Now that's just mean.
"Oh Sergeant is this the adventures you meant,
When I put my name down on the line
All that talk of computers, and sunshine and skis
I'm asking you Sergeant, where's mine?"
When I put my name down on the line
All that talk of computers, and sunshine and skis
I'm asking you Sergeant, where's mine?"
— Billy Connolly, "Sergeant Where's Mine?"
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 free college, then a cushy desk 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 your head shaved, then get chased around and screamed at by some wacky guy with a big hat, you got slotted into the Infantry, digging trenches and filling sandbags. And now you've been assigned to a crappy base in the middle of nowhere, your barracks are crappy, the food is unpalatable, and you just found out you're being deployed to a Bleak Border Base or to some burning hot desert on the other side of the world for the next year and a half. Free college? You can take online courses in your off-hours. How could the recruiter let this happen to you?!
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. Note that this trope also applies to recruitment advertisements, known for pushing a convincingly glamorized depiction of the military that downplays the risk of violent death.
Compare with Propaganda Machine. See also Fence Painting. If the actual phrase '"Join the Army," They Said' is used by a disillusioned character bemoaning their situation, then it crosses into Advice Recollection Snark.
Truth in Television, unfortunately. Also Older Than Dirt, as the ancient Egyptian text Instructions of the Scribe Wenemdiamun
(ca. 1878-1839 BCE) describes in detail how lousy the soldier's life was as a pushback against the trope. It finishes with "Be a scribe, and be spared from soldiering!"
Examples:
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Advertising
- Some recruitment commercials can get a little absurd, like this one for the American Marines which feature a giant sci-fi style assault course, magic swords, and a huge cgi monster all trying to imply that American Marines are some sort of superheroes (hopefully no recruits take such things seriously).
Comic Books
- Asterix: A Running Gag is hapless Roman soldiers muttering "'join the army', they said", usually through a mouthful of missing teeth after having been beaten senseless by Gauls.
- 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.
Sarge: "Don't worry, Jones. I'm sure your chute-suit will be one of the 60% that open before they hit the ground."
- G.I. Joe
- Heavy weapons specialist Roadblock enlisted after a recruiter, awed by his size, told the aspiring chef he could learn to cook in the army. Roadblock transferred to infantry very quickly, having found army kitchens and menus substandard at best.
- Crankcase was a stock car racer who felt bored by his work. That's when he was spotted by "a recruiting sergeant with a crooked smile" and promised "speed and glory". Crankcase does get to drive pretty fast in the A.W.E. Striker, but he's far from satisfied with the slow pace of everyday military life.
- Marshal Law the titular Anti-Hero was originally inspired by his childhood hero to become a hero like him, recruited to fight in "The Zone" and.....ended as shell shocked veteran, who hates "heroes" (including himself).
- Sturmtruppen has rather creative recruiters, who once convinced a guy to enroll by claiming he was signing in for a military-style vacation, and even warned him about how the other vacationers may try and convince him he's actually in the army as a prank. While he's a friendly and actually competent soldier, his continued insistence that he's on vacation and the various military activities are recreation drive the other soldiers mad, and ends up walking on an anti-personnel mine because the soldiers couldn't make him realize the truth of the situation.
- In another occasion soldier Sigfriend von Nibelungen dropped out of college and joined the army after hearing how wonderful and honorable it would be joining the army and dying for the country in a field of wheat - and actually went to the sergeant to ask where the closest field of wheat was for his glorious death. He ends up walking on a mine he had set up himself earlier that day and lose eyes, legs, ears, eyes and nose, and as he lies in the hospital he wonders "Maybe they lied to me?".
Films — Live-Action
- Mortal Kombat (1995) provides a non-military example: Johnny Cage visits his instructor, who suggests that, as a break from his acting career with less-than-stellar extras, he should join a certain Mortal Kombat tournament. Not only is the prize money good, he'll get to fight stronger opponents, which may hone his martial arts skills and boost his career in the future. His master is actually the tournament organizer, Shang Tsung, disguised as the instructor whom he killed, and Johnny never finds out. In the tournament, Johnny witnesses just how weird and dangerous the tournament is—what with a soul-sucking sorcerer, a four-armed hulking man, a cryomancer who literally breaks people like a popsicle, amongst others... He then remarks to his friend that he's been 'recruited' to participate in something weirder than he bargained for.
Johnny: Come to a little tournament, he said. Good for the career, he said. Yeah, right...
- The entire premise of Private Benjamin:
Judy Benjamin: I think they sent me to the wrong place.
Capt. Lewis: Uh-huh.
