"Join the Army," They Said

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Now that's just mean.

We joined the Navy To see the world And what did we see? We saw the sea —"We Saw the Sea", Irving Berlin

"Join the army" they said, "it'll be FUN" they said. —Engineers, Company of Heroes

Military recruitment ads, appearing on TV or in print. There are two ways to go with these:

• One type tends to depict the military as far more glamorous than in real life, and tends to downplay the danger of violent death. Of course, everyone already knows about that part...
• The other does not downplay the danger and may in fact emphasize the risks and harsh conditions that servicemembers endure. It instead asks you, are you Badass enough to take it? Do you want to be?

See also Wartime Cartoon, Recruiters Always Lie.

Examples of "Join the Army," They Said include:

Advertising

• The famous World War I-era "I want YOU" ads involving Lord Kitchener and Uncle Sam. Oft-imitated and parodied (including an anti-Vietnam War version).
  • They now have their own trope: Uncle Sam Wants You.
• From the World War Two period, "Gee! I wish I were a man! I'd join the Navy!", with lady in fetishistic navy uniform.
• The United States Marine Corps is famous for its "The Few, the Proud, the Marines" ad campaign. One such ad featured a Marine slaying a CGI demon with a sword.
  • The Simpsons satirized this ad, in a sequence where the knight then turns into a helicopter that shoots at Nazis, Communists, Hippies and a Hurricane in a video-game like sequence, then lands in front of a screaming audience and unloads a rock & roll band. The closing tag? "The Army - it's everything you like."
  • On The Daily Show, correspondent (and actual Marine) Rob Riggle notes that he joined the Marines to fight fire monsters.
  • The HBO adaptation of Generation Kill has fun with this. Person joked that he joined up so Thai women would have sex with him, and Trombley joined up to shoot people, Colbert was taken in by this ad. The Marines actually discuss the particulars of the ad, with Person concluding that it was absolute genius in terms of being effective advertising, and that Colbert "should've rolled into battle with a sword." You can also hear random Marines shouting "Slay that dragon!" in reference from time to time.
• * The Canadian Armed Forces once had the slogan, "There's no life like it." A later campaign had commercials with Canadian personnel doing things like stopping smugglers - "Fight chaos" - rescuing people trapped in a crashed plane in the Arctic - "Fight fear" - and ending with "Fight with the Canadian Armed Forces". However, some did still have shots of (presumably) hostile gunmen, IEDs exploding, and soldiers removing rubble from a bombing in addition to the standard Canadian Forces scenes of search and rescue and humanitarian assistance.
• Police recruitment ads can be similar. Of particular note is a New Zealand ad which featured a young policewoman hauling around a bale of marijuana twice her size. One wonders if this was supposed to be a career highlight.
  • There's a British "Police. Could You?" ad series, which featured actors who play police officers on-screen, saying they couldn't do the job in real life.
  • The Norfolk, VA Police Department used to have an ad showing an officer missing anniversaries, holidays, and other major family events.
  • The Memphis, TN Police Department is currently (2009) running ads featuring Steven Seagal, in Memphis Police uniform, sitting with the current Memphis Police Chief while talking (to the viewing public) about how rewarding a police career is.
    • That's because he IS a cop.
• The Finnish army, despite being based on universal conscription for men, has TV and print ads (presumably aimed at women), with the slogan "Have a job with a cause." This is ironically sometimes used as a unofficial slogan for civilian service, the unarmed version for those who don't want to go to the army, and instead work at hospitals and the like.
• The U.S. Navy did a series of ads with the slogan, "It's not just a job, it's an adventure".
  • Parodied in a Saturday Night Live imitation where they show sailors mopping decks and cleaning toilets ending with the slogan, "It's not just a job, it's $96.78 a week".
  • Navy enlisted personnel on their first (and presumably only) tour of duty often say that "NAVY" really stands for "Never Again Volunteer Yourself".
• Averted by some current US commercials, including one which shows two soldiers spying on an enemy encampment where they say something like: "You arrived with three days' supplies...it's now day seven". (This was a campaign for the U.S. Army Rangers, and was really meant to showcase how badass and hardcore they are.)
• The current advertising campaign for the Royal Navy in the UK uses the slogan "Live a life without limits". Amusingly, on one commercial, this slogan is read out over an image of a submarine surfacing in the middle of the ocean, implying that the character from the advert was aboard that very vessel.
• This ad for the Singapore navy, featuring a transforming cruiser.
  • Another Singapore Navy ad encourages viewers to "stop dreaming" and join up. Apparently Singaporean viewers dream of office skyscrapers cruising into the sea to do battle with other, foreign office buildings... which makes sense because their ships have all been upgraded into Giant Death Robots.
• A Dutch ad was part of a recruitment drive showing people handling different sorts of situations in daily life, with a little graphic showing whether they're fit or unfit for the army. Yeah, it turns out the Dutch don't want the kind of person who even pretends to go on a shooting spree, even if the "guns" are breakfast bananas.
