It is Good Friday, 07 April 2023. Yesterday, after months of of waiting ever so impatiently I got the email: I have hard copy orders bringing me and my family back to Fort Bragg. I know what Brigade I will be in, but not what specific unit. We are thankful to have been so fortunate as to get orders back to Bragg but also saddened that our time here is coming to a close.
It hardly seems like it's been 2.5 years since we moved here to start my time in recruiting; I guess that time really does start to slip away the older you get. My folks are pretty sad to come face to face with the impending time line of my change of station/new assignment. I don't blame them and sympathize with them having kids of my own and imagining myself in the same shoes. Still, I must do what I have to do. I cannot sustain my family comfortably here and I feel called back to the service of the troops; I secretly wish to go back to being a platoon sergeant and dealing with all the nonsense of a staff position for a chance to interact with young troopers again. Only 3 years ago I felt the exact opposite but having seen the other side of the coin I would rather deal with the operational Army instead of the recruiting side.
I would like to reflect on some lessons or wisdom learned while here in USAREC. Certainly I will come out the other side a little wiser, a little older and perhaps with a slower run time but I will take the good with the bad.
1) When your outcomes are reliant on human decisions (Human decisions being a choice that is made both with the logical and emotional sides of your mind) you can only hope to influence the outcome; at the end of the day, it's a roll of the dice and you have to roll with the punches. For example, you can talk an applicant logically into joining but they may wrestle with the emotional aspect of leaving "home" and may go through the entire process to enlist but not sign a contract at literally the last minute. When this happens, as it has happened to me, I chalk it up to the game and try to move on without holding too much against them.
2) Honesty is the best policy. The truth beneath a lie will almost always come to bite you in the rear sooner or later and almost always with much more consequence than you would have suffered from an initial truth telling. This is especially true when dealing with administrative paperwork that gets saved to a database that never deletes but only archives any and all submissions. I could, and I have before, looked at every single paper I signed at 19 years old back in 2013 when I was in the recruiters office. There is no foreseeable future where this system is to go offline.
3) If something is free then you are the product. This applies in many different areas of life but I found myself seeing how the Army uses tactics of "free" to gain a product, outcome or data. The table set up is the perfect example: I sit at a table with all my Army goodies and a young man comes up to inquire. I make some small talk about the Army, the young man's interest and offer up a free item. throughout the conversation I get a first/last name, age, approx ht/wt, some personal interests/family history and at the end I ask simply for an email or phone number to be written down on the sign in sheet so I can prove to my boss I talked to people that day. The young man having received a "free" gift will feel in some way obliged, happily or warily, to provide the contact info and then a farewell is initiated. Rinse and repeat. At the end of the day I build this newly acquired profile into the system for all Army recruiters in my station to have access to start solicitation. So many others will do something in the same manner, I have become very wary.
There is more I learned, probably some more important lessons than this but I just wanted to jot some things down today.