Will Success Erase a Failure?

byLesWallerJr

1K followers

2 days ago

My brother mentioned his recruiter lying to him when he missed his scheduled time to go to boot camp. That made me remember my time on recruiting duty. Although I have some good memories most of them are not so good.

Recruiting duty, Drill Instructor duty and Embassy duty for Marines are called B billets. They are not your primary job or MOS (Military Occupations Specialty) but they can be a career enhancer.

In my field there were less than 200 of us so promotions were slow and the competition was tough.

While out on a 6-month deployment I received orders to go to recruiting school because the San Francisco office wanted someone who spoke Chinese, which I did. Of course, I couldn't follow the orders because I was on an operational deployment. The problem was, to me, I had been identified for the billet and that wouldn't go away.

Therefore, when I finished the deployment, I volunteered for recruiting duty. I went to the school in San Diego and at the appointed time I went to meet the San Francisco office head recruiter to ask that they by name request me.

Before graduation I was told that that office was not getting any recruiters assigned to them. So, I then interviewed for the Los Angeles office as it was relatively close to where we lived at the time so they could by name request me.

Marines love challenges, by the way, and one of the challenges during recruiting school was to join the 100 mile club so I ran 100 miles in the month I was at the school.

I got my orders and at the same time found out that the San Francisco office ended up getting a recruiter assigned to them. I wasn't too happy about that.

Marines are mission oriented and you would think that being on recruiting duty the mission would be to successfully recruit men and women to join the Marine Corps on your 3-year tour. Well, if you know sales and that is what we learned in the school for recruiting, then you know its more than having a successful 3-year tour.

For us it was having 36x 1 month missions of getting 3x people signing up per month. For some of us it was "easy" to get people to enlist by telling them what they wanted to hear. For others of us it was extremely difficult. I didn't need any incentives to join the Marine Corps I went for the non-tangilbe things, like pride, camaraderie, and discipline.

Well, that became a problem. I was 34 years old and out of the running to apply for warrant officer. Then, the Marine Corps decided to extend the age range so I applied for warrant officer. Normally, the command just forwards the package to HQMC (headquarters Marine Corps) and the people are selected there. However, my command had another idea. I wasn't doing well on recruiting in making my three enlistments a month. And, headquarters also decided when we would take drops from people who became disqualified to enlist. Well they decided to give me five drops in one month prior to the package going forward. That meant a negative recruitment number for that month. Therefore, due to substandard performance I was told to report to the commander on a Saturday morning where I received a bad (double signed) fitness report.

That was there way of influencing my warrant officer package, needless to say I wasn't selected.

The worst part is that later that year I achieved 10x enlistments in one month which automatically earns the Navy Marine Achievement Medal. Too little too late as now both actions follow you through your career and most times when it comes to promotions people will look at the bad more than the good.

So, even though I earned the Navy Marine Achievement Medal, the highest I had earned in my career it was pretty much meaningless as it didn't negate the previous bad report.

What experiences have you had where one aw crap couldn't be made up with 100 attaboys?

Cheers!

Les