this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2024
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A Boring Dystopia
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That's not true. If you want to go combat arms with a high score they just have you sign a letter of intent for Green Berets or Rangers. If you fail off that you go to a normal infantry unit. "Grunts" actually have to be pretty smart. It's a Hollywood thing that all the grunts are just cannon fodder. Our Army runs, in combat, on millions of decisions made by Corporals and Sergeants with teams of 4-6 people under them.
They do present you with all the other jobs you could do though.
I did say if you have a specific thing to get it in writing. If you sign a letter of intent, that is getting it in writing. Plenty of guys in my boot camp got told they could go do X job in the Navy but ended up getting a different designation during boot. This was back in the mid 2000's so it may be more standard to have the LoI but at the time plenty of us did and plenty of us didn't. And for my job, I only got to join "the nuke program" - we got to give a wishlist for which rating but it didn't mean much. I got the rating I wanted, but several guys wanted Electronics Technician and ended up as their last choice - Machinist's Mates. And I've met some decently smart infantry, but I've also met plenty of infantry that were (affectionately) window lickers. More seriously though, the ones we joked around with about being window lickers aren't actually stupid, they were just average guys, just not as quick as some of the other vets in the group (the Marine vet embraced the crayon eating jokes). I'm sure they were fine at their job though, and they followed orders well which is probably the most important thing in a soldier or sailor.
Different services, different ways I guess. I was early 2000's too but in the army. And you knew most of what you were doing before you went. For example Infantry was known, but not rifleman or mortarman. And they could only deny you if you didn't qualify. Over qualified wasn't a thing. (My dumbass was over qualified for the infantry)