Sometimes he gets home on Saturday around 3/4PM and then he picks up the lap top and plays wow straight thru until Sunday Night at midnight.  Back to work on  Monday.   He doesn't hug his kids, kiss his wife or pet the dog.   He moves only to eat.

But hey, we have made mission every single month since we got here.

And he is getting better at lying, well I let down my defenses really.   I know when I am being set up and he did it again tonight and I fell for it....

Just let me disappear to a bar somenight....and we'll see what happens.  

You have activities with your pool....one day a week and some Saturdays you have activities that range from any kind of PME to Physical Conditioning or PT.  Then there are district pool functions.  Football games, basketball games, pizza parties, anything. 

You have to remember that "Poolees" are young people, from 17 to 27, male and female.   Mostly the 17/18/19 year old range and they lie.....lie.....lie.  Do not trust them, document everything they say and do......... and don't be alone with one of the opposite sex.  PERIOD.

They will lie about things you said, things you did, things you promised, things you didn't promise, drugs, school, their parents, their friends, their past, their future and anything else that suits them.  

And they will make attachments to you.   Attachments as a friend, a parent, a mentor.   Do not share anything personal with them, where you live, your personal phone number and make it clear this is a PROFESSIONAL ARRANGEMENT.  And do not ever let your recruiter transport anyone of the opposite sex without a partner.

AND ABOVE ALL, BE HONEST IN YOUR DEALINGS WITH THEM.

"Phase One" is generally the 5th or 6th day of the month, depending on your quota you may have to have one or two in by the phase one of the month, that means to MEPS, tested and ready to take the physical and swear in.  If you can get just one in, you might start getting Saturdays off, but since you don't know when or if that may happen you will never know if you get Saturday off until the last minute you have to be prepared just in case if you want to do anything as a family.  

And no matter how hard you try and are almost certain you will have that first guy in something always happens.   And once again, noone cares about your PHASE OR YOUR QUOTA.....to accomplish that.   Like this week, we had our guy ready to go, but he needed a letter from his doctor.  The doctor left early and didn't sign the letter, so no Saturday off.    

But eventually they all went home and he had to spend the rest of the evening with me.  

And then he got Saturday off for the first time since we got here.   YEAH!  

And now after having a nice weekend together, I won't see him for days.  At least it is the 4th of July and he has one more day off this week, I THINK.

And the washer broke, one of this kids is sick, the acreage had to be mowed and edged and hedges trimmed, the pool had to be cleaned, a part had to be orered for the washer, I had to pay the bills and he won't be home until midnight at least.

Did he have a conversation with them?  No.  Did he go outside and play catch?  No   Did he even ask what they did with their day?  No. 

So they drifted back to the every evening activities of video games and bedtime.  So big deal, he was home before 10 WHO REALLY CARES AT THIS POINT?

BUT HEY, LOOKS LIKE THEY WILL MAKE MISSION, I wonder which night this weekend they will want to go drink to celebrate?  Probably the one night he has with me.

Where do they get the lists from?  Well the high schools give it to them.  They don't have to do it, but they do.  As a parent, I am not sure I like that idea, but that is where the military's info comes from.  

Why are they calling?  To book appointments, those 3 appointments they are supposed to have every day.  They are supposed to have 3 EVERY SINGLE DAY, planning on:  one appointment to not show up, one appointment to show and not qualify and one appointment to qualify.  And they don't just sit in the office for these appointments they drive from one end of the district to the other going to the appointments homes if they do not have transportation to get the hour and a half to get to the office, or their parents need to be in on the meeting, or because they have no money for gas or no car, seems like to me if they have that many problems the Marine Corps would be a sure thing.

And many times after driving the hour and a half to talk to a young person, noone is home.  They book the appointment and noone is home.  They don't call and cancel, they just are not there.  Then the recruiter has to call and try to track them down from their issued cell phone and drive the hour and a half back to their office.  That is already about 4 hours out of their day.  

If you spend an entire day out of the office going to appointments, it is kind of hard to book appointments for the next day when you WILL be in the office.  So in between they are supposed to do ACing/Area Convassing.  They hit every Target/WalMart/Grocery Store/Video Store/Mall/KMART/Library etc every week to find those young people just hanging out. 