Judy Benjamin: See, I did join the army, but I joined a different army. I joined the one with the condos and the private rooms. - At the start of The Scavengers, one of the troopers is singing a song about the lies he was told before joining; primarily "the cavalry ride horse, walk in infantry". It soon transpires that several members of the troop are walking because their horses have died.
- Solo. Han joins the Imperial military to become a pilot. The recruiter tells him "We'll have you flying in no time!" Gilligan Cut to Han getting blown through the air as a trooper on a muddy battlefield three years later. In fairness, he had been assigned to flight training as promised, but was demoted to Cannon Fodder for reasons Han doesn't really explain.note
- From Stripes
Russell Ziskey: I'm gonna kill you, damn you! Where's the great pay? Where's the travel? Where's the Winnebago, Goddamnit!
- Ironically, they eventually get assigned to Italy to guard a weaponized Winnebago.
- 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?"
Jokes
- A seaman complains to his captain that the recruiters promised that joining the Navy would let him see the world, but so far they've only seen ocean, ocean and more ocean. The captain reminds him that 75% of the world's surface is ocean.
Literature
- In his autobiography Baa Baa Black Sheep, Greg "Pappy" Boyington (of Black Sheep Squadron fame) relates how the recruiter for the Flying Tigers told him his job would be easy as he would be shooting down unarmed and obsolete transport planes flown by Japanese pilots, who as everyone knew couldn't fly properly because they all wore glasses.
- Bill the Galactic Hero (a specific parody of Starship Troopers) features an over-the-top parody example who recruits Bill using every tactic from Blatant Lies to hypnosis. And then a Distant Finale shows that Bill ends his military career as an ethics-free recruiting sergeant who uses the same tactics to recruit his younger brother, just to fulfill his quota so he'll get out of the military earlier.
- This is spoofed in various Discworld novels, most obviously in Monstrous Regiment.
- 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.
- Quite literally in The Forever War. Mandella and Marygay leave the military and are told they can return as instructors at their choice of location. They agree, and are assigned as instructors on a base on the Moon, far from the fighting... for about an hour. Then they receive a reassignment to frontline combat duty.
- Gentleman Ranker: Big Jack O'Hara is giving a speech about the glories of Army life to a tavern full of London lowlifes when Stephen meets him. He then convinces Trent to join, implying that it will be a similar situation to the one his uncle offered.
- Red Dwarf: The office of the Jupiter Mining Corp recruitment center is designed to be bright and shiny and attractive, until the suckers have signed up and realised its soul-destroying drudgery. But until then, bright and shiny and exciting! Not that it matters for Lister, since he's only signing up to get back to Earth and is lying in equal measure.
- The Saga of Tanya the Evil: Tanya tries to defy this trope when she is tasked with creating an advertisement for a new battalion of mages that she is going to lead. Since Tanya doesn't want the job, she has the advertisement emphasize how miserable and horrific the detail will be in the hopes of deterring potential candidates. However what Tanya didn't take into account was that the military would instead see it as a Dare to Be Badass advert and she gets absolutely flooded with requests from people to join her battalion.
- In the Sharpe series, new recruits are promised a reward of 7 pounds, a considerable sum in the early nineteenth century, only to be either tricked or coerced into signing a document which declares them to have spent it on uniform and supplies.
- The Stainless Steel Rat. While on a primitive planet, Slippery Jim is signed up as a mercenary and told to scrawl an X as he undoubtedly can't read. Being an alien offworlder, Jim states that he can read and so is first going to correct how the recruiter tried to sign him up for twice the stated enlistment period.
- In the Star Craft novel I, Mengsk, the protagonist Arcturus Mengsk joins the marines, after the recruiter, a gorgeous captain, told him recruits have a 25% chance of seeing combat. She later mentioned, after he becomes a lieutenant and is about to see combat for the first time, that most recruits never pass basic training or even die or are badly maimed in training. The chances of a successful recruit seeing combat is nearly 100%. note
- 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.note
- 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.
- In the Time Wars novels, Temporal Corps recruiting presentations involve the more attractive soldiers, many of whom have never seen actual combat, dressing up in pretty historical costumes. The series regulars bitterly note how this bears almost no resemblance to their actual duties, which frequently involve being on freezing, muddy battlefields, disguised as peasants in lice-ridden clothing.
Live-Action TV
- 21 Jump Street (1987): Judy, an undercover cop, has an interview at the P.R. department of the police, who make it seem it is a glamorous job. When she gets the job, it turns out to consist of her having to wear a milk carton suit and helping children cross the road. The only reason she applied for the job in the first place, was that Jump Street was disbanded, but luckily the program and team was continued again, and she quickly and happily returned to Jump Street.
