"Military recruiting is a sophisticated psychological pursuit."

August 22, 2016 7:36 PM

High School Students' Test Results Are Being Sent to Military Recruiters Without Consent
Data released by the Department of Defense on August 1st shows the military administered its 3-hour enlistment exam to nearly 700,000 students in 12,000 high schools during the 2013-14 school year, a 2% increase over the prior year. [...] For instance, North Little Rock High School tested 680, almost all of its juniors and seniors. All of the data was shipped to recruiters without mom and dad in the loop, while the Pentagon’s database reports that the students took the test voluntarily
posted by Room 641-A (58 comments total)

As usual, very few people are concerned with protecting children from online predators when those predators are the military and/or businesses.
posted by GenjiandProust at 7:51 PM on August 22, 2016 [31 favorites]

Sounds like, until someone challenges this in court no consent is required (outside of Maryland and perhaps New Hampshire and Hawaii).

Of all the problems US education has, this one doesn't seem like that big of a deal.
posted by paulcole at 7:54 PM on August 22, 2016 [2 favorites]

That's a very misleading headline. It's not like they are sending the kids' classroom test results. If you take a test called the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, I think it's safe to assume that the military is going to see those results. Wouldn't it make more sense to just need parental consent before allowing the kids to even take the test?

I took the ASVAB in high school (it was optional) only because it got me out of class(es) for several hours, even though I had no intention of joining the military. Of course, I got all kinds of mail and phone calls from the recruiters after that, but it was worth it.
posted by Mr. Big Business at 8:09 PM on August 22, 2016 [9 favorites]

Man, we had nothing like that in high school, and if we had, I would've been a bit pissed off. Indoctrination sucks. Keep it out of schools.
posted by koeselitz at 8:11 PM on August 22, 2016 [1 favorite]

My high school math teacher was nominated for a fairly big deal teaching award and, on the day the organization came to observe, there were military recruiters in gym class the period before. (Supposedly "invited" by a student? God knows.) They had cornered one of my friends and I was hanging around listening in case I had to point out the complete bullshit coming out of their mouths. So I come rushing into math late and say something like "Military recruiters in gym class. Had to defend friend". I still wonder what the observers made of that being a totally reasonable thing to say when dashing in late.

Of course, this same trip to gym class somehow convinced said military recruiters that another of my friends was a prime target, so commenced calling her at home (thanks No Child Left Behind (I think) for making her phone number available). They eventually gave up after she told them, no, she didn't go bowling with men she didn't know.

That's a very misleading headline. It's not like they are sending the kids' classroom test results. If you take a test called the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, I think it's safe to assume that the military is going to see those results. Wouldn't it make more sense to just need parental consent before allowing the kids to even take the test?

They misrepresent the ASVAB as being one of those general career aptitude test things (and don't say what it stands for).
posted by hoyland at 8:13 PM on August 22, 2016 [21 favorites]

They don't _always_ misrepresent it, but I'm sure some schools do. I took it in high school way back in the 90s and its nature was not hidden. Of course, this was in the South which is pretty pro-military and lots of my classmates did go on to the military, so maybe its context dependent. (I did quite well, mostly because I loved and was good at standardized tests in general, and got several calls etc as a result, but was not particularly interested and they took a "no thanks" as an answer).

(Also they called me at home way before NCLB but I never thought to ask where they got my number, I guess at that age I just assumed of course the government knew our phone number)
posted by thefoxgod at 8:17 PM on August 22, 2016 [1 favorite]

I graduated high school in 1992, and the ASVAB was basically given as an opt-out test for everyone in, I'm pretty sure, our junior year. Pretty much everyone took it. I took it because I liked tests and it got me out of class and I was obsessed with seeing how good i was at things, and I dodged recruiters for the next year. My sister took it and is about to retire at 37 as a captain in the US Navy. This isn't new, or news.
posted by padraigin at 8:21 PM on August 22, 2016 [12 favorites]

Holy crap! I took the ASVAB in, like '84 or '85. I scored really high, and got 0 recruitment calls or anything. Forgot all about it until this thread. Just as well. I'd have sucked at Army.
posted by Cookiebastard at 8:22 PM on August 22, 2016 [2 favorites]

