From a Boston Globe article posted over at truthout. What I don’t like about this article is that they never give a full accounting of recruiters. It played them up as all being the “lie, cheat, and steal” types just to get warm bodies in the military.

Some do, some don’t. It all depends on the recruiter. Some are geared toward just pulling in bodies and making quotas. Those are the ones you usually hear about as liars and cheaters because they pissed people off. But there are also a number of recruiters that are good folks trying to find people that really want to serve and can fill much-needed vacancies in the service. They want to match up jobs with people that want to be there… that’s their job.

I’ve met a number of them when I was working on computer systems at Headquarters Recruiting Service for the Air Force (and had to go out to recruiter sites to update software), and they’re just people… people with a job to do. Some are pushy and some are even willing to discourage potential candidates for the right reasons.

One recruiter actually let me talk to a classroom full of students, and he gave me an open forum to discuss my experiences in the military. I told them about destroying my knee, about the kind of things you go through for POW resistance training, about seeing bodies lined up at the port mortuary, about getting persecuted by the civilian populations around some military bases (just for being military) and about nearly getting killed just following orders. But I also told them about the confidence I gained, about the hundreds of friends I made that I could always count on, about how I had gained experience in a career field I was already getting civilian job offers on, and about finding the extra bit of discipline I needed to chase my dreams.

Just like any job, there’s good and bad, and the military’s no different. For some people, it’s still a good career option. But I doubt you’ll see many of the counter-recruiters encouraging people to join the military even if it could be a good career possibility for them. That’s not in their job agenda description.