Ever heard the phrase \plausible deniability?"" It's a state in which someone can purposely mislead without technically lying. No one makes more use of it as a tactic than military recruiters.
The stories range from overt to fairly subtle. One enlistee reported to his recruiter that he had a metal screw in his leg from a previous surgery, which is a no-no for people enlisting in the military. Without uttering a word, the recruiter wrote on a piece of paper, ""You never had surgery."" This allowed the recruit to enlist and the recruiter to claim credit for a successful enlistment. Naturally, if the screw were discovered, the blame would be placed solely on the enlistee because the recruiter could plausibly deny telling him to lie.
Another recruit came with a friend into a recruiter's office last July, just before she was due to report to boot camp, wanting to know if she would be sent to Iraq. The recruiter gave a meandering answer that seemed to indicate that she would not be. She is currently a private first class and is waiting for what she now considers the inevitable deployment order. I asked her what she thought of the stop-loss program, which allows the Pentagon to arbitrarily extend soldiers' tours of duty past their expected discharge dates. She had no idea what it was.
Her friend, a freshman at UW-Madison who considered enlisting and then decided against it, said that recruiters often ""give you answers that lead you to believe that what you want to hear is true."" She described her own experience listening to a recruiter's spiel that devoted not a single word to Iraq. When she asked specifically about it, the recruiter said casually, ""Oh, that.""
She adds, ""It's not really [the recruiters'] fault. They're under so much pressure to meet their recruiting targets; otherwise their careers go nowhere.""
It's bad enough that an atmosphere exists in which many recruiters feel they must deliver their recruits by any means necessary, even if it means cutting legal and ethical corners and playing down the very real risks that entailed in wartime enlistment. What's even worse is that this seeming inability to give straight answers to the American public appears to stretch all the way from recruiters to mid-level bureaucrats to Donald Rumsfeld.
I telephoned the U.S. Army Recruiting Center in University Square and was informed that due to several negative stories in The Daily Cardinal and The Badger Herald, interview requests had to go through the public affairs department of the U.S. Army Recruiting Battalion in Milwaukee.
When I called Milwaukee, public relations officer Pat Grobschmidt answered my questions, but declined to grant me an interview with a recruiter. Ms. Grobschmidt said that it was impossible to give a ""probability factor"" of what a recruit's chances are of being deployed to Iraq but stressed that ""Everybody who joins knows fully what the Army is ... everything [recruits] should know, it's all in the contract."" She said she could not speak about recruiters who rushed recruits through the lengthy contract (says the previously mentioned private first class: ""There were so many [pages] that I quit reading them"") or whether they had a policy requiring them to inform recruits of the potential risks. ""That's something you'd need to ask a recruiter directly,"" she said.
Ms. Grobschmidt referred me to the Department of the Army when I asked about the fact that GoArmy.com lists a maximum six-year service requirement when the real number is eight years plus any stop-loss time.
The spokesperson for the Department of the Army, a lieutenant colonel who did not want her name used, said of the website's inaccuracy, ""It may just be someone didn't write it as clearly as they could have.""
On stop-loss, she at first referred me to the Department of Defense. Then she reiterated that the usual period of combat duty is three months before deployment, 12 months ""boots on the ground,"" and three months after, with the Army reserving the right to extend ""boots on the ground"" time for special circumstances such as the Iraqi elections.
I asked if such extensions were for fixed or indefinite amounts of time. Just like the recruiters, she gave a roundabout non-answer. I asked again. She asked suspiciously what I was writing. I told her again and asked again whether the stop-loss extensions were for fixed or indefinite time periods. She said there was another person in her office that had more expertise in this area. I asked if I could speak to him. She refused, telling me to check the website instead of talking to them. It was obvious that my question was not going to be answered and that this conversation had run its course.
My brief odyssey with the U.S. Army was more than enough to dispel any myths I may have had about the military being a bastion of order, equality and efficiency. At every level I was given the run-around, first on recruiter tactics, then on GoArmy.com's misleading length-of-service information and finally on the amount of time soldiers could be stuck in Iraq under stop-loss.
My inconvenience, however, is nothing compared to that of real enlistees, many of whom sign up to get money for college but end up being misled about the nature and duration of their service. It is sadly apparent that for the military officials who maintain this oppressive system, the ""Honor"" part of ""Duty, Honor, Country,"" deserves to be called into serious question.
Nick Barbash is a sophomore majoring in political science and international relations. He can be reached at opinion@dailycardinal.com. His column runs every Thursday. in
The Daily Cardinal.