I should add, the test was in no way misrepresented to us, we knew exactly what it was and that it was not a state or district of school mandated test. We knew it was a military skills test.
posted by padraigin at 8:23 PM on August 22, 2016

*gasp*

I remember just before I graduated highschool (this would be 1989), I got a call from a pushy recruiter. He mentioned my friend Eliot's name. Eliot (a JROTC kid) told me later that his sergeant saw his yearbook and asked him to point out his friends.
posted by jonmc at 8:25 PM on August 22, 2016 [3 favorites]

Took the ASVAB, got lots of attention from Navy recruiter asking if I liked the idea of submarine reactors. One of my classmates got the same call, LOVED the idea and today helps design nuclear subs.
posted by infinitewindow at 8:39 PM on August 22, 2016 [6 favorites]

Yeah, I took it in high school in '81 or '82, mostly just for shits and giggles, and AFAIK it was completely voluntary. (It sucks that some schools made it mandatory--both of the examples given are in the South--but, since the only institution that uses or even cares about the ASVAB is the Department of Defense, kids could ward off Uncle Sam's interest simply by deliberately failing it.) I was surprised and slightly amused that the Army recruiter indicated that I might be able to get a medical waiver for my deaf ear, since I was pretty sure that I'd be rated 4F (or whatever the corresponding medical disqualification was called at the time); I'd been reading up on draft dodging after discovering that I'd have to register for Selective Service in order to qualify for financial aid for college. The Navy sent me a letter asking me to contact a local recruiter if I felt like it, the Marines gave a brief phone call, and I never did hear from the Air Force (despite scoring very high on the test), so make of that what you will.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:40 PM on August 22, 2016

In my experience with my son, recruiters lie a lot, and lie when it isn't even necessary.
posted by theora55 at 8:42 PM on August 22, 2016 [9 favorites]

I was called by exactly one military recruiter back in my school days of the 70's. He as a very polite, but determined, salesman. I listened to his spiel for awhile, but then I informed him that my plan was to attend college.

"You know," he said, "the Army can prepare young men like yourself for all sorts of careers. What are you going to major in?"

"Art."

An uncomfortable silence...

"Well," he said, "thank you for your time."
posted by Thorzdad at 8:45 PM on August 22, 2016 [63 favorites]

I still have some Bad Religion LPs that the recruiters gave me. A friend had to point out to me that I was a militant pacifist before I stopped talking to the recruiters. Ah, the peaceful innocent mid-90s,
posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 8:46 PM on August 22, 2016

Also, WRT the call from the Navy recruiter regarding nuclear subs, that was and is one of the most lucrative specialties in the armed forces for entry-level enlisted jobs, both in terms of the signing (and re-enlistment) bonus and in ongoing pay, since they throw in sea pay and sub pay, which is why a relative of mine with college debts and a similarly high ASVAB score signed on for it. He then found out that another reason why the incentives are so high is that submarine duty is very stressful; in addition to being squeezed in an incredibly small space with a bunch of other guys, you spend much of your "free" time cross-training on most of the other specialties required to operate a sub. He finished his one hitch (six years) and got out, despite the impressive re-up bonuses.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:47 PM on August 22, 2016

"(thanks No Child Left Behind (I think) for making her phone number available"

Student directory data has always been available. FERPA protected students' educational data from being released without explicit consent, but directory data is still available. And if the schools are cagey about releasing it, as many are, it can be FOIAed.

Some schools are just "whatever" with military recruiters; others take care to emphasize to students and parents that they typically have to affirmatively opt out of contact in various situations ... usually, in my experience, after some parents freak out about it one year or there's a shady, over-aggressive recruiter who pisses lots of families off.