• The Dutch Airforce and Navy ads have a tendency (even more so than the Army) to show soldiers on peace missions; one exception was an Air Force ad that discussed the question people had "If I join now, will I be sent to Afghanistan?" The answer was: "Probably."
• Pretty badass commercial for the Dutch Marine Corps that shows the challenge of making it through basic training and earning the blue beret of the Marines.
• This ad for the Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force.
• A by-now pretty old Swedish TV commercial encouraging women to join the Armed Forces rather than work as au-pairs abroad (quite common for young women of what-would-be conscription age). It consisted of a Japanese man rattling off a long harangue of rules he expected his family au-pair to follow and ended with the caption: "Or: Drive a tank. Blow up a bridge. And assume command."
  • A new one features a movie-trailer-ish narration stating that you won't get to experience many action-movie clichés and "You won't even get my cool american voice."
• The British Army got in trouble for this. It was decided that their TV adverts glamourised war too much and didn't make the risks clear.
  • This problem was itself averted in British adverts for the Royal Marine Commandos, where a series of extremely un-glamorous images were shown, ranging from crawling through knee-deep filth to getting stuck in an underwater crawlspace. At each one, the text asked "When would you give up, here? Here? Don't even bother filling in the form." It seems odd at first, but then, like the Ranger ad mentioned above, the idea of the campaign was likely to persuade people that there was a certain amount of pride on offer for actually achieving something difficult.
    • There's a reason the recruiting slogan for the Commandos was "99.9% need not apply" at one point. This changed when the Royals found that, suddenly, 99.9% didn't apply, and they couldn't get enough recruits. Now it's a challenge: "Do you have the strength of mind to be a Royal Marine Commando?"
• The current US Army (and Army Reserve) commercials have the slogan, "There's strong, and then there's Army strong." Which makes it sound like a commercial for a household cleaner. It is at least marginally better than their recruitment website URL, which sounds like a cheer: Go Army.com. (Reports of the Army using BeatNavy.com are unsubstantiated.)
  • "Army Strong?" HULK STRONG!! WAAAUGH!!!
  • It still beats "Army of One" without breaking a sweat. Maybe they'll bring that one out again when they develop Powered Armor, but until then, it's plainly false advertising. And also invited gibes like "If you join we can change the sign to Army of Two!", "Rapidly Becoming an Army of One" and similar.
  • They should never have retired "Be All That You Can Be".
  • The "We do more before nine a.m. than most people do all day," was supposed to sound really cool, but made the Army sound like slave labor, which may be truth in advertising, but might not have been the best recruitment tool.
• The US National Guard and Army Reserve used to advertise along the lines of "Only one weekend a month, but you will have all the benefits of serving your country." This was before the Iraq war had gone into its second year.
  • NG members deployed to Iraq certainly remembered the slogan.
• The US Air Force has recently advertised that it is on the forefront of fighting cyberwarfare. The appeal of this to sufficiently intelligent recruits should be clear. (And keep in mind, you never know who may be reading this.)
  • Air Force ads tend to be very big on the Technology Porn. Oddly enough, their current recruiting slogan is "It's not science fiction. It's what we do every day."
  • The "Above All" ads featured a parade of Air Force toys capping it all off with the oh-so-sexy F-22 Raptor.
• A recruitment advert once showed a camera's eye view of a woman in a war torn house while subtitles informed us that the bad guys had killed her husband and gang raped her, the last thing she needed to see was another man. Luckily the soldier giving her a blanket was a woman. So... women should join the army to help rape victims...
  • The point being that women should join the Army to build the demographically-diverse force necessary for modern low-intensity conflicts
• New Zealand averts this trope by not showing any advertising for the Defence Forces, which kinda makes sense as NZ has no Defence Forces whatsoever.
  • • Well, actually...
  • This lack of a Defense Force might just be too tempting to certain countries if this ad is any indication...
  • The ads for the NZ defence forces tended to focus on learning skills and suchlike, rather than anything particularly combative.
• The Danish special ops branches had a recent campaign with the slogan: "You don't have a chance. Take it." Basically a call for people who want to show themselves that they can do anything.
• The Ukrainian Army has this ad. The ad pretty much speaks for itself.
• The Royal Australian Navy is currently screening this ad. You may notice it shows almost nothing but Aussies in their early twenties having a good time (swimming, eating, partying, taking photos, grinning like idiots...). Occasionally a single-second shot of the viewpoint character pointing at a radar display, unloading boxes and spraying a hose will be inserted, just to remind you that it's not Schoolies 2.0. The ad even ends with the slogan "That was seven days in the Navy, imagine what you could do in a lifetime"!
  • Older Australian Army Reserve ads began with stock First and Second World War footage that specifically did not downplay or ignore the aspects of Army life that include combat in godawful climates and receiving wounds.
• The recently professionalised Polish military cooked up this ad. It speaks of improving yourself, honour, comradeship and that a soldier won't have unemployment problems.
• Modern French Land Army ads subvert it, instead asking:

Would you risk your life for someone you don't even know? (Beat) We do.

• • Granted, those are a little old now. The new slogan is "Become yourself".
• Several years back there was a slew of "combined armed forces" recruitment ads for the US military, with the slogan "Army, Navy, Airforce, Marines, what a great place to start!". The message of which was apparently, "We don't care which service you join, just join one." In these commercials, the soldiers were seen driving tanks and shooting rifles and running through the woods, the airmen were seen flying (or repairing) jets, the sailors were working with electronics onboard ships, and the marines... were standing in formation, looking pretty in their full dress blues, including sabres, and basically doing a whole lot of nothing. Many active duty service members in the Army, Airforce, and Navy found this hilarious.

Anime and Manga

• Two such commercials appear for the EDF in Detonator Orgun. The first one even features a cameo by Catty from Gall Force.

Comic Books

• This is a Running Gag in Asterix, as the Romans have a tendency to mutter, "Join up they said... It's [insert recruiting promise here], they said..." after getting beaten up by the Gauls.
  • The most common variation being "Join up, they said...it's a man's life, they said..."
    • And then later stories included one soldier moaning that "Join the army they" only to be interrupted by another soldier saying something along the lines of "Belt it, we've all heard that before, and we're sick of it."
• A recurring theme in the old Marvel comic Strikeforce: Morituri, largely because the process for converting people into supersoldiers had the minor flaw of being 100% fatal, and your survival time decreased sharply the older you were. Potential volunteers got asked a LOT of questions, but only one mattered: "Why do you want to die?" (A solution to the problem was found, but the last stage of the conversion process, that actually activated the superpowers, still had a high fatality rate, and couldn't be changed because only the lethality of the environment could bring out the powers.)
• In the 1970s Underground Comics "Merton of the Movement", one of the would-be radicals watching an Army recruitment ad thinks the prospect of world travel and $288 a month sounds pretty sweet, and goes to enlist. He's such a drugged-out little wizened husk of a guy, however, that he drives the interviewing desk sergeant into an apoplectic rage - when he asks "Ya got any openin's in Denmark?" the sergeant boots him out.

Film

• This trope is parodied in the classic Marx Brothers film, Duck Soup, where Chico notes that Harpo's working in a new military recruitment drive; which consists solely on him banging a drum while wearing a sandwich sign saying, "Join the Army and see the Navy!". While walking around on the battlefield.
• Private Benjamin has Judy Benjamin joining the Army thinking it is all travel and fun, like the adverts (an image reinforced by an unscrupulous recruiter).
• The film version of Starship Troopers is actually intended to represent a recruitment video at many points.

"Would you like to know more?"

