The latest event to tarnish recruiting and paint everyone with a very broad bush was the recent enlistment of an autistic man into the Army. There is an investigation currently going on involving the recruiters and the station involved. As usual for events like this though the recruiters are judged guilty by people not familar with the system. Recruiters do stupid things, and if these recruiters did actually commit an impropriety I’m sure they will be punished. But this is a situation where the recruiters are probably going to be hurt a lot worse than those above them.
By all accounts Mr. Guinther looks normal, and when they describe how it is to talk with him he doesn’t seem any different from any random, shy, awkward teenager. He’s also graduating with a regular, not a special ed, high school diploma and he passed the ASVAB with a 43. A 43 is pretty close to average on the ASVAB, and in the future when the next guy I meet gets a 17 on the ASVAB or EST I will tell them that an autistic kid more than doubled their score. The medical pre-screening is self-revealing. If the kid doesn’t put down that he’s autistic the recruiter won’t know. Maybe you’d think “the boy’s not right” when talking to him, but, again, he doesn’t seem to be someone who is obviously handicapped.
The fact Mr. Guinther was ASVAB’d, and went through the physical where he was seen by a couple of doctors and nurses, and none of them DQ’d him says something. The recruiters didn’t get this kid through phys. The kid got himself through phys. I’ve seen applicants DQ’d for heavy menstrual flow, being lactose intollerant, asthma when 6 years old, and I’ve heard of applicants being DQ’d for excessive acne and man-boobs. The doctors at MEPS are there to keep people who are unqualified form joining, obviously they didn’t see anything wrong with this kid.
The recruiters are going to take the punishment for this. They’re the ones who apparently turned squirelly when confronted. The old saw about the cover-up not the crime applies in recruiting too. But the media coverage of this, as it being a symptom of a corrupt, broken force looking to fraudlently enlist anyone for the machine, isn’t accurate. There is no attempt by any story to look at this from the perspective of the recruiter. Jared Guinther doesn’t walk around with a giant tattoo on his head saying “Autistic” and his brother isn’t driving him around.
It’s for the best that Guinther isn’t going to be shipping. But recruiting as a whole is going to suffer for this mistake, and it’s being unjustly used as an excuse to score political points. The coverage demonstrates to me the broad disconnect between the need for a reporter to say their bit in a 5 paragraph space, and the intricacies of a complex process like putting someone into the Army. That disconnect exists anytime something complex or involved is reported, but this time it affects my sphere of influence.
Oh well, hope everyone has a good weekend.
During the late ’60’s President Johnson initiated “Project 100,000″, a program to put individuals that tested “substandard” on the AFQT into military service. The story was at the time this was a response to the DQ of Muhammad Ali on the basis of his low test scores.
Now everyone knew Ali to be a bright and articulate athlete - so the system that DQ’d him had to be flawed. There had to be a place in the military for young men who didn’t meet the minimum scores. This bit of social engineering, while perhaps laudable in its intent to train otherwise rejected individuals in a useful trade (and here I thought that was what “Job Corps” was for!) the program failed in its implementation. It could have been nasty.
The charter for Project 100,000 was to accept and train 100,000 young men who had sub-par scores on the AFQT. These individuals were to be retained stateside in non-critical MOS positions. They were not to be shipped overseas, and were certainly never to be placed in a combat unit. In those pre-PC days, you didn’t want some moron dragging your unit down, and you certainly didn’t want him handling anything sharp or dangerous.
Somehow the Navy received a bumper crop of “Project” recruits. Fine, there were plenty of stateside shore billets for swab jockeys and messcooks. I spent most of my Naval enlistment at sea on an attack carrier - and sure enough, by 1969, we had several “Tennessee Turtles” (most of our “Project” sailors came from the Volunteer State). In its infinite wisdom, the BUPERS had assigned several of these guys to sea duty - and sent them overseas.
Two were placed in our Department - WEAPONS Department. Yes, all that red glare and bursting in air stuff. What harm could come to a not-too-bright young man fiddling with high explosives? What about his shipmates? The program was very secretive – so much so that the new guys had no obvious notation in their service records that they might be a little difficult to instruct or have a bit of a memory problem.
While I’m all for “mainstreaming” mentally challenged individuals, my generosity screeches to a halt at the point where it might reduce me to tiny fragments. We had plenty of garden-variety dumbasses to handle, without the help of BUPERS. Fortunately we found enough berthing compartments and empty magazines for them to swab - assigning a man to watch over each of these Turtles when working anywhere near an instrument of destruction was a pointless waste of manpower.
Nine months of watching our Turtles - who were generally nice guys, if more than a little slow - was wearing to say the least. About two days after returning to the States, they were transferred ashore, and some say, mustered out. The grand social experiment was over, having been perhaps a laudable social program, but thanks to mismanagement, a considerable risk to the troops.
You have to wonder how many of these guys wound up in combat units in Vietnam. Was Forrest Gump a soldier? In today’s politically-correct opportunity-for-all society, are there several Guinthers already in today’s combat units? Probably.
Or to use Raymond’s more pessimistic response, “Definitely.”
Comment by Take2 — 20060522 @ 0923
As a 4-H Agent, I’ve had kids in classes that I didn’t know were autistic until I was told. They participated in our activities and did as good a job as any other kid. I work with someone who (as far as I know) has no diagnosis, but obviously has similar problems. I suspect Asperger’s Syndrome–but my psychology degree is still in the mail.
In today’s recruiting climate, I would want verification before I accepted a parent’s word about something that was (apparently) not obvious. I’ve heard stories about parents really giving recruiters a hard time. It’s conceivable to me that a parent might call up a recruiter and lie about something that was a “hidden” disability to keep their kid out of the military.
Do the MEPS people not have copies of your medical records when they examine you? Were they in psych/counseling records?
Comment by Tracy V — 20060522 @ 0924
I’m sure there have been all sorts of interesting social engineering projects under taken in the military. I had no idea about Take2’s experiences, but it sounds a bit different from the current issue I was discussing. The boy is obviously handicapped and shouldn’t have enlisted. My issue was with the lopsided coverage and the quick-to-judge nature of the reporting. Instead of a balanced “The Army enlisted a handicapped boy, let’s examine where the system broke down,” we get a “Recruiters hid a handicapped boy’s mental condition so they could put him in the ‘most dangerous’ job in the Army, and it’s all because the war in Iraq is q QUAGMIRE!”
Tracy, the only records that will be present when an applicant processes is those they let us know about. There is nothing on the pre-screening questionaire used by recruiters in all services that refers to Autism. The closest thing to such a condition is asking about seeing a counselor. I’m sure that Jared has seen many counselors but people do forget things when answering these questionaires. Many a recruiter’s day has been ruined by someone remembering that they used an inhaler 10 years ago, or were prescribed Ritalin back in Jr. High, even after the recruiter had asked them 10 different ways, and the Station Commander asked another 10 different ways. It happens.
If an applicant claims no medical conditions when doing the prescreen there is no requirement to get medical records for MEPS processing. The system seems to be set up so that the docs at MEPS represent the final line. If they find anything wrong with an applicant they can DQ them and request more info. It doesn’t even need to be something overly specific. Whatever “obvious” signs this man had, they weren’t obvious to a senior medical professional who probably has a decade of experience in determining whether people were qualified to enlist.
Comment by Detailed Recruiter — 20060522 @ 1720