They do.\u00a0 Maybe not all of them, but some do.\u00a0 I was lied to – I know.\u00a0 I don’t remember the recruiter’s name, but I bet it’s on some of this old paperwork in my filing cabinet.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The biggest lie that I was told was that lieing on my application (is that what it is?) to get into the Army was standard – everyone\u00a0did it and it was okay.\u00a0 I guess I don’t want to go into too much detail, lest there be legal implications on the flipside, but I enlisted in the Army Reserve in 1997.\u00a0 I did not understand the implications of this action.\u00a0 My recruiter promised me the world.\u00a0 He promised to take me running and work out with me to help me prepare for basic.\u00a0 He promised me that there was no sexual harassment in the Army anymore – it was against all the rules.\u00a0 He promised me that I would form the deepest friendships while I was there (that’s a laugh – I think I corresponded with a few of them for about a year).<\/p>\n
Had a been 100% truthful on my application, they would have sent me home as unfit to serve.\u00a0 Had I been left to myself to fill out the papers, I would have been 100% honest.\u00a0 That’s how I am.\u00a0 They have qualifications in place for a reason.\u00a0 How would you like to be under attack with someone who would rather die than defend his\/her own life?\u00a0 You don’t have much chance of survival.\u00a0 But I filled out these papers with Sgt. So&So coaching me on the “correct” answers.\u00a0 He told me that, in many cases, mental health issues aren’t severe enough to report.\u00a0 And occasional drug use (without dependence, treatment, or punitive legal action) is inconsequential.\u00a0 And, in many cases, childhood asthma, allergies, and other medical problems can simply be removed from existence without repercussions.\u00a0 Not that any of these situations applied to me more than anybody else.\u00a0 You learn a lot when you have to answer questions about things you don’t normally consider – so you ask about the “what if”.\u00a0 And that’s when you find out that a strung-out junkie with years of manic-depression and medical problems could be your “buddy” on the killing field.\u00a0 Do you really want that?\u00a0 I sure as hell wouldn’t.<\/p>\n
Of my military career – it was short.\u00a0 I went to basic training.\u00a0 I screwed up my ankles, and graduated with shin splints and stress fractures in both feet.\u00a0 I went on to AIT (job training) for Railway Equipment Repair.\u00a0 Yeah – it was short – 5 weeks.\u00a0 They gave us our final and let us out a few days early so we could get home in time for the 4th of July.\u00a0 I screwed\u00a0my feet up some more, running 7-10 miles every morning on already fractured bones and pained shins.\u00a0 I learned how to numb everything with ibuprofen and Icy Hot.\u00a0 You could smell me coming from a mile away, but it was necessary for me to walk.\u00a0<\/p>\n
They say that privates aren’t supposed to “date” each other in basic or AIT.\u00a0 It’s supposed to be punishable by court marshall.\u00a0 People find the most creative ways to use each others’ bodies for, um, gratification and do that in the most interesting of places.\u00a0 Think of basic\/AIT as the poor man’s (woman’s) college campus and you sort of get the idea.\u00a0 Only those seriously committed to someone abstain from the flirtation and what follows.\u00a0<\/p>\n
And as far as sexual harassment and “equality”, it’s exactly how you imagine.\u00a0 The majority of people involved in the military are male.\u00a0 Until our society changes completely and women are truly respected by ALL men,\u00a0sexual harassment and gender-based inequality will remain the norm – especially in male-dominated fields like the military.\u00a0 It may not be as overt as it used to be, but it’s there, threatening every woman every moment.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“But that was ten years ago”, you say.\u00a0 Trust me, if ten years ago this shit was going on – it’s gotten worse since then.\u00a0 Have you seen how our society has changed overall in the last ten years?\u00a0 If anything, the treatment of women has lost ground – not gained it.\u00a0 The military will only reflect that.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Now, I know I was too naive to enter into this thing and understand what I was doing.\u00a0 But at the time, I needed someone to pay for my college tuition and the Army said it was going to do that.\u00a0 And it may have, had I remained an active member and honored my contract.\u00a0 But after I got back from AIT, I went to a few months of drill.\u00a0 I’d say it was about 3\/4 of a year.\u00a0 I suffered MORE sexual harassment – and this time I couldn’t get away as easily.\u00a0 And everyone in my company already knew each other (except for the other two people I graduated AIT with) and were buddies.\u00a0 If I tried to make my complaint and make something happen, I had no idea what might happen to me.\u00a0 In reality, I probably would have been reassigned and made to press charges of some sort.\u00a0 However, I didn’t have it in me to put up a fight not knowing what the consequences might have been.\u00a0 So I stopped going.\u00a0 I simply stopped appearing at drill every month.\u00a0 They would call and call.\u00a0 And I would never call back.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I was scared as hell that they would come to my house and take me to jail for going AWOL or just for insubordination, but that never happened.\u00a0 I got a call once or twice from female soldiers I had never met who wanted to help me file my complaint, but I continually declined.\u00a0 At this point, I just wanted out.\u00a0 There was an additional element of being a reservist that made me feel like I was living two lives and I hated it.\u00a0 And the Army had seriously altered my attitude towards everything.\u00a0 I was impatient, angry all the time, and incredibly mean.\u00a0 So I wanted to try to “de-program” myself as quickly as I could so I could get back to my life and be happy again.\u00a0 Eventually, the Army went away.\u00a0 I had to pay back the small part of the signing bonus that I had already received, but after that they left me alone.\u00a0<\/p>\n
At first I didn’t understand why they didn’t seek me out and force me to take responsibility for the papers I signed and the contract that I was ignoring.\u00a0 But then I realized that it wouldn’t make sense for them to do that.\u00a0 Would you want to force people to honor their commitment to the military when they really didn’t want to be there?\u00a0 How good do you think an army made up of people like that would be?\u00a0 Horrible.\u00a0 Any sign of danger and they’d be running home.\u00a0 That’s why they didn’t pursue me.\u00a0 I was less of a threat staying home than I was participating in the Army.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Anyway, that’s pretty much my Army story.\u00a0 There’s more, but that’s the basic overview.\u00a0 My advice to everyone (except the people who feel strongly the need to place themselves in the line of danger to serve the honor of their country) is DON’T JOIN THE MILITARY!\u00a0 And they should make sure people know what they are getting themselves into before letting them sign up.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I don’t really know what kind of discharge I received.\u00a0 I just applied for a copy of my service records yesterday, out of pure curiosity.\u00a0 So we’ll see what that holds in store . . . I can’t wait to see that document in the mail.\u00a0<\/p>\n
If you have your own recruitment horror story or question for me about my time in the service, drop me a line or leave a comment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
They do.\u00a0 Maybe not all of them, but some do.\u00a0 I was lied to – I know.\u00a0 I don’t remember the recruiter’s name, but I bet it’s on some of this old paperwork in my filing cabinet.\u00a0 The biggest lie that I was told was that lieing on my application (is that what it is?) […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[21,28,35,55],"class_list":["post-69","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-career","tag-culture","tag-ethics","tag-life"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3aAvV-17","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jen.jllocke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jen.jllocke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jen.jllocke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jen.jllocke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jen.jllocke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jen.jllocke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jen.jllocke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jen.jllocke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jen.jllocke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}