- Altered Carbon. Jaegar tells the protagonist Takeshi Kovacs that if he volunteers for C-TAC, his sister will be placed in foster care with a good family. Whether Jaegar is responsible for selling her to the Yakuza is unknown, but his insistence that Kovacs never contact Reileen, ostensibly to protect her from retaliation, implies that he knew about it. This one backfires as when Kovacs discovers the truth (during a C-TAC raid on a Yakuza stronghold he finds his sister there) brother and sister instantly join forces against their former employers.
- 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.
- He also originally joined the army when the UK was mainly fighting colonial wars against greatly outmatched opponents. The idea of an enemy actually having a gun had never come up prior to World War I.
- In the Horrible Histories parody recruitment advert for the Georgian-era British Royal Navy, the recruiter (Ben Willibond) parodies this trope by being bluntly honest about the facts that the captain can have sailors whipped at will, medical care consists of a drunk with a saw performing Meatgrinder Surgery, the food is infested with vermin, and none of the previous facts negatively impact his recruitment numbers as he works with a Press Gang who can just kidnap people and force them to join up.
- In JAG (season 5 "Promises") a young female sailor is court-martialed for going AWOL after she simply had enough of swabbing the deck of a destroyer. When she signed up at the recruiter she was almost promised education as an air traffic controller, but she didn't Read the Fine Print of the contract which stated "subject upon availability and to the needs of the Navy".
- 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 Nautilus, Edward Cuff explains to Humility why he signed up for the East India Company's private army: "'Join the Company,' they said, 'Put the boot into others, instead of getting it put into you.'" From his tone (and the way the Company treats its men elsewhere in the series) it's clear that being a low-ranked Company soldier doesn't spare you from getting the boot put in.
- 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.
- Saturday Night Live: One parody commercial depicts the Navy Experience as a tad more mundane than the real ads would lead you to believe.
It's not just a job. It's $96.78 a week.
Music
- Many traditional folksongs have shades of this.
- "Arthur McBride" in which the sergeant promises gold and women and good food but the two cousins refuse, knowing they would only get shot. Depending on the version, he also mentions the smart uniform, to which the cousins reply that you don't get the uniform, you only have the loan of it, and eventually the sergeant gets so insulted by their criticism of the army that he threatens to draw his sword on them. So they club him over the head and throw the sword in the river.
- This is the whole point of the old army song "Gee Mom, I Want To Go Home". Each verse has two lines relating what recruits are told, followed by an exaggerated description of the fact. For example:
- Marching Through Rochester:
"Not I," said the baker, "Nor I," said the tailor,
And most of the crowd with them did all agree
''To be paid with the powder and rattle of the cannonball
Wages for soldiers like Marlborough and thee."- The 18th-century Twa Recruiting Sergeants overemphasizes the hardships of a Scottish farmer's life — he won't have to plow, have his horse go lame or listen to his baby's screaming.
- The WWI-era Recruiting Sergeant follows a dialogue between an Irish civilian and an English recruiter. Many Irish songs of this period contrast the high causes of the war with the treatment the Irish received at the time, such as The Foggy Dew:
T'was Britannia bade our Wild Geese go, that small nations might be free
But their lonely graves stand by Suvla's waves, or the fringes of the great North Sea. - The Billy Connolly song "Sergeant Where's Mine." 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.
- Hero of War by Rise Against: A recruiter sells the singer on joining the military by offering him the chance to get paid for seeing the world. Nowhere in the pitch does the recruiter mention the various atrocities the singer eventually commits in the name of fighting for his country.
- "Barrett's Privateers" by Stan Rogers: Captain Barrett promises a cushy gig with no fighting and plenty of loot. Disaster ensues. The betrayal is reiterated in every chorus
God damn them all! I was told
We'd cruise the seas for American gold
We'd fire no guns, shed no tears
Now I'm a broken man on a Halifax pier
The last of Barrett's privateers. - "Song for Cindy Sheehan" by David Rovics:
He wouldn't have to fight
Cindy hoped this was the case
And prayed for him every night
That was before they sent him
To the desert with a gun
She is every mother
And he was every mother's son - The Status Quo song In The Army Now starts with lines like "A vacation in the foreign land" and "Now you remember what the draft man said. Nothing to do all day but stay in bed", but as the song progresses the harsh realities of being in the army are quickly brought up.