One of the yearly joys of school board was the parade of parents whose kids took the ASVAB who subsequently freaked out about the recruiters contacting them, some of whose kids were in ROTC already and some of whom had parentally-signed permission slips if they were under 18 expressly stating the military would contact their kid. Some people really move through life in a daze, I tell you what. The other half of this little-known fact that student directory data is public information and publicly available is that our Congresspeople always requested (by the official process) a list of graduating seniors and sent hand-signed cards to their homes congratulating them. Which, in the years we had a GOP rep, led to a parade of outraged Democratic parents; and in the years we had a Democratic rep, led to a parade of outraged Republican parents. It ceaselessly amused me that when it was their OWN party they'd be like, "Oh, a card, how nice," and not think about it again but contact from the enemy party and they'd flip the hell out and come demand WON'T SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN AND THE FACT THAT ALL THESE CONGRESSPEOPLE ASKING FOR THEIR HOME ADDRESSES MIGHT BE CHILD MOLESTORS (which I guess in Illinois is a legit concern these days but at the time it was just free-floating political rage).

" Eliot (a JROTC kid) told me later that his sergeant saw his yearbook and asked him to point out his friends."

Oh, yeah, this is a common shady-recruiter gambit and that one really pisses schools off because it really pisses parents off. The even shadier version is they go to the local library, get the yearbook, PICK A KID IN ROTC FROM THE PICTURES and call other kids going, "Hey, I know your friend Eliot ..." and poor freakin' Eliot had nothing to do with it and has no idea why other people's parents are calling HIS parents flipping out.

Anyway, Dear Parents, Your kids' information at school is not as private as you may think it is and some of it is FOIAable public record that you cannot hide from interested parties, and other parts of it is quaintly in the town library where creepers and journalists and military recruiters can go to trawl yearbooks just like anybody else, and once your kid is 18 and a senior you have extremely limited ability to prevent him or her from making bad decisions about signing their own permission forms and some colleges and recruiters take advantage of that fact.

(We did not during my time have a shady military recruiter problem in my district -- they were fine and I guess didn't have trouble making their numbers because they weren't super-pushy or over-aggressive -- but oh I've heard stories from other districts that had serious issues with their recruiters.)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 8:48 PM on August 22, 2016 [12 favorites]

I got unsolicited calls and letters from every branch except the the marines, I assumed because my my uncle was in the navy. Or they looked at everyone's GPA and called the people just thisclose to getting scholarships but not actually getting any. They shouldn't misrepresent what the ASVAB is, but this seems pretty small potatoes even in the context of shady recruiting tactics.

I can't imagine they even need to be shady these days, good jobs are not generally knocking down high school kids' doors, and the military is not recruiting as heavily as say 2001-2006. My brother was in for 6yrs as a mechanic and basically got pushed out because the platform he worked on was getting phased out, they said they didn't need mechanics bad enough to retrain him on a different helicopter, he'd have to either reenlist as a rifleman or try to qualify for pilot school (which is an 8 year commitment he wasn't willing to make).
posted by T.D. Strange at 8:59 PM on August 22, 2016 [1 favorite]

In 2006, the Army sent me a pencil in the mail and that was it. I liked how they didn't care enough to actually make an effort to recruit me, but here, have a pencil.

(It was actually the best sketching pencil I ever had and I wish I could have asked the Army to send me another one.)
posted by adso at 9:25 PM on August 22, 2016 [7 favorites]

I can't add anything coherent right now except this song by the Mr. T Experience: Marine Recruiter
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 9:29 PM on August 22, 2016 [1 favorite]

The uniformed Marine proctoring the test when I took it in 1991 was a giveaway that it was military-related.
posted by Hatashran at 9:35 PM on August 22, 2016 [1 favorite]

I took the ASVAB in high school, and knew what it was. I wanted to know what the results would say. Who cares if the military knows what I got? I'm either going to join or not and the test isn't going to suddenly convince me driving a tank would be cool because I got a 99 on TD or something.

In other news, it doesn't actually say you'd be good at any particular military thing, like tank driving. It's just boring stuff like spatial reasoning, etc. That is, it's useful information even if you don't plan to go military.
posted by ctmf at 9:40 PM on August 22, 2016

you might get a special in-person visit

Round here you don’t need to insult anyone to get an in-person visit. My son took the ASVAB in 2013-4, mostly as a joke I think or to get himself out of some class or other; he did well, so even if he wasn’t interested in them, they were interested in him. A pair of recruiters stopped by our house two or three times looking for him.
posted by Quinbus Flestrin at 9:57 PM on August 22, 2016

I went to a lefty Jewish high school in NYC, so I didn't even learn that the AFVAB existed until my mid-twenties. It was just never on our radar.

