say the pledge of allegiance over the years, told things like i was disrespectful and was a traitor to my country and whatnot. its especially bad and military-centric in the south (i currently live in NC). If you dont live in the us, look up the words to the pledge of allegiance. its vaguely reminiscent of Nazi propaganda, and they start children saying it every day from age 5. how many 5 year olds know what they are saying and agreeing to? none of them, thats how many.
My high school required us to take the asvab. For two years afterwards I received near daily calls from the air force.
jeez. i went to school in ny and had a really liberal teacher in 5th grade who would drop little comments about discrimination against illegal immigrants, maybe we shouldn’t say “God” in the pledge, etc. and if he hadn’t made those comments i wouldn’t have thought twice about these things even though i wasn’t religious and was reciting a pledge involving “God” every day. by hs, everyone just stood and listened to the pledge without reciting it, and we never had crazy military recruitment. did get the west point letters in the mail though
I went to school in NY too and that’s where I took the ASVAB my senior year of high school and got letters from all the branches because I did so well. Specifically, the Air Force Academy wanted me real bad lol. You get the stuff about the military all the time in school. But I was an Army brat so I got it double you know?
At both New York Comic Cons I’ve been to, the Armed Forces have a big booth set up with a bunch of video games that Con-goers can try out – and a recruiter conveniently sitting right there in case anyone wants to sign up.
In my after-school class, one of my students is now an official recruit and has already missed class twice to attend his army events.
I got several calls from the Marines when I was in High School. It was like they were boys trying to ask me put on a date, just chatting with me about myself and what I was interested in. Thankfully I still had my deathly fear of intimacy with men so I eventually emphasized my asthma to get them to leave me alone.
But now in the cold light of 10 years later, that was some grooming shit. Making me feel like a special kid. Preying on a 16 year old girl. Fuck that.
This is fucking terrifying. No wonder conservative American governments are so furiously opposed to free/affordable college, housing and healthcare – if poor kids had access to all that stuff as a matter of routine, then what the fuck would the army have left to bribe them with?
I scored really high on the ASVAB tests to! They were REQUIRED in my school as a graduation standard! Without taking them, you weren’t allowed to get your diploma!
I ended up almost going into the Marine’s because I was in a really abusive home place, and the only reason I didn’t is because my birth defect showed up during a physical!
It’s really terrifying!
My highschool required me to take the ASVAB. It was really cool that I scored in the 98th percentile! But then I started getting daily letters and phone calls from recruitment officers.
The offers sounded enticing, so I went to the local Navy office and met with a Petty Officer to discuss options. They told me I would have to loose 75lbs before I came to boot camp, and when I told them I have a history of heart issues in my family he said “it’s probably nothing”.
He started telling me about how easy it was to get a job in the Navy and post-Navy, and he could guarantee me I would never be deployed, and how the job market for what I wanted to do was pitifully thin and I’d be starving if I didn’t enter the Navy.
Then I told him I was on an anti-depressant.
He told me to stop taking it, without my doctors knowledge, so I could be “clean” of the drug for six months before boot camp, and that my mental health issues were because of a lack of discipline and exercise.
Even now, as a severely ill queer person, I still get a monthly call from them.
What the fuck. They’re not supposed to keep files on potential recruits for longer than three years. The Navy quit stalking me three years after I took the ASVAB. Also, fuck that guy right in the ear for saying that to you!
KG
My high school required everyone to take the ASVAB on one particular day. If you were sick that day, you HAD to make it up. All eleventh graders had to take the test.
I spent the entire testing period in my AP Gov teacher’s classroom hiding. My parents knew I was planning to do that. So when the school called to say I was absent, they wouldn’t even answer the phone. I did the same thing on make up day.
All of our teachers offered what amounted to asylum for anyone who didn’t want to take the test. They’d hide us out in their classrooms despite risk to their jobs. They knew this shit was terrible and they tried their damnedest to protect us however they could.