Theatre
- The Army recruiters in A Piece of My Heart convince Leeann and Sissy with a) tons of fancy equipment, b) gorgeous hospitals, and c) the promise that they'd have to volunteer for Vietnam — otherwise, they could work in somewhere like Germany or Hawaii if they so please. Riiiiiiiiiiight.
Video Games
- The Canadian War Museum's older Choose Your Own Adventure game Armoured Warrior (about a troop corporal of the Sherbrooke Fusiliers in the Falaise Gap), after one of your tanks becomes bogged down and C Squadron is diverted to help the Polish detachment, your tank's gunner says, "First we lose a tank, and now we lose an entire squadron. I say we join the Navy!"
- Company of Heroes has the American Combat Engineer unit occasionally griping about this when selected, "Join the army, they said!...it'll be fun, they said!" American Riflemen can also get into this when ordered to build things by being able to complain, "I didn't come all the way to Europe to do this." or "They said the army would be an easy paycheck. Damn assholes."
- Deadlock: Planetary Conquest: "The Deadlock Song", an easter egg of sorts buried in the game's data files, is a humorous description of the dangers of each of the game's races through the eyes of a very disillusioned human colonist who was not told any of this by the recruiter.
If I ever get back home again,
if I ever get back home again,
if I ever get back home again,
that recruiter's gonna die. - Dragon Age: Origins: Duncan doesn't lie per se 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 - and this is as Justified as it could be, because the Blights they combat are a nigh-existential threat to the people of Thedas.
- In The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, troops at Fort Frostmoth in Bloodmoon (a frozen Reassigned to Antarctica assignment) will sometimes say a variation of the classic lying recruiter pitch "join the (service), see the world!" as idle banter.
"Join the Legion! See the world!" Freeze your arse..."
- Helldivers: Across its entire history, Super Earth has portrayed enlistment in its military as the most noble possible thing a Super Citizen could do for their country and for Democracy, with the Helldiver Corps recruitment ads especially portraying the organization as an honorable band of galactic peacekeepers who kick evil alien ass and keep the defenseless, the downtrodden and the innocent safe. These ads fail to mention anything about the single-digit number of minutes the average Helldiver's life expectancy is, the sheer levels of brutality and carnage the galactic front-lines has in store, Super Earth's own horrific war aims and the crimes against humanity it commits in the name of them, that Super Earth has no intention of ever not being at war if it can help it and that even if the war does miraculously end and you manage to survive, you'll just be stuffed in a cryo-pod somewhere and stored away so you can fight in the next war a century from now, likely never getting to see your family or home planet ever again.
- Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots: Satirised with the fake military recruitment ads during the opening scene that are based on the style of real ones, exaggerated with tons of psychedelia and Deliberate Values Dissonance. Notably, the ads, like real ads, repeatedly use video game-like imagery like First-Person Perspective and unthinking, unbleeding, identical enemies — in some ways, a comment on video games being used to recruit young people into fighting real wars.
- Warcraft II: The Footman's Stop Poking Me! quotes are thus; "Join the army, they said ... See the world, they said ... I'd rather be sailing."
Webcomics
- Sleepless Domain: A recruitment poster sent out by the Board of Magical Girls lists various benefits to entice young girls to register as Magical Girl Warriors (read: Child Soldiers) and defend the city, playing up the exciting and glamorous aspects of the job as much as possible. Of course, one of these benefits also happens to be a 70% lower risk of serious injury or death compared to girls who don't register. Make of that what you will.
- Terminal Lance #28: "False Advertising." First panel: Marine grunt in combat. Second panel: Three Marines in dress uniform with ceremonial rifles, with the "The Few. The Proud." recruiting slogan across it. Third panel: Guy in fatigues standing in front of a recruiting poster with a mop. The Rant even says that "making fun of the cheesy recruiting commercials is one of the favorite pass times [sic] of Marines."
Mop guy: Well, anything seems cool if you say it like that...
Western Animation
- The Batman: The Animated Series episode "The Cat and the Claw" has a soldier guarding a train transporting a container with a deadly plague complain that the Army commercials on tv never mentioned guarding a plague.
- One episode of Beavis and Butt-Head 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."
- 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 Sergeant Extreme and Major Awesome of the military visit Chris's school in Family Guy, they show a video of hot chicks and a soldier diving into a pile of money. A disclaimer quickly notes your experience may differ but it works on a good chunk of the school anyway.
- 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.
- Roughnecks: Starship Troopers Chronicles: Rico and Dizzy end up on Pluto under-equipped, 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:
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.Lisa: (worried) This wasn't in the brochure.