Recruitment

No joke, there I was…slacking off at my pet store job, taking a little nap on the clock. We were slow, and I only made around six bucks an hour. Then I heard it. Knock knock knock. Someone was rapping on the outside of my preferred hidey hole—the Dogloo brand igloo-shaped doghouse for large dogs, like me. I felt someone guiding my legs out of my state-of-the-art doghouse as I shimmied backwards like a crawdad fleeing a predator. There before me stood a man in Army woodland camouflage with creases starched and ironed so sharp they could cut you. His Cochran jump boots were so shiny you’d go blind if you stared too long. I’m in trouble now, I thought.

“My name is Staff Sergeant Chuck Ketner,” the man boomed down to me as I lay in reverse prostrate confusion. “I was sent here by your best friend, Ricky, to talk with you. Did I catch you at a bad time?” Well, this was as awkward a first introduction as any I’ve ever had. I guess I’m committed to at least talking with the man now. Maybe I could sell him a dual-purpose doghouse, after all, they’re quite comfortable, for dogs AND people. I figured I’d have words with Ricky later about this fortuitous meeting of the minds on the dog food aisle of Warehouse For Pets.

After essentially telling the well-dressed recruiter with an old Ironside combat patch from Desert Storm that I really wasn’t interested in the military, I decided to finish out my shift sweeping the store and reading up on the various animals we had in our care. What a weird experience, I thought. I’d always flirted with the idea of service, but now that it was time to sign my life away, I felt resigned to take out student loans and study science at the local university. Surely a college degree would warrant a job that’d pay those loans back. Right?!

Recruiters. Those silver-tongued purveyors of half-truths. The buddy you always wanted. The cheerleader your father never was. Man, they’re good. They can make a dumb teenager believe in his dream of being a door gunner on a rocket ship, but it wasn’t in writing, so you ended up becoming something else, something the Army, Navy, or Marine Corps needed more. Your recruiter sold you a dream with 27% interest, and when you swore in at MEPS and showed an old man your butthole—yeah, that’s a thing, he smiled because he met his quota.

They don’t lie, necessarily; recruiters merely bend the truth right before it’s breaking point. They meet the needs, they seem to know exactly what you want to hear, and are just crafty enough to omit those promises from the mountain of forms you signed but were too dumb to read completely. I learned about contracts, about what is and isn’t in my enlistment paperwork. I found myself in basic training and later advanced individual training, figuring out what the hell I signed up for in the first place. What the heck is field artillery anyway, and when do I get to blow stuff up as he promised? Recruiters are the devil—a necessary evil for the American war machine. Thanks to them, I don’t just sign documents without reading them anymore, fool me once...

A few months after meeting with the recruiter at my job, I found myself watching Ricky march across a parade field at Fort Jackson down in South Carolina. Something got hold of me during that weekend. I noticed how differently people treated my friend and how disciplined he seemed. My friend Brian—who was also there—and I decided we’d talk to the recruiters at the High Point Army National Guard unit and to see what they had to offer. We wanted to do something cool, and having college paid for sounded like a damn fine idea. What could a conversation hurt? It’s not like we were at war and hadn’t been in over a decade at that time.

Brian and I took the ASVAB test, and both of us scored very high. We signed up under the buddy system and figured if Ricky could do it, so could we. I went to the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where I was accepted and enrolled in the first week of classes, and dropped them all. This was the first time I dropped out of college.

The next week, I was at MEPS, duck walking nearly naked in front of an ancient doctor. I raised my right hand, and just like that, I was enlisted in the Army National Guard. Six short days later, on September 11, 2001, we were attacked, and this whimsical foray into free college money seemed a little more serious.

I wouldn’t ship to basic training for another two and a half months, so I had time to get myself in better shape and mentally prepare for what was to come. I ran backroads until I puked. I kept convincing my girlfriend at the time that I was only in the National Guard, and this thing in the Middle East would blow over quickly. Besides, they don’t send the Guard to war anyway.

Two weeks before Thanksgiving of that year, I landed at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and learned that my friend Brian never shipped out. He decided there were limits to his patriotism and 9/11 wasn’t what he signed up for. I’ve never been so alone. I cursed the recruiter because that’s just what privates do. I cursed Brian for backing out of his commitment to our country and to me. But besides being scared to death, I decided there was no way I wasn’t going to follow through with what I said I’d do. My country needed me, at least that’s what I told myself then. Here goes nothing…