*promising students jobs as musicians The military has musicians - this is an established Military Occupational Specialty, and that is all they do.

    This is true, but to become a military musician you must already play an instrument, and be evaluated on your ability to play that instrument before you can become a military musician. I doubt that recruiters are actually promising potential recruits that they will be given positions in bands or orchestras, but if they do, with no other strings attached, the person so enlisted and not given the job has a good case for being released from active duty.

    As I have said on another thread, I requested one of a large number of electronics schools, and after I completed the Army Qualification, Interest, and Ability tests with sufficient scores to allow me to attend these schools, my recruiter putt me in for all of the schools, in the order of their decreasing length. I didn't mind selling my body for three years, but I wanted it to be on my terms.

    As it turned out, I was given one of my choices, and I agreed to sign up for this school. I was given earliest and latest dates to enlist for this school, so that I would be finished with Basic training before the school started, and I went for the gusto. As it turned out I completed basic in time, completed the school and worked for the next two years as an Avionics Repairman, fixing the electronics on any of a large group of different airplanes and helicopters. I went to Thailand and Viet Nam in this job, and finished up down in central Texas, where I enlisted in the AF as soon as I was released from the Army, to wait our the GI Bill, I knew was going to come along, sooner or later. By the time it was enacted I had enough time in that it made sense to remain in the AF for the retirement, which I did, retiring as an AF Master Sergeant, with 26 years of service.

    It worked out well for me. I traveled around the world in two of my many actual jobs, one as a mobile Field Training Detachment Instructor, training airmen and officers in the AF, Air Guard and Reserve, and even the Norwegian Air Force, which had purchased an aircraft on which I instructed; and as an Airlift Controller, providing communication from forward bases back to the rest of the world. It could have gone completely toes up as I walked into Basic training, and something unfortunate happened to me crippling me for life, and resulting in my being medically released from the Army with a tiny disability pension. As Scotty says so succinctly in one of the many Star Trek films, "Aye, an' if me Granny 'ad wheels she'd be a tea trolley!" No one can foresee how any particular decision will play out, but my decision worked for me, although it might not have done, for another.

    The Recruiter will offer as much as he can honestly provide, much of which is dependent on the skills the potential recruit has to offer. If he's knuckle-drug his way through school, barely graduating or even not graduating at all,but merely left, after the requisite number of years, he may be lucky to get ANY choice, and up until recently he could not enlist an ANY service without a High School Diploma, or a GED Test Certificate, in the case of the Army. With the Iraq action in full swing, the various services may be desperate for recruits, but these recruits still have to possess the intelligence to actually make a decent soldier or airman. Anything less will come home in a body bag, and endanger his mates as well. We saw during the actual war what happens when someone reads a map incorrectly, or doesn't get the word about the line of march - people are captured or die, and this happens because someone wasn't pulling his or her fair share of the load.

    Dave