The army sent me a pair of extremely shitty branded external laptop speakers once, and that was about it.
posted by Itaxpica at 10:08 PM on August 22, 2016

I had a military recruiter call me at seven in the morning literally the day after I graduated from high school and I was like for real bro?
posted by Hey Dean Yeager! at 10:09 PM on August 22, 2016 [3 favorites]

(It's hard to overstate just how little the military was on our radar. I know more people - American citizens, all - who've joined the Israeli army than the US army. My grandfather served in WWII, but all my life the idea of joining the military myself was entirely beyond the pale)
posted by Itaxpica at 10:09 PM on August 22, 2016

When i was seventeen, in the fall of my senior year of H.S., the local recruiter cold-called me. No idea how they got my number.

At the time i had a mohawk and was sitting cross-legged on the floor with my wicked-smart/hot girlfriend lying down with her head in my lap. She was giggling and whispering “he’s a communist” (not true, but it was the Cold War 1980s) during the entire call while i politely told the recruiter i wasn’t interested.
posted by D.C. at 11:08 PM on August 22, 2016 [1 favorite]

If you didn't figure out that the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery is somehow associated with the Armed Services wanting to know your aptitude for their vocations, then you may have failed one test even while doing well on another.
posted by sebastienbailard at 11:43 PM on August 22, 2016 [5 favorites]

My experience was similar to a lot of people here. It was a small, rural high school with a lot of lower-income students, in a politically conservative area; a lot of kids really were interested in joining up. We knew what the test was, we knew it was voluntary, but the guidance counselor strongly suggested it for all of us and I'm pretty sure we all took it. Leastwise, I don't remember anyone opting out. I wasn't contacted by any recruiters. Then again, we weren't at war at the time.

A couple of years ago, I heard my officemate spend a stressful afternoon on the phone with her son. He had done so poorly on the ASVAB that normally the Army wouldn't have wanted him. But there was a really aggressive recruiter telling him they would make an exception if he would sign and commit right then and there. He was old enough to go without his parents' permission, but the whole thing just seemed so shady to me.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 11:47 PM on August 22, 2016

Huh. You guys got off easy (and even got bribesgifts). The Norwegian Armed Forces sent me a slip when I was 17 entitling me to free transportation to the nearest major city, where I had to spend the day doing tests of different kinds. The year after they sent me packing to far above the Arctic Circle, where I had to spend a year waiting for the Russians in the dark and cold. They certainly didn't offer to take me bowling!
posted by Harald74 at 12:03 AM on August 23, 2016 [19 favorites]

I wasn't all that curious about it at the time but now I kind of want to know who in my engineering school gave my name to the Naval Surface Warfare Center that contacted me with a recruitment offer when I was graduating from university and whether they spammed every graduating senior or were more selective (and if so, on what basis?)
posted by Nerd of the North at 12:34 AM on August 23, 2016

Recruiters were all over my High School. Probably every male in my class was pulled out of class multiple times to get the pitch. But I think special arrangement had to be made to take the ASVAB. This was in an area with a lot of low income kids, before September 11, so all sorts of kids saw it as basically the best opportunity they had. There was some kind of junior ROTC program there already, some R. Lee Ermey type with his own office and a bunch of kids who had to wear uniforms on special occasions.
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 1:32 AM on August 23, 2016

Okay, I don't think anyone has read this remarkably stupid link, which is fine because it appears to be crazy. ASVAB military testing violates the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child?!? The ASVAB counts as human rights abusing "Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict"?!? This strikes me as the kind of human rights talk that is justly mocked. I've worked with a few former child soldiers over the years and this is... not that.

