During my junior and Senior years of highschool, the school corporation would set aside a 3 hour window to have a pair of military recruiters come in where we were forced to listen to their spiel about all of the glory and the perks of "becoming a hero."
I seemed to be the only student who had actually spoken to one in the past. When I was 17, before the recruiters came to school that first time, I had fallen into that familiar depressing point in life where I felt that I had no forward looking direction to guide me, so I decided to schedule an appointment with a navy recruiter to inquire about joining the military. I already knew a little bit with two uncles and a cousin of mine being MCPOs at the time.
But holy. Fucking. Shit.
Those recruiters are some of the snakiest, slimiest, rotten people in the world. I had explicitly stated that I would NOT be signing any papers or taking anything back home with me from their office from the beginning. I was just there to talk.
Not even 15 minutes into the conversation, this guy is trying to talk about what I see the military having done for me 20 years down the road. By 30 minutes in, after I've started getting clearly upset with his underhanded social engineering attempts (that were so overt they would make a used car salesman seem seem honest), he's trying to stuff papers into my hands to sign off on things like aptitude and medical tests. From that point on, I made it a personal goal to disrupt those scumbag recruiters at my every convenience.
So back to them visiting my high school.
When they visited, they spent over an hour glorifying every aspect of the military life you could think of, and pushing the benefits as if they were akin to winning the Powerball. I was so disgusted with the image of military careers they were driving into my peers' heads that I started to go after the recruiters directly with questions pointed at them.
"So how many teens are you expected to conscript this quarter to meet your quota?"
"Why are you spending so much time glamorizing military life when we all know how terrible it really is? Are you afraid that being realistic about the military with us will affect your bottom line?"
"As a recruiter, what do you personally receive for each teenager that you convince to sign that contract?"
Etc, etc.
Once the recruiters started beating around the bush and fumbling over their words when asked direct questions like that, many of my peers looked like they were having one of those lightbulb moments and could finally see through their bullshit, and it felt good, like I'd saved them a whole lot of time and trouble.
Fuck military recruiters. They're scum and will stop at nothing to get you to sign that contract before they forget about you when you're shipped off to Georgia for 28 weeks. They don't care about you.