Same. Our high school made the ASVAB mandatory. I scored pretty high, 90-something, plus my dad is a vet, so recruiters were on my like flies. It took me years of aggressive rejection letters, phone calls, emails, and face-to-face conversations to get them to leave me alone even though I have a minor health condition that actually prevents me from serving normally. They were still hounding me in college.
I too stopped doing the pledge of allegiance after some time. A teacher told me he was going to write me up because I’m “not going to disrespect this country in his class”. It was my History teacher who told us the whole “under God” part was solely put in to spite Russian communists.
I think my school also had weird “games” the recruiters had kids do. I also took the ASVAB, mainly because I still unsure and wanted a back up plan. Plus many of my friends (plus family) were going/in into the armed services so I got curious. Recruiters would just roam the cafeteria and God forbid you make eye contact because they’ll be on you. I told guy I wanted to study psychology, and he mentioned about working myself up to either FBI or CIA. Still not sure how true that was.
I ended up getting swooped in by Navy recruiter in my first semester of college. Of course they sugar coated everything, leaving out the real important not so savory parts.
(An acquaintance told me, that when she had a meeting with a recruiter they tried to leave out the part where even after you do you mandatory couple years, they can still contact you afterwards and the recruiter kinda got annoyed she brought it up). Me being severely depressed/suicidal with social anxiety the military is not really an option for me. What freaked me out is when she missed a meeting (much to my relief) and when I told her I wasn’t interested anymore, I get a call barely 5 minutes later from her supervisor, trying to get me to talk to her. Even now, if I miss her messages, within minutes they call me. Not to mention the never ending mail.
I’ve got a weird addition to this, especially re: preying on poor kids. I went to a very conservative private school. This was a school where we did THREE pledges every morning- one to the American flag, one to the Christian flag, and one to the Bible. (Here’s an image with all three.) I was in 7th grade when 9/11 happened, and thankfully I was old enough to see some of the crazy patriotism bullshit for what it was. The freedom fries (yes, they were literally called that), hatred of France (we had parents saying we shouldn’t have French class) and the crazy, hyper-militarism that screamed and demanded to support our troops, covering our building with yellow ribbons, a big map with pins where the military dropped bombs in Afghanistan IN THE HALLWAY, etc…. (A note: my parents are actually pretty moderate, and it was only after I graduated they found out how densely fucked up my school was.)
But the weird thing? Not a single family I can remember was military. Maybe one? But honestly, I can’t remember anyone. No marines, no army kids- seriously. Nobody. And Fort Knox is a stone’s throw away. And, not ONCE did we have the military come by and try to recruit us. Not once. Now, isn’t that weird? This is literally a school that our SCHOOL COLORS were red, white, and blue and was the most conservative, right-wing group I can think of. Andddd they didn’t ask if we should serve?
As all the other stories stated, the military is VICIOUS in public schools, They literally prey on kids, specifically kids who would “benefit” (putting that in quotations there) from the military’s bait. Why? Because this was a private school (which to be fair, may have had something to do with it… but if they were so proud, why didn’t they want their military there?) And most of the kids were college-bound as it was.
My brother, who was interested for all the reasons mentioned above (he played a lot of shooter video games), was actively discouraged from going into the military because “oh no, that’s not what smart boys like you do.” UH? WHAT?
Recap: They are looking for “EXPENDABLE” kids that they can bait. Kids in low-income minorities, kids who wouldn’t have the opportunity to get to go to school if it weren’t for the army maybe paying for it. Like. These are the same people who post the kind of “if you want free money for college go into the military” kind of crap. Like the only way these kids could earn the same opportunity to have an education is to literally risk their physical and mental lives in bullshit causes they didn’t choose.
Y’all that is fucked up.
Seconding the above.
The amount of shit I missed because I went to private school still stuns me to this day. And I graduated in 2000. I’m sure some folks I knew along the way went into the military, but it certainly wasn’t because of recruitment pressure.
This country is so fucked up.