If you think that's bad, did you know that every male citizen under the age of 25 is conscript-able by the US government? TRUE STORY. Not only do they not seek consent, they can put you in jail if you refuse!
posted by anotherpanacea at 3:16 AM on August 23, 2016 [1 favorite]

You guys think you're good? I scored so high on the ASVAB they told me I could be a submarine.
posted by atoxyl at 3:39 AM on August 23, 2016 [6 favorites]

Private Catholic girls' high school in 2000 here, and the ASVAB was optional in the sense that you could either take the test, or be questioned by the guidance counselor for several hours about why you didn't take the test/hate America. (A similar cause for concern was not registering as a Rose Queen hopeful.)

I did well enough that the Navy didn't stop calling until my stepfather growled "she's underage!" and slammed down the phone. (Which is also how we got rid of the Lyndon Larouche campaign.) I enjoyed that the scoring method gave you a special pen to reveal your score and that you could choose boy or girl and see how you compared to others. I scored high for a girl in mechanical knowledge (we had a series of beater cars) and high for a boy in artistic ability (why does the military care about artistic ability? And how did they get that from a test with no art?)
posted by blnkfrnk at 4:01 AM on August 23, 2016 [2 favorites]

Not sure specifically what your pen was showing you since I don't think there's an artistic composite score (something to do with spatial reasoning I guess), but if you scored high I guess you might have qualified to be one of the "Arts and Media" MOSs. Here is a brief breakdown of the scores.

Even though I love taking standardized tests I did not take the ASVAB in high school because fuck that. There was no particular pressure for anyone to take it and everyone knew what it was; then again, my school was in the DoDDS system and located on an overseas US military installation so I guess you might say we were not likely to be uninformed about it.

Then 10 years later I went and joined anyway, so I had to take it, just without the thrill of getting to compare scores with my friends.
posted by Hal Mumkin at 4:27 AM on August 23, 2016

20 years ago I graduated from with a high school class of 122, 121 of whom at least attempted college. I had never heard of this test before today. There is a lot of information in that.
posted by JPD at 5:05 AM on August 23, 2016 [6 favorites]

I just wish I had a pen that revealed secret knowledge, that's all. Judging from this and the pencil mentioned above, the military recruiters seem to have a really good connection in the stationery world.
posted by blnkfrnk at 5:35 AM on August 23, 2016 [8 favorites]

So I checked out the database on the schools that allowed the exam to be proctored, and in my city, it was all failing or nearly failing schools. No Blue Ribbon schools, no private schools at all, only struggling schools in really poor districts. Sometimes military service is the only way for those kids to get out of their situations, and I'm not at all sure how I feel about that. I don't think I feel good about it.
posted by cooker girl at 6:12 AM on August 23, 2016 [3 favorites]

It was actually the best sketching pencil I ever had and I wish I could have asked the Army to send me another one.

I feel Thorzdad was sort of short-changed here.
posted by Segundus at 6:16 AM on August 23, 2016 [2 favorites]

Oh, hey, a chance to retell my favorite military recruiter story!

Someone, somewhere, in the mid-80's, mistyped my birthday into a computer, and the Selective Service ended up with a database entry in which I was ten years older than I actually am. Which is how it came to be that military recruiters started calling the house on my eighth birthday. My father, a career Naval officer of some terrifying rank, thought it was hilarious the first time it happened, and agreed to put me on the phone when the recruiter asked him to. (History does not record the ensuing conversation, but I assume Dad told me to talk about my hobbies, since the nice man might want to hear about all the exciting things I was doing outside of school hours). When the phone calls did not stop after the first time the error was gently corrected, Dad donned his dress whites for the first time I could remember, and paid the recruitment office a visit in person.

Sadly I was not there to bear witness, but by all accounts, many Shuvs and Zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of the Slor that day. I just wish I could have been there to see the look on the poor enlisted guy's face as he realized what was about to happen to him.
posted by Mayor West at 7:09 AM on August 23, 2016 [18 favorites]

I took the ASVAB in HS (this was in Las Vegas, NV in the mid-90s), and it was no secret what it was for. It was strictly opt-in, you had to be a Junior or Senior to go, and they would send a flyer home with all students about a month before (and then again a week before) to let you and your parents know it was an option and when/where to be.