• • It should be noted that the fake interface includes 'Join' as one of the options.
• In Stripes, the recruits ironically sing the Reagan-era "Pick a service, pick a challenge" recruiting jingle as they wearily trudge back to the barracks after a long march.
  • The movie also contains a scene in a recruiting office, recruitment posters, and recruiting commercials on TV, including one of the famous "Be all that you can be..." commercials.
  • Keep in mind that Stripes is basically one long recruitment commercial. The military actually has an office solely devoted to approving use of military property for any film they think might increase enrollment. Stripes is one of those that got such approval and pretty much all the uniforms, equipment, and vehicles that show up in the movie are courtesy of the armed forces, and after the movie came out enrollment did go up.
• In Down Periscope, the basketball player is climbing a mast in a rainstorm to rig a light as part of his captain's Zany Scheme (they're planning to sneak past the sub hunting them by impersonating a fishing boat), and gripes "I never saw this shit on the recruiting poster!"
  • He then promptly sings "Be all that you can be" before The Captain yells at him that it's the Army recruitment song.
• While it isn't a military-themed movie, the first Mortal Kombat film contains an example that definitely fits the spirit of the first version of this trope. When Johnny Cage starts learning just how strange and unusual Shang Tsung's tournament is, he says the following:

Johnny Cage: "Come to a little tournament", he said. "(It'll) Be good for the career", he said. Yeah, right.

• Muppet Treasure Island has Statler and Waldorf as the figurehead of the Hispaniola, with the following conversation:

Statler: "Take a cruise," you said. "See the world," you said. Now here we are stuck on the front of this stupid ship. Waldorf: Well it could be worse. We could be stuck in the audience! Both: Do-ho-ho-ho-hoh!

Literature

• A Separate Peace addresses this trope. All you need to know is that it ends badly.
• In Niven and Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye, right after a particularly dangerous mission, a naval rating quips "My brother wanted me to help him with his wet-ranch on Aphrodite and I thought it was too dangerous. So I joined the flipping Navy." The {{SPACE Navy]] that is!
  • In a perfect example of Niven's Law (Anything worth writing is worth selling repeatedly.) he used an almost identical sentence in the dialog of a Star Trek comic strip he wrote, just replacing 'Aphrodite' with 'Mizar'.
• Weirdly inverted in the book Starship Troopers, where recruiters try to discourage people from signing up. Since only veterans can vote, the constitution says everyone who volunteers must be allowed to join, even if they are useless incompetents. The military wastes a lot of money trying to train and support the low-quality recruits.
• Gently prodded in the Discworld novel Men at Arms, and with all Watch novels afterwards (and some that weren't), with Detritus being a particularly enthusiastic, if malapropism-prone, evangelist of such slogans (as well as other military book/movie/TV cliches).
  • Played brutally straight in Monstrous Regiment. The war is going so badly and has stripped such a large portion of the possible recruits from the population that not only is nobody joining up anymore, but the recruiters are only going through the motions. Things aren't helped by the fact that not enough of the men are coming back, and not enough of those that do come back is coming back.
• In Sandy Mitchell's Warhammer 40,000 novel Scourge The Heretic, two new Imperial Guardsmen are introduced on guard and grumbling, "Join the Guard and see the galaxy."
• Shada Du'kal, high-quality bodyguard and commando (the two go hand-in-hand in Star Wars), while climbing a filthy wall to get in position to cover her employer for a transaction with someone.

Join a smuggling group, she thought darkly for about the fifth time since beginning her climb. Visit a side of the galaxy the tourists never see.

• In Old Man's War, Colonial Defense Force recruits aren't even told what they're going to be fighting, all they know is that the CDF can probably restore their youth (recruitment age is 75).
• Played straight for both comedy and drama in a later book from the Phule's Company. Much of the book follows a recruit fresh out of boot camp, whose only previous knowledge of the Space Legion (which has a reputation for being a Legion of Lost Souls and Army of Thieves and Whores, at least in the earlier books) comes from a poster that follows this trope.
• In Edgar Lee Masters "Spoon River Anthology" is the story of Knowlt Hoheimer who wishes he had "staid at home" and gone to jail for stealing hogs rather than running away to join the army only to be killed in battle:

Rather a thousand times the country jail Than to lie under this marble figure with wings, And this granite pedestal

Live-Action TV

• Monty Python's Flying Circus has a sketch featuring a soldier who has seen too many of the glamourised ads. "I joined the army for the water skiing and the travel, Colonel. Not for the killing."
  • "This is obviously making fun of our slogan, 'it's a dog's life -- man's life in the Army!"

Its a man's life in the British Dental Association!

