A Boring Dystopia

Their recruiting offices were set up directly across the street from my daughter's high school right next to the Burger King where all the seniors went to lunch.

Shady as fuck

I went to highschool and university in the US - I was lucky that I got a scholarship and that covered pretty much all my tuition costs.

But I had a friend, one year older than me, who joined and served in the US army for something like 2 years just so he could get his university costs covered and to save some money for living expenses.

It may not be intentional, but the high cost of higher education is an excellent recruiting tool for the US military.

It's creepy that they're allowed to text children without their express consent. Assuming that this is a real text exchange and that OOP didn't wilfully give the recruiter their number earlier.

I still fondly remember my friend Bob Niederider from high school in the '80s. One day an Army recruiter came to talk to our history class, and at the end he asked if anybody had any questions. Bob raised his hand and said "yeah I have a question: does napalm still stick to kids?" I didn't really appreciate this at the time - and the recruiter certainly didn't, either.

Army recruiters in your school that somehow use social media to contact you?

Institutionalised creepiness.

Seeing the army recruitment at comic Con always skeeves me out. I see them talking to 16-17 year old socially awkward kids who don't know any better. Really predatory.

I remember when the Xbox 360 came out, I was in high school.

The army brought a Ford Excursion that looked fresh off the Pimp my Ride show, with a huge flat screen that flipped down out of the back, 4 huge subs, and the current football game playing.

You could only play the Xbox if you signed up.

Sadly all the branches have one at the schools. I made the mistake of taking the ASVAB test in high school to get out of class, scored well and was hounded by all of these guys. The marine recruiter showed up at my house carrying a CRT TV/VHS combo to try and convince me to join lol

I’ll go against the grain here.

I joined not long after high school because I wasn’t gonna be able to pay for college, not that I was a good student anyway.

Spent most of my 4 year Air Force enlistment in the UK doing what I wanted - sysad, basically. Never deployed.

Got out and worked for increasingly higher pay and now I make $250k+ without a college degree.

It was required in my school to take the ASVAB. If we missed we'd face repercussions. I purposely answered questions wrong-- not all of them because it would look too obvious, but I apparently still scored high enough that they still considered me. I got my results in class, we had someone from the military come speak with us and try to get us to sign up, and even text messages.

Shit was so fucking annoying.

I asked a friend of mine from where I used to live if she had to take it and she asked me what the fuck I was talking about.

I mean, shit, I guess when you live in a state that is known for having awful levels of education they figure they can shove you in the military instead.

...Or football.

I wasn't going to join anyway, but the military recruiter who came to my school in the 90s ensured I wouldn't enlist.

He ended literally ended every phrase or clause with "'n stuff." And I do mean literally. Every phrase or clause.

It went like this:

"If you wanna join the army 'n stuff, you gotta get fit 'n stuff because basic training ain't easy 'n stuff but if you start getting fit now, you'll do fine 'n stuff."

For 45 fucking minutes.

Yup. Although it's not generally 1 per school. More like 1 per 10 schools. No different than job recruiters for any other field.

War is lame. It's just a bunch of people killing each other while the real people in power sit in comfy chairs watching it all unfold. Can we just all get along?

Oh wait, you have oil? Oh, um, he hit me first. 💥🔫⚔️🛢️💯

I remember mowing the lawn at home in the early 2000s when an Army recruiter pulled up and tried to get me to sign up. We lived in a cul-de-sac, so he was clearly there for me. I was 17 at the time.

The older I get, the more creeped out I am that they showed up unsolicited and talked to me without one of my parents present.

Hi I'm SSG Douchenozzle, ever had a nightmare that you can't wake up from? With PTSD we can make that your reality.

Wait till OP hears about mandatory service in other countries.

Imma be real with you, every country that has a military recruits from schools. Lots of countries don't even ask, they just make you go in anyway. America isn't an oddity at this.

We had a recruiter 20 years ago. The kids are smarter these days tho it seems.

It's pretty fucked, honestly. They regularly posted up in the lunchroom at my school, recruiting students with promises of scholarships.

We didn't get text messages like this, but I'm not surprised to see it. I do wonder how they get the numbers though. Is it just data broker bullshit or is the school system selling out their own students' information?

I've got forced military service, but my country ain't at war, so I've just gotta work 6 months in shitty jobs, that are necessary for society for free. Oh, and your free time in the barracks consists of drinking beer, playing cards and smoking

Wait till you learn about places with conscription.

I went to college in my 30s and got texts and calls from recruiters for months. I never knowingly gave my contact info to them, so I'm assuming they got it from the school.

When i was in high school 2003, my physics class devoted an entire period to a military recruiter... Sufficed to say, only the redneck kids were interested.

When I was in high school, during the last 3 months of the school year ... I forget if they were the Army or the Marines, but they had a table with a display and two guys in the hallway right outside the cafeteria.

That waa back when the coolest phone you could have was a Motorola Razr and computers still had mice with rubber balls instead of lasers... MySpace era. So they just set up in the most highly foot trafficked area of the school.

I had a very anti-war sociology professor that had been protesting since vietnam. Despite his qualms with military industrial complex, he would always say that the the military is the last vestige of upward mobility in the united states as it's one of the few places where you can enter a playing field that is somewhat leveled for new entries, have merit impact your growth, and get access things like subsidized education. Sure there's still racism, sexism, etc. but in terms of economic mobility it provides a decent ladder.

You'll probably be shipped off to Africa at some point. America isn't interested in oil anymore, it's all about them minerals so we can build them high tech weapons.