On the day of, the JROTC (of which I was a part all 4 years) would arrange the trip to the nearest recruiting center with sufficient space for testing for any students who were interested. We were back a few hours later, and were excused from all classes we missed as a result.

I got some immediate calls from all branches (I scored right near the top on the whole thing, with the critical AFQT sub-score being the maximum of 99), but they mostly died down after I chose to go to a military college. The Army stopped entirely once I was enrolled in College ROTC, and the Air Force after I commissioned, but apparently the Navy took a while to get the message. I was an Army Captain for a few years when I last got a mailer from the Navy asking if I wanted to "Accelerate [my] life."
posted by mystyk at 7:25 AM on August 23, 2016 [1 favorite]

I grew up in rural middle Georgia in the late 70's/early 80's and man, yeah, we all took the ASVAB in high school. It was presented as a mandatory test, just like any other standardized test. I weighed about a hundred pounds back then and basically looked like a stick figure throughout high school. Somehow, based on my scores and demographics the Marines targeted me as a good enough candidate. Recruiters called my home ceaselessly and I would say "thanks but no thanks," hang up on them, etc. Finally, one Sunday morning at around 10:00 a.m. when the rest of my family was at church, and before I left for work, two huge, hulking recruiters all decked out in blue dress showed up at Casa de Regular. I was all "okay, let's do this," and opened up the screen door. They said they wanted to come in and chat with me about my future in the Marine corps, and I acquiesced - figuring it was better to just go with it than keep resisting and also thinking "wow, this is kinda cool, they must see some potential in me if they came way the hell out here." Once inside, it was awkward to say the least - they were trying really hard to connect with me as a Regular ol' teenage boy (not realizing that I was a mutant from another planet - didn't watch sports or know any teams or listen to pop music, etc.), while also telling me that my ASVAB scores were like totally off the charts dude and why not put my armed services vocational aptitude to good use? Our whole talk was at the kitchen table, underneath my mom's framed needlepoint and pineapple stencils. Their approach felt practiced and was basically a high pressured run-down of my "options," peppered with youth idiom and also some military-grade rhetoric about serving God and country. During our convo, I think they each used the word "electronics" about forty times. While I was certainly not immune to their approach, the whole thing felt to me so much like an invasion of privacy that - even in the muddy hormonal haze of deep adolescence - I decided that this bag felt too uncanny not to resist. So I gave these dudes the fade, locked up the house, and went on in to work. Looking back on it, of course (regardless of how being a Marine might have turned out for me as a subjective experience), my feelings were totally reasonable things to feel: Invasion of privacy, indeed.
posted by Bob Regular at 7:29 AM on August 23, 2016 [5 favorites]

This is the first I've herd of the ASVAB, but given that the recruiters were first hounded out of the school by angry students the first time they tried to recruit on-campus, and when we were told by the school administration they *had* to let the recruiters in, the hallway they set up their booth in was blocked off at either end by arm-locked students, I think they got the message and didn't bother. They did get a copy of my transcript somehow, as the recruiter who called me knew how I was doing in my various classes, but when I explained I was near-sighted, had a hand-eye coordination disability, and was color-blind, they stopped calling after about the fifth repetition. A couple of friends did go military, but one was Coast Guard, in order to escape a troubled family, and the other was accepted to the Air Force Academy and planned to go career as did most men in his family.

I still remember with some fascinated horror discovering, four years later, that everyone in ROTC at my college was called up to active duty the day after their last final for the first Gulf war, not even able to attend graduation or visit home if they were from out-of-state. And, yes, the military knew when their last finals were, and made sure that the recruits knew that failing to report for duty as ordered was a jailable court-martial offense.
posted by Blackanvil at 7:53 AM on August 23, 2016 [3 favorites]

I went to a boarding school for artsy kids. Not surprisingly, we didn't get visited by any recruiters.
posted by Elly Vortex at 8:00 AM on August 23, 2016

I still remember with some fascinated horror discovering, four years later, that everyone in ROTC at my college was called up to active duty the day after their last final for the first Gulf war, not even able to attend graduation or visit home if they were from out-of-state.

The first Gulf War that (kinda) started in August, started in earnest in January, and was done in February?