• As noted above, "Be all you can be" was an Army slogan. Buffy the Vampire Slayer crossed its wires when Riley Finn (apparently a Special Forces soldier) said, referring to demon-hunting, "It's not just a job--" Buffy interrupted: "Right, it's an adventure." He doesn't deny he thinks that way. (They never say what branch of the military he was from. The Initiative is more along the lines of the FBI, CIA or NSA. It's an agency, not a part of the armed forces. Basically, it's the Supernatural FBI/CIA/NSA, complete with torture, inhumane experiments and indefinite imprisonment.)
• Complained about by minor M*A*S*H characters such as Rizzo, Zale, and Igor. Mocked by Hawkeye and Klinger. The joke's on them. They were drafted after all.
• One episode of The Hollowmen dealt with the decline in military recruits with the main characters attempting to create an recruitment campaign that appealed to young people. The Prime Minister wanted an old-fashioned ad, highlighting the qualities of "mateship"; The military wanted one that showed people having a good time - neither of which would work, as nowadays people know what they're getting into. In the end, they just make an old-fashioned ad featuring plenty of explosions.
• Parodied in The Young Ones episode "Cash", where the sole employment ad in the newspaper is for the British Army. It reads thus: "Join The Profeshionels -- It’s Graet! You Can Have A Gun If You Want! And There’s Money In It (Not The Gun)."
• Parodied in Malcolm in the Middle when Reese joins the army, and his drill sergeant says something along the lines of "How ridiculous, the army doesn't put out subliminal advertising!" and he gives a long pause and looks knowingly at his friend.
• The Victim of the Week in one episode of NCIS was an unscrupulous Marine recruiter who made promises that would never be met, such as promising one recruit that he would be trained as a medic. As Gibbs points out, the Marine Corps doesn't have medics; they use Navy corpsmen.

Music

• Almost too obvious to mention, but : "I joined the navy/to see the world!/And what did I see?/I saw the sea".
• Music example which everyone should know: "In the navy (yes, you can sail the seven seas), In the navy (yes, you can put your mind at ease), In the navy (come on now people, make a stand), In the navy, in the navy... can't you see we need a hand!"
  • Apparently shortly after the song first hit the charts, some higher-up in the U.S. Navy wanted to use it in recruitment ads, until someone filled him in on the subtext he'd clearly missed.
  • Actually, Status Quo's "In The Army Now" might be even more famous worldwide.
• Serj Tankian's Empty Walls features a chorus with the lines "I want you/To be left behind"; it might be a coincidence, but this is Serj Tankian we're talking about.
• Sgt. Smiles, marine recruiter. teach you to program computers. teach you all the skills you need. you can die with dignity
• Rise Against's "Hero of War" features a pretty extremist version of the army. Just look up the lyrics.

He said, "Son, Have you seen the world? Well, what would you say If I said that you could? Just carry this gun, You'll even get paid." I said, "That sounds pretty good."

• Disturbed's "Indestructible" seems to be about some sort of black ops soldier, who thanks to skill and equipment is seen as an unholy terror by his enemies. The song is intended as a sort of Theme Music Power-Up for the troops, since the band's style is popular among soldiers. As a band, they're "For the troops, against the war" (respect the sacrifice, hate on the cause of the sacrifice).
  • The band has straight examples as well (again, in the realm of respecting the soldiers): "Enough" and "Sacred Lie" are the most obvious.
• Billy Connolly's "Sergeant, Where's Mine?" savagely criticized the then current British Army advertisments, from the perspective of a young man who'd believed them and found himself in the middle of The Troubles.
  • Connolly himself served in the Parachute Regiment - until Bloody Sunday happened and he began asking himself hard questions, such as why, after that, a Glaswegian Scot of Irish Catholic ancestry should be in the British Army.
• "Twa Recruitin' Sergeants", a traditional Scottish song popularised by Jeannie Robertson, takes a different tack. Maybe being a soldier isn't glamorous or fun, but it's got to be better than spending your entire life as a farm labourer.
• The Pogues do a verion of "The Recruiting Sergeant" that is pretty much definitive from an Irish viewpoint.

Tabletop Games

• The Imperial Guard of Warhammer 40,000 can - depending on the world the troops are from - be made up of all-volunteer forces with much propaganda and patriotism, fitting this trope to the letter. Never mind the daemons, soulless ghost-robots, giant bugs, and the other denizens of the setting they'll be sent to fight against...Although generally, worlds that raise regiments from volunteers are more likely to provide competent soldiers than ones that press-gang conscripts.

