Uncle Sam Did Not Want Me – Why I Wasn’t Accepted by the United States Army

Rather than bury the lead:

My application for enlistment into the United States Army was rejected because I refused to release my mental health records to them.

In January of 2008, I was about to be homeless, so I called the Air Force.

The Air Force laughed because I was 39 years old, and suggested that I call the Army.

The Army was pumped and came out to pick me up the next morning.

I did pretty well on the trial ASVAB test, and so, they put me up in a motel and bought me a ticket to Oklahoma City to go through MEPS.

The transport van dropped me off at a motel that has contracted with the military to house the people trying to get into our armed forces — a process that takes several days.

I rode in the van with three kids, all of whom had graduated from high school just that previous year.

There was a girl, who seemed to be quite brilliant, who was going into the Air Force.  She ended up getting accepted for a job in Air Force intelligence work of some kind.

There was an athletic kids who seemed a little crazy (in a good way) who was accepted into the Marines.

And there was a kid who could have been me, twenty years earlier, who was accepted into the Army for infantry.

At dinner that night, the three of us ate at a whole table of wannabe jarheads (Marines).  What an excellent batch of red, white, and blue kids.  All of them were completely nuts and wonderful.

We traded recruitment stories over barbecue.  All of the stories were boring, except, of course, those of the Marines boys.  Apparently recruitment involved intra-office warfare with Nerf weapons.

The next morning I aced the ASVAB — not one error on the test.

So, I was able to pick any job.

WELL, exception one that would require a security clearance — because of my credit score — so being a linguist was out (that would have been my first choice — translating for troops in Iraq).

My recruiter wanted me to get into medical (I’m guessing they get more money for medical people?)… And he was obviously quite frustrated that I answered in half-truth on that questionnaire about my past drug use.  Yes, I said, I did inhale in college.

“Why the hell did you tell them that?”

MEDICAL WAS OUT… If you’ve ever smoked marijuana, then the Army doesn’t want you around drugs.

It was a half-truth because I omitted that I’d smoked marijuana the month before (a fact their drug test missed) and that I’d been smoking crack (a fact a drug test always misses) and that I’d been shooting meth for the last few years (long story).

Drug tests are useless for catching people using sketchy drugs — in pre-employment screenings — because they can just not use the drug for the 72 hours before the test.  NO HELP.  Drug tests are REALLY good at keeping pot smokers from getting good jobs, though.  Way to go, America!!

Pot smokers aren’t all slackers, they just have fewer employment opportunities.

I’m not a pot smoker, by the way… I would love to smoke pot from time to time, maybe sometimes every hour for a number of days, and it would be GREAT for me, frankly, but I won’t do that because I don’t want to be stoned around children and I will not engage in the purchase or possession of a controlled substance.  I may very well move to another state one day, though, in the Northwest.

I’ve smoked pot three times in the last 52 months.  Thank you, friends, for your generosity.

The job I picked out: COMBAT ENGINEER.  I wanted to blow things up.


So, everyone I knew down at MEPS all took their vow and entered military service.

I waited for five more hours.

Finally, I heard, “WINETT!!!  GET IN HERE!!!”

In there was a rather scary sergeant guy who was in charge and two other sergeant guys who were still pretty scary.

The head dude said they’d received a call from a person saying that I had spent time in a mental institution.

I was asked if that was true.

I confirmed it was true.

I was asked why that fact was not on my medical information form.

I said I had declined to disclose the information because (a) I would not be accepted by the Army, and (b) I planned a political career and did not want my records submitted as part of a public application for service.

I was ordered to return to medical and disclose my records.

I returned to medical to visit the head medical dude — the man who inspected my anus with a flashlight (SPREAD YOUR CHEEKS!  WIDER!! ) and declined to disclose my records.

By the way, I was 39, so my anus was inspected from five feet away.  Had I been just one year older, then that doctor and my anus would have had to become a little more intimate… (40 year old men regularly get prostate exams.)

So, Captain Doctor wrote a number on my form and I was done.

The recruiter was not happy, but he did give me a ride back to Tulsa.

So, then, I was bummed.

My father bought me a ticket to Minnesota.  

I had it in my head that I could go stay with my wife, but that was not going to happen.  I ended up being driven out of Minnesota to Iowa by a sheriff’s deputy, and told not to return, but that’s another story.