ROTC graduates have to go to several months of training before they're unleashed on enlisted people, and units go through several months of training and preparation before deploying to combat. I suppose it's possible that a few people who had graduated college in June 1990 -- two months before Iraq's invasion of Kuwait -- made it to their units soon enough to be in the trainup to get to Kuwait/Iraq by January, but they were few and far between, and no one would have been summarily called up in December to get on a plane.

I think you're misremembering, or someone was yanking your chain back then.
posted by Etrigan at 8:02 AM on August 23, 2016 [2 favorites]

I still remember with some fascinated horror discovering, four years later, that everyone in ROTC at my college was called up to active duty the day after their last final for the first Gulf war, not even able to attend graduation or visit home if they were from out-of-state. And, yes, the military knew when their last finals were, and made sure that the recruits knew that failing to report for duty as ordered was a jailable court-martial offense.

I'm highly skeptical of this. It has been the standard for quite a long time that if you have not received the appropriate training (AIT for an Enlisted position, OBC [now called BOLC B] for Officers) then you can't be deployed. And if you were a Mustang (Enlisted who went Officer) then the Officer standard applied even if you had been fully prior-trained for the Enlisted job.

What may have happened was that they were slotted for first-available OBC schooling, which may have given them very little time (classes for any given branch are often 2-4 weeks apart but even then there's only so many slots per class), or if they were going Active Duty (instead of Reserve or Guard) that they were given orders for their first duty station with little gap.

Edit: Etrigan, looks like we had a similar opinion.
posted by mystyk at 8:46 AM on August 23, 2016

I also took the ASVAB (always good at tests and liked taking them), and it was quite clear what it was for--the proctors were all uniformed military personnel; recruiters, I'd assume.

The experience has always stood out in my mind because of one of said proctors--one section, called "ciphering" (which I thought would involve coding or decoding but involved quickly counting how many zeroes were in an extended sequence of them) was mechanically simple but time-consuming, so I didn't finish all of them by the time limit. The next section after that, I finished early and put down my pencil, and a proctor came over and told me I could go back and work on the ciphering section some more.

After starting to do so, I realized that this was explicitly against the rules and against the spirit of the ciphering section in particular, even if the proctor said otherwise, so I erased the few extra answers I had put in and stopped again. I still ended up scoring well and just deflected the recruitment attempts I got later.
posted by Four Ds at 9:14 AM on August 23, 2016

You are probably right -- this was a while ago, after all -- what I remember is that it was the end of the school year i.e. late May, and several friends/acquaintances who were graduating that year showed up in my office (I was editor-in-chief of the alternative rag) to complain about being called to duty without even time to go to the ceremony or visit home. I think I recall on further reflection some of them saying that they had already done training with their units during previous school breaks, but that's not as clear in my memory and it's quite likely they were being sent to the additional unit training you mention or some similar non-combat duty thing. Call it a bit of hyperbole to convey the emotional impact of such on impressionable youths -- but it clearly made them angry and upset, to the point where several were actively trying to get out of their agreements or get the schedule changed.
posted by Blackanvil at 9:29 AM on August 23, 2016

Wow I haven't thought about the ASVAB in years. I got a really high general score (something like 110 or so) and scored exceptionally well. For some reason my mechanics score was impeccable even though I hadn't ever done anything mechanical in my life except build computers.
posted by gucci mane at 9:55 AM on August 23, 2016

My favorite military recruiter story: my son J was on the jv football team in Ithaca, NY, when he was 15. He had a friend, T, who was on the varsity team, and about to graduate. T had never been a great student and wasn't good enough to get an athletic scholarship to go to college. His family was dirt poor. He decided to go into the military- there were no wars at the time- and took the test. He didn't do very well. The recruiter asked him if he had any friends who were better at test-taking. T mentioned my son J. The following Saturday the recruiter picked up my son J downtown and drove him to another recruiting station 30 miles away. My son took the test using T's name and info, aced it, and T enlisted and got into some great training program.

