Recruiters Always Lie
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oh Sergeant is this the adventures you meant, —Billy Connolly: "Sergeant Where's Mine?"
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So, you've graduated high school, and now you're ready to tackle the world! And what better way to do so than by doing a few years in the Army? The recruiter, who is totally trustworthy and would never mislead you, explained the whole thing to you. You ship out for Basic, get some cushy job in Intel or something, and you can get stationed in Hawaii or Germany, and you get all these great benefits!
Except that's not the case. You ship off to Basic, get chased around and screamed at by some wacky guy with a big hat, you got slotted into the Infantry, you've been assigned to a crappy base in some redneck part of the Deep South, your barracks are crappy, the food is worse, and you just found out you're being deployed to some burning hot desert on the other side of the world for the next year and a half. How could the recruiter let this happen to you!?
A sister trope to "Join the Army," They Said, where members of an organization complain about it not being what they expected from the recruitment pitch. It is worth noting that not all recruiters are like this, but amongst the military, they can have a reputation not entirely unlike that of Honest John's Dealership.
Comic Books
- The Ballad of Halo Jones has a whole chapter dedicated to this trope, where Halo re-reads her recruitment pamphlet as ironic narration to a flashback montage of her training. When the montage ends, it's shown she's on a drop ship in a spacesuit, about to be deployed, right after she's found the spot in the pamphlet she remembered where it said 40% of recruits never see combat.
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Sarge: "Don't worry, Jones. I'm sure your chute-suit will be one of the 60% that open before they hit the ground." |
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Film
- Pretty much the entire premise of Private Benjamin:
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Judy Benjamin: I think they sent me to the wrong place. |
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- Discussed in We Were Soldiers: During a lull in the fighting, Sergeant Major Plumley half-jokingly asks Lieutenant Colonel Moore: "Kinda makes you wish you'd signed up for Submarines, don't it?"
- Averted hard in Winter's Bone: The recruiter (played by an actual army recruiter) realizes quickly that Ree is simply desperate for money and has no idea what she's getting into. He calmly lists all the reasons why signing her up would be a really bad idea and rejects her.
Literature
- This is spoofed in various Discworld novels, most obviously in Monstrous Regiment.
- Starship Troopers: Inverted, where the man working at the front desk of the recruiting center is missing both legs and has a prosthetic hand (which he shakes Rico's hand with to intentionally induce Squick). Rico runs into him later walking down the street after leaving work, and the recruiter explains that him working without his prosthetic legs on is just one more thing they do to try and scare people off who don't really want to join.
- Not quite as odd as it looks: completing a tour of duty is the only way to become a full citizen of that society, so there's a law that says the military has to accept every single recruit who volunteers, irrespective of any possible suitability for the job. The trick is to minimize the number of less than ideal recruits.
- In the movie, while performing said handshake, the recruiter even says "Mobile Infantry made me the man I am today". One of the few things from the book to make it into the movie unchanged.
- Subverted in the Farsala Trilogy. Despite Kavi's best attempts to find any lies in Patrius' claims, Patrius is completely open about every single aspect of being a spy and what will happen to Farsala if the Hrum win the war.
Live Action TV
- There is a Monty Python's Flying Circus sketch about a soldier who is shocked to find out that people might be shooting at him in the army. He joined for the water-skiing.
- In the Blackadder Goes Forth episode "Private Plane", Blackadder tries to join the Royal Flying Corps after being told their nickname 'The Twenty Minuters' refers to the average amount of time they spend in combat. It actually refers to the average life expectancy of a new pilot.
- The 5.50 mark of this clip from Sharpe's Regiment.
- One of the earlier episodes of NCIS involving the murder of a recruiter brings this trope up (telling one recruit that joining the Marines would help him become a paramedic when the Marine Corps medics are actually Naval personnel, or telling another who had no chance of entering the commissioning program otherwise). Ultimately turns out to be a Red Herring with the real murderer taking revenge for having been denied entry in the first place.
- However, there is an episode of JAG (set in the same universe) in which a recruit sues the Navy for lying to her about specific benefits she was told she would receive for joining the Navy.
Music
- The Billy Connolly song "Sergeant Where's Mine" that provides the page quote. Inspiration struck when he walked past a recruiting station and noticed that nowhere in the photos of soldiers partying and having fun were there any of dead bodies. It's about a poor private who is now lying in a grimy hospital bed, and lamenting that despite what the sergeant said all he has is no medals, and a lot of bad memories from being shot at or having to do questionable things.
Video Games
- Dragon Age: Duncan doesn't lie per say about the dangers of being a Grey Warden, but he does leave out critical details about it. Namely, the initiation rite has a good chance of killing you, and if you pass, Your Days Are Numbered. It's pretty standard practice among the Grey Wardens, who view it as an unfortunate necessity for their order. In some cases, recruits are forcibly conscripted.
- Warcraft II: The Footman's Stop Poking Me quotes are thus; "Join the army, they said ... See the world, they siad ... I'd rather be sailing."
Western Animation
- Roughnecks: Starship Troopers Chronicles: Rico and Dizzy end up on Pluto under-equiped, undermanned and under duress from swarms of killer bugs. Flash to a recruitment campaign with the idealised setting and the impression that killing bugs on Pluto would be a walk in the park.
- Also discussed in the pilot episode. The troopers joke about how they should sue their recruiter.
- Inverted in the book (See Literature, above) and Played With in the film.
- From The Simpsons:
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Military Commandant: Meet the Eliminator. That's a 150-foot hand-over-hand crawl across a sixty-gauge hemp-jute line with a blister factor of twelve. The rope is suspended a full forty feet over a solid British acre of old-growth Connecticut Valley thorn bushes. Gentlemen, welcome to flavor country. |
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- In the Disney Wartime Cartoon Donald Gets Drafted, Donald Duck passes a series of posters on his way to the recruitment office, saying how cushy and glamorous the modern army supposedly is. Upon arriving, he goes through a humilliating health exam, and after passing is sent to march under Drill Sergeant Nasty Pete.
- When the military visits Chris's school in Family Guy, they show a video of Stuff Blowing Up, hot chicks, and money raining from the sky. They then quickly say this will not happen in the army but it works on a good chunk of the school anyway.
- One episode of Beavis and Butthead involved them talking to an army recruiter for the entire episode. He showed them a recruitment video that played more like a music video, with the tagline: "We're looking for a few good headbangers."