"Join the Imperial Guard! Travel to fantastic new planets! Meet exotic new life forms! And then shoot them! Serve the Emperor today - tomorrow you may be dead!"

• The Magic: The Gathering card Border Guard parodies the "...and kill them" thing. "'Join the army, see foreign countries!' they'd said."
• The NEG in Cthulhu Tech.

Theatre

• Wonderfully parodied with The Cannon Song (sometimes called The Army Song) from The Threepenny Opera here

Video Games

• In the World War II RTS Company of Heroes, selecting an allied engineer squad will sometimes prompt a response of "Join the army they said... It'll be fun they said..."
  • Which may be a Reverse Funny Aneurysm when you realize that, historically speaking, he was probably conscripted.
• In Warcraft 2, clicking on the human Footman frequently enough will yield the comment. " 'Join the army!', they said. 'See the world!', they said. I'd rather be sailing."
  • Which only gets funnier when you find out how you can torture the crew of your destroyers by clicking incessantly until they complain you're rocking the boat making them seasick, and then throw up. They're even played by the same guy, who hasn't even changed his voice for the role. You've got them coming and going...
  • Warcraft III features footmen who, if clicked on enough, start spouting recruitment phrases. "Grab your sword and fight the Horde!" "Uncle Lothar wants you!" They also have a "captain of the guard" special unit available in certain campaign missions and in the map editor, who muses that his job entails constant danger and lousy pay, but at least he's got chicken he gets to hobnob with royalty.
  • Similarly, repeatedly clicking on a civilian in StarCraft will make him declare, "I wanna be all I can be!" and decide to join the Terran forces, with his only misgiving being, "I'm a little claustrophobic though. Hope they don't put me in any tight spaces". Repeated clicking on one of the SCV construction units reveals that... it's the same guy, now sealed into a tiny crew compartment, babbling, "I told 'em I was claustrophobic, I gotta get outta here!"
• Mocked rather cruelly in X-Wing Alliance, where one of your emails is a recruitment poster for Red Squadron—the first into battle, and the first to replace the first who fall in battle. And this is what they sent Rebel pilots.
  • In Star Wars Battlefront 2, Imperial troopers occasionally mention the Imperial recruitment campaigns with a slogan which is a parody of this trope.
• The Feelies from Crusader: No Remorse included a newsletter that had an advertisement for joining "MilOps" (Military Operations Cartel), the assault arm of the WEC's forces.
• Ratchet and Clank Future Tools of Destruction:

"Greeting, inferior beings of Polaris. Does you life lack a sense of purpose? Do you constantly worry about finding steady income? Do you enjoy killing stuff? Then join the imperial army and aid me on my humble quest for Galactic domination! Here, you'll travel to interesting places, meet interesting people, and execute them in the name of me."

• • From the first one:

"I joined the army to get money to go to college, I didn't know I would end up in a war!"

• Killzone 2's Making Of: Enemy Territory trailer has the narrator use this in full Sarcasm Mode;

In and out, they said. A show of force, they said. The Helghast war machine was destroyed on Vekta, and you guys just need to sweep it up, they said.

• Arcade game Bad Dudes Vs. Dragon Ninja wants to know: are you a bad enough dude to hit your own dick with a hammer rescue the president?
• Mechwarrior 3: Pirate's Moon produced this sarcastic quip from lancemate Dominic Paine after a particularly tough mission: "Join the army, see the galaxy, what the hell was I thinking?!"
• Mass Effect: If you speak to the surviving marines on Nepmos after helping them Hold the Line, they'll say, "'Join the marines, see the galaxy.' Hell."
• Satirised in Metal Gear Solid 4, which has fake military recruitment ads during the opening scene that are based on the style of real ones, exaggerated with tons of psychedelia and Values Dissonance until it ends up right in the Uncanny Valley. Notably, the ads, like real ads, repeatedly use video-game like imagery like First Person Perspective and unthinking, unbleeding, identical enemies - Metal Gear Solid 4 is in some ways a comment on video games being used to recruit young people into fighting real wars.
• In Bloodmoon, the second expansion to The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, the the legionnaires at Fort Frostmoth will occasionally mutter to themselves:

""Join the Legion! See the world!" Freeze your arse..."

• Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas had Join The Military radio ads which by its very nature, a spoof of recruitment ads. see them here.

Web Comics

• Various recruitment techniques are parodied on Homestar Runner in the Strong Bad Email more armies.
• The first Schlock Mercenary. Appropriate really.

Western Animation

• A Simpsons example would involve the Navy and a subliminal music video: Yvan eht nioj, people!
  • Along with "superliminal" advertising - yelling out the window at random strangers.
  • Yet again as a background gag in an early "Treehouse of Horrors" episode. A recruiting poster on the wall advertises "Join the Army, and see the opposing army".
  • And how was Homer convinced to join the Naval Reserve?

"Daybreak, Jakarta. The proud men and women of the Navy are protecting America's interests overseas, but you're in Lubbock, Texas hosing down a statue, because you're in the Naval Reserve. Once you complete basic training, you only work one weekend a month, and most of that time you're drunk off your ass. The Naval Reserve: America's 17th line of defense, between the Mississippi National Guard, and the American League of Women Voters."

• The Walt Disney Wartime Cartoon Donald Gets Drafted begins with Donald Duck passing a series of ads about how glamorous life in the modern army has become, accompanied by a catchy jingle titled "The Army's Not the Army Anymore". Turns out the Army is still the Army.
  • However, why Donald, a water fowl, who normally wears a sailor suit, was not in the Navy or at least the Marines, makes no sense.
    • Especially since his stated goal was to be a pilot, so the Navy would've been the natural choice. (At the time the Air Force was part of the Army.) The closest he comes to flying is being tricked by Sergeant Pete into boarding a paratrooper training plane in "Sky Trooper".
• An odd episode of Time Squad parodied these commercials. (Mixed with a bit of infomercial.) It showed a Time Squad unit rescuing George Washington and his men from a Redcoat ambush. Fans of the show know that the team's average assignment is a lot less glamorous. The commercial even becomes Hilarious in Hindsight after the episode with the "Virtual Washington" cold opening...
• Family Guy has "Aaaww Yeah" and "Actual experience may differ".
• In Evil Con Carne, Skarr rants against his mother and the military while crawling up a hill.

Skarr: Join the military, my mother said! The military! Curse you mother! Curse you! Curse my luck!

• In an episode of Ned's Newt, an army recruitment message looks more like a travel bureau ad, so much that the enthusiastic Newton ends up enlisting Ned into it without his knowledge.

Other Media

• Parodied in this video, in which the Navy bases its entire recruitment spiel upon being everything the Army is not in a manner most awesome.
• The U.S. Army recruitment slogan "Be all that you can be" has become something of a cultural Catch Phrase, as well as the subject of a number of spoofs.
  • George Lopez parodied the "Be all you can be" phrase by saying, "I wanted to be all that I can be, but all they'd let me be is a truck mechanic."
  • They had to change it to "Army Strong" when the Iraq War started to ruin their re-enlistment rates. Too much Truth in Television, as it were.
• Many of these military ads are subject to spoof and satire, particularly by military and former military personnel:
  • "Join the Navy, it's more than ships at sea... but mostly, it's ships at sea."
  • "Join the Navy, see the world... just remember, 70% of the world is water."
  • "Join the Navy, where you decide who you are... before we tell that you're wrong."
  • "Fun, Travel and Adventure" was an unfortunate choice of slogan for the US, given it shares a TLA with "Free The Army"... usually with another word beginning with "F" instead of "Free" being used.
• An ancient Egyptian text described in detail how much serving in the ancient Egyptian army sucks; it was probably written to dissuade the scribe's pupils from going there rather than study and become scribes. It finishes with "Be a scribe, and be spared from soldiering!"
• A Code Pink group protested outside a Marines recruitment office in Berkeley. One of their signs had the "Travel the world, meet interesting people... and kill them" phrase on it. Inside, behind the recruit on the chin-up bar, you could see a poster with the exact same phrase. Brilliant.
  • The Marine Corps' attitude is that anyone who could be deterred by a Code Pink picket line wouldn't have the willpower to survive boot camp anyway. They're probably right.
  • The Deadpool commercial for X-Men Origins: Wolverine features Wade Wilson citing that line as his exact reason for enlistment.