I didn't find this out until some time later and was, as a lifelong pacifist, furious.
posted by mareli at 10:17 AM on August 23, 2016 [1 favorite]

I too went to all-girls Catholic school and never heard of this till I was way out of school. I'm curious how I would have done but, despite plenty of grandparents who had been in the military, it was clearly Not An Option in our milieu.
posted by dame at 11:57 AM on August 23, 2016

Here's the deal with military recruiters:
1. They will promise you the world and the ability to do whatever you want after basic/boot/whatever the air force calls theirs.
2. They have it within their power to grant you these wishes.
3. Someone above them in rank has it within their power to negate/change everything they just promised you.
4. Fuck you. You signed the contract and took the oath. Have a nice day.
posted by prepmonkey at 1:22 PM on August 23, 2016 [2 favorites]

I think you're misremembering, or someone was yanking your chain back then.

This really depends on when Bush Sr. decided full on war was not going to work.
posted by Strange_Robinson at 2:12 PM on August 23, 2016

I grew up in a military town and came of age right after 9/11. The ASVAB was definitely not voluntary at my high school but my mom knew that I'd be harassed so she told me to use a fake number. My mother is really into civic duty and she does things like volunteer at polling places on election day. Being told to lie to the authorities made a big impression on me.

In 2002, 2003, the quotas were really high, the incentives were great but not enough to make up for getting shot at, and times were rough for recruiters. They were at my high school lunch area every week with a big display of a tank or Humvee and pull-up bars and loud music. It was hard to reconcile, because I knew military recruiters as my friends' dads and I knew the military as the employer of many of the families I went to school with. Everyone had a sticker to get on base. Everyone had someone knocking on the door to do a clearance check on a neighbor or family member. We held junior prom at the officers' club on base for god's sake.

I scored really well on the ASVAB. It was a good call on my parents' part to go with the fake number. Multiple guys from my high school class died in Iraq.
posted by librarylis at 7:51 PM on August 23, 2016 [1 favorite]

I went to grade school in South Carolina and didn't take this. But I was compelled to sign up for the selective service. They sent me a razor which kinda was a bummer because I couldn't grow facial hair yet.
posted by lazaruslong at 9:35 AM on August 24, 2016

You know, I wondered at the time why I didn't hear from any recruiters despite my test scores, but if they really did have access to lots of information they probably knew about my poor health. (Not that I wanted to be contacted, but still.)

All this ROTC talk has me missing the university job I had where my office was next door to the building that housed ROTC headquarters. I used to love sitting outside at lunchtime and watching handsome young men in sailor suits go by.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 10:05 AM on August 24, 2016

I mean, I have nothing against the military-- they have work to do. Lots of people find a good career there. I would prefer it if we as a nation prioritized peace, domestic infrastructure, and prosperity, and I wish young people had more opportunities, but until we change our national priorities...it is what it is.

I will say it is a goddamn crime that we effectively have a draft of the poor (and by extension, a draft of people of color because of how poverty works in America.) I was able to nope out of military recruiting easily, even though I seriously considered the Navy when they called-- it sounded interesting, you get good health care for life, and I was sort of hoping that more time in a gender-segregated environment would fix my gender problems. Then 9/11 happened, and it looked like there would be a big war without end, and that sold me on college and maybe a teaching career if they decided to start drafting women (nobody knew what would happen in those days-- this was a serious concern that we talked about at school.)

A lot of people don't have that ability to nope out of recruiting. I was poor but white, with a family tradition of college for both the women and the men going back several generations. There was no question that I could go to college if I didn't screw up.

At the time I took the ASVAB, this was not the case for many of my peers in the same dropout prevention program-- which had adopted my second-grade class with the intention of coaching inner-city, poorest-of-the-poor students of color through high school and into college. (I was in the right place at the right time to be included in this program, which adopts a whole class at a Title I school.) Many of the students of color who were in this same class were not aimed at college, despite the best intentions of the program-- there's only so much an extracurricular can do to overcome generational poverty. Many of them went straight to the military, and from there I've lost track, but having this so clearly illustrated to me has made me deeply distrustful of military recruiting of young people.

Who has to take the ASVAB and who's never heard of it is one more illustration of how America works for the great majority of people.
posted by blnkfrnk at 3:46 PM on August 24, 2016