Terminal Lance #504 “Recruiting Duty”

I could never be a recruiter. There’s something rather uneasy to me about targeting high school kids and propositioning them on behalf of Uncle Sam. As well, you have to be a pretty good salesman, and I’m painfully too honest for that line of work.

As a thought experiment, I like to imagine how the military would be if they raised the minimum enlistment age to 21 or even 25. How many people would actually enlist with just a little bit more life experience under their belts? How much less stupid would enlisted life be on a daily basis if everyone was just a bit older? On some level, these numbers seem arbitrary, but if a six month deployment can separate a Senior Lance Corporal from BootyMcBootFuck Boot Face, surely a few years would be night and day different.

With that said, there are of course benefits to doing the enlistment thing younger rather than older. For starters, by the time I got out and was using my GI Bill, I was only 23. That’s not too bad, considering college is filled with 18-22 year olds and I didn’t want to be the super old guy on campus.

As well, and probably more importantly, 18-24 is the perfect age range to be able to get the shit beat out of you every day and bounce back like it’s nothing.

You’ll be doing a lot of that in the Corps.