When I was a senior in high school, military recruiters practically fell over themselves attempting to recruit me for the military. They frequently called the house seeing if they could get me to sign up, and I repeatedly told them that I was not interested (ironically, it honestly seemed that none of them had known that I had to quit soccer because I could not keep up with my teammates and rode the bench in gym classes because my asthma was so severe — and, surprisingly, at the time, undiagnosed — that I could not participate). My parents had to tell them that I was not interested. And then my dad had to access their chain of command for what became the first time because they would not stop calling the house trying to “convince” me to enlist after I graduated from high school. Yes, this is actually a true story. It actually gets worse from here.

Some time after their chain of command was accessed and they stopped calling our house, I began to get approached at school by military recruiters. One of them actually had the nerve to tell me “that he was recruiting me at school (where my parents weren’t around) to see if I had the same opinions as my parents”. I told my dad that the exchange had occurred, and he accessed their chain of command again, this time to let them know that recruiters had been going behind my parents’ back when they had been told by my parents not to contact me for any reason about recruitment, and my dad threatened to sue them if all contact was not ceased. Apparently my high school conveniently lost the form that my parents had filled out at the start of the school year forbidding recruiters to contact me for any reason (they had filled one out at the beginning of the school year, and they clearly remember — as they had — not giving permission). The school “could not find the form on file”. In the absence of a denial of consent the school assumes consent is/has been granted.

I hate the fact that army recruiters even interact with high school students for a large number of reasons.