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Recruitment Calls

Lauren

The best response I’ve ever heard given to an army recuriter goes a little something like this: “Look, I’m lazy and I’m a fag. I refuse to wake up at 5am every morning to wear that ugly green. And I’m gay! Did you hear that? GAY!”

I was tempted to use this line, originally reported to me by my best friend’s big gay brother, when they phoned me at seventeen. I felt bad. I was working as a telemarketer at the time, dreadful job, and knew what a downer it was to hear the line go dead on every phone call. I let the man finish his spiel about paying for college and a possible stint with the Reserves before I told him I was pregnant. “Oh,” he said. “Have a nice day.” And then he hung up on me.

I got a phone call from an Army recruiter yesterday. Knowing that they were short on recruits this year and remembering my telemarketing days, I decided to let the guy talk. He asked me what I was doing this summer.


Taking classes.

Oh, lots of people seem to be taking classes this summer. How are you paying for school?

Loans.

Is that working out for you?

Not too bad. I was beginning to develop a smirk. You might begin to see how I’m not at my best on the phone.

Have you ever thought about joining the military? We are looking for well-educated candidates and we could help you pay for your school and your loans.

I’m not the best candidate for the military.

I’ll bet you are. What makes your think you shouldn’t join?

Well (and this is where I lied a little), I’m practically blind (LIE!) and I am a single mom.

This is where the conversation shifted. I had been having a bad week — too much to do, too little time to do it, feeling run down over medication and lack of sleep, generally feeling sorry for myself.

So, you’re a single mom going to college. He sounded impressed.

Yup.

I had a single mom. She went to college and worked and managed to save up enough money for my brothers to go to school, too.

Wow. Good for her. I was getting suspicious of where this conversation was going to go from here.

We need more of you. Keep working and gettin’ As. Your kids will thank you later. Have a nice day.

Hey, you too. I hung up the phone, stunned. I didn’t wonder how they’d gotten my cell phone number until much later.

Something about this conversation was incredibly refreshing. A total stranger, initially friendly with alterior political motives, genuinely complimented and identified with me and this struggle through school as a young parent. And then he let me go without pressing his initial motive.

I thought about that all day.

18 thoughts on Recruitment Calls

  3. But, Lauren, if you can’t defend your uterus, how can you defend your country? The first recruiter was perfectly right to reject you–pregnant women never produce anything of value.

    You know, there were some comments like this–far fewer than there should have been–in the chezmiscarriage mommy drive-by thread, between all the, “APPLE JUICE?! HAVE YOU NO SHAME?!” and, “Well, if you haven’t already bought Little Mozart, you might as well be digging your thumb into his fontanelle every morning.” They were usually from other women, other mothers, who saw the commenter wrangling two or three screaming children through the food court of shame and said, “Don’t worry. It gets better. You can do this,” or, even more rarely, “Hey, thanks!”

    And then, on Pamie.com, there was this story about a guy who printed up little thank-you cards for soldiers returning from Iraq. Just, he knew they weren’t getting much appreciation, so, “Thank you. Your service will never be forgotten,” to give to them as they got off the planes.

  4. I lied twice to people who were marketing… while in Bloomington I was passing a blood sign-up drive when they called to me to sign up for a good cause. I told them they wouldn’t accept my blood, I was a drug addict. I know, I was evil not to sign up, i was young and stupid… and you can only grow out of being young lol. Second, I was called by the NRA and asked questions about my hunting habbits. I don’t hunt, but wanted to play along.

    “How often do you hunt?”
    “All the time, but not since the accident…”
    “Hmm… how many guns do you own?”
    “Well, they took them all away after the accident…”
    CLICK.

  5. So, you’re a single mom going to college. He sounded impressed.

    I’m sure he was as are a lot of people; you are the exception, not the rule (oh yeah, and he should be impressed FWIW)

    We need more of you.
    He sounds like an exceptionally intelligent and intuitive man to me.

  8. Lauren and Jill, make your blog stop mocking me.

    Okay, so, they were fake-html tags meant to indicate sarcasm. And apparently the software’s going, “Oh, an html tag! Can’t read it, though,” and it didn’t appear as such.

    And now I’m just going to stop commenting, because, dumb.

  10. I told the truth to hounding recruiters about substance use, and they came out and told me to lie about it if it ever came up again. They really wanted me to become one of those nuclear engineers who maintains the reactors on ships and subs.

    I wonder where I’d be right now if I gone through with it. (N.B. my parents [both vets] were strongly opposed to me signing up; it didn’t take much arm twisting from their end.)

  11. Having been an Army Reserve Recruiter for four years, it is very nice to know some are intelligent caring people.

    He handled it well, as did you. How simple it is to make people smile.

  12. You know, the thing is, the military is not a bad career move for lots of people. My husband spent 20 years in, and 7 of those years were as a full-time student, and now he collects full retirement benefits in addition to a pretty good salary, thanks to his PhD. (And as a liberal, he was a good influence on his students.)

    But there’s no way I’d want either of my daughters to join.

    Iraq changed everything.

  13. Kathy, I assume your husband was an officer? IME, there’s a huge class difference between officers and enlisted personnel (and I have relatives who are or have been both, as short-timers, lifers and reservists).

  14. I have a friend who is a Marine recruiter. He hates the way people, even military, look at him, sort of like a used car salesman.

  15. Very amusing. One of my high-school teachers suggested the I’m-on-drugs bit. I generally use the laziness excuse.

    It has occured to me that something very interesting to do would be to invent a spouse the same sex as yourself (you got married in Canada or Massachusetts), then ask them if your wife (for a female; husband if you’re a guy) was eligible for all the pensions and benefits they offer families–in other words, will they recognize your same-sex marriage. Then you can say you won’t work for anyone who doesn’t.

    I got rid of one of them by telling her that I wouldn’t join because the military discriminates by gender, and I believe that’s wrong. Ditto sexual orientation.

    If you’re male, you could say you refuse to cut your hair.

  16. Thomas, yes, though in the Air Force there’s a bit less of the enlisted/officer divide than in the other services.

    Mainly that’s because Air Force officers, who mainly push paper around, are less likely to have to order their subordinates into battle.

    My husband only had to order his lower ranking officers to turn in their homework.

  17. Kathy, I have a relative, now a civilian, who was an Air Force officer, also pushing paper. It’s the most corporate of the services, and the most like civilian life. As far as I can tell, Marines are the least like civilian life, and the Navy has the most entrenched class division between O and E.

  18. Thomas, you’re spot on. I’ve got a Marine nephew about to go back to Iraq, and a Navy nephew who just got back from Kuwait. They didn’t tell the recruiter “no”. I hope to god they live to not regret it.

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