[Rumor]

r blog � in the news

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.”
Manning, however, disagrees with the ease the recruiter describes.
“I would believe it’s not as easy as he would lead you to believe it is,” he said.

I'll start by saying, NO, I do NOT frequent this site. I was merely looking for a picture of O'Donnell for another thread and came across this.

Now that it's out of the way.

Is it really so hard to recruit people that they have to flat out lie? From my previous experiences with the recruiters, I know that sometimes they will tell you what you want to hear (read: not lie) to get you to enlist. To lie to potentional recruits and help them cheat to get in is ludicris. There has to be plenty of young men and women that all willing to go. My older brother ships off for basic this month, if he is willing to go, so should many more.

[subego]

I sense a quota being behind this.

[Warren Pease]

We had recruiters at our school the other day and several students said that the recruiters told them they could enlist and they could opt-out of going to Iraq/Afghanistan. Right...

[subego]

Originally Posted by Warren Pease 

We had recruiters at our school the other day and several students said that the recruiters told them they could enlist and they would have the option of NOT going to Iraq/Afghanistan to fight. Right...

Isn't this, like, half-true?

You can sign-up for something specific, the question is whether that's where the military wants to put you.

I can see them phrasing something like this very carefully to leave the impression they could opt-out, some of which got lost in translation.

Or they could have flat-out lied, I just see that as less likely when they're in someone else's territory, if you get my meaning.

[Warren Pease]

Originally Posted by subego 

Isn't this, like, half-true?

You can sign-up for something specific, the question is whether that's where the military wants to put you.

I can see them phrasing something like this very carefully to leave the impression they could opt-out, some of which got lost in translation.

Or they could have flat-out lied, I just see that as less likely when they're in someone else's territory, if you get my meaning.

I'm sure that's true for some specialized jobs. I got this secondhand so I'm not sure how things were phrased exactly. But it makes more sense for the Armed Forces to exagerate that possibility.