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
they aren’t joking that’s an actual thing that happened at my school too. Every year. Multiple times.
SIT DOWN AND LEMME TELL U A STORY
I was in my Jr year of high school(this is around 2006-2007 ) when this handful of army recruiters started showing up on campus during our lunch breaks.Our school has an open lunch policy so for the lunch hour the kid’s where free to go off campus and eat at local restaurants or just go the fuck home for an hour and chill. And these bro’s from the army recruiters where following the high schoolers off campus as they walked to Taco Bell and shit, spewing their recruitment nonsense left and right.
I was sitting on the steps outside the main entrance to the school with some kids in my grade, some seniors, and some freshmen kid’s when some cornbread white recruiter in his 20′s saunters up like he’s at a speed dating mixer. He make’s small talk before getting into his spiel and we’re all of course like ‘fuck this guy’ and he’s pinning different one’s of us with questions to find out what we like and we’re all sorta playing along with his shit.
Until he ask’s this freshmen kid, 13-14 year old baby-faced little dork, if he like’s sports. Kid hate’s sports but goes with it and say’s oh yeah he loves soccer or whatever. The military recruiter get’s all excited and tell’s this kid ‘Oh well the (US)military has it’s own professional soccer league and we have national matches against other countries military’ .
He kept trying to get our name’s but all we’d tell him is our first names and he’d ask our age’s and told the freshmen kid it’s never to early to plan on signing into the military. He’d ask us where we lived in that ‘do you guy’s live nearby’ line of questioning. Ask for our numbers so he’d have ‘The Military’ call us and ‘talk about opportunities’. He was hard selling the senior kid’s like WHOA.
This went on for a solid 20-30 minutes until he finally left. But it was around 2-3 weeks of the group of recruiters following kid’s on and off campus.
Wanna know why it stopped? MY MOM. I told her that day what happened and she was livid. Called up our school and laid into the principal about what was going on. Turn’s out the recruiters had never been given permission to go on campus like that, they’d never called the school or district and none of the teachers had any idea they where there much-less following their student’s around town.
They stopped showing up and it was made abundantly clear by the school that the military wasn’t allowed to recruit on campus outside of the job fairs and even then none of the kid’s gave a shit about them.
An important note about our school is that we where an open district, the only open district school in the entire area. We had kid’s who came in from really poor neighborhoods, not as in ‘oh the areas bad’ but they came from one of the most famously shitty and poor and dangerous cities in the US because the school’s in their area’s where dangerous and awful. Our school housed the most student’s from the lowest income families in the entire area. It was absolutely no accident that our school was the only school targeted by this group of military recruiters.
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