Now as a parent, I know in the summer time most teens don't go to bed at 9 and up at 8 so they can hit the mall or stores by 10.....they stay up until 1 or 2 am then they sleep until noonish and hit the stores/mall by 3 or 4 PM to meet their friends to hang out....so no point until ACing until afternoon when they are out and about. 

So a day consists of:  PHONE CALLS AND MORE PHONE CALLS/APPOINTMENTS/ACing/PAPERWORK ON THOSE WHO ARE TRYING TO GET IN/AND DOING INTERVIEWS  Day in and day out.

Then there are POOLEE days.......these are they days when a recruiter meets with his "POOL" of recruits that are preparing to be shipped out.  They range in age from 17 to 29 and they come in once a week (more if there is a POOLee event) and PT.  Running/Playing Basketball/doing pull ups, getting prepared for boot camp.  Sometimes they have mini-classes where they are shown  a video or something to help them be better prepared.  This usually lasts 3/4 hours and the recruiters have to be with them.   So these are hours away from ACing, setting appointments, making phone calls (phone calls that have to be made up the next day or late into the evening.  So maybe he now will have 100 phone calls the next day instead of 60/70.

With caller ID these days, most people screen their calls and when it says US GOVERNMENT on their phone they don't answer.  And sometimes when the kids do answer or the parents answer they lie for their kids and say they aren't there or have the kids hang up on the recruiter.  

Then there are the lists of people who go online and look at the website for the USMARINE.  By providing their personal information to the site they have now created what is called a quicklead or a PPC.   These are forwarded to the office by the District Office and used for phone calls as well.  They are assigned to which ever recruiter has their high school assigned to him or quite possibly the guy who has gotten no one in for the month.  Who decides this?   The Marine in the office that is designated BOSS, I forget the real title for now we will just call him GUNNY.   Sometimes the Gunny just holds on to these and uses them for himself, or waits until the Recruiter has already made a contact on a general phone call, and then he can say "OH I ALREADY HAVE HIM, HE IS MINE."  This list seems to not be getting passed on in my husbands office and it ticks me off.  Just pass the damn things on and be done with it.

My husband got home at 12:30 last night.  Phone calls generally stop after 10:00, people get really angry when you call their home after 10PM, so you ask what could they be doing until 12:30 int he morning, paperwork/paperwork/ACing.   Haunting the stores late at night where the teens hang out.   He came home, ate dinner and fell asleep all by 12:45.   Not much time left for me and the kids.  In fact he has not seen or talked to his kids since last Sunday.  It is Thursday now.

Oh and somewhere in there they have to get their hair cut....and their uniforms cleaned and eat and go to the bathroom.  Since they generally have to eat out because they are not allowed to go home, there is another chunk out of that whopping $450.00 extra pay.

Do you know how many parents will promise their kid anything to NOT join the military?   Well that is another story.

My husband (who by the way has made his personal Mission every month we have been in the recruiting field) has been home only once before 11PM.  A couple of Saturdays he has been home around 7PM if there is a POOLEE function.

He is at work sometimes before 7:15, works until around 10:30 or 11:00PM eats dinner, falls asleep by 11:30 and is up at 06:30. That's a normal day.  Most days he is in the office until Midnight.  Last night was 3:30AM

I complained to the Command, once.  Their response was to pay a visit to my husband and try to intimidate him to get me under control.

OOOOOOPS does this site mean I am not in control???????????????????

Oh the other guys in the office?   His wife beat the crap out of him, he was released from his Recruiter Position.  They had 3 kids in 3 years................The other guy thinks this is "DATING R US" and not the recruiting field.  And the other one:  He goes home and says "call me when you get 3 interviews lined up for tomorrow."  So much for teamwork. 

Because even if you get a holiday off, you only get THAT day and there is no doubt your Marine will want to play softball or something other than really spend time with you because by now he has forgotten what that means.......and how to do it.

Well when your RSS makes Mission, they want to go out and celebrate.   What do they do to celebrate?  Invite the wives who have supported them for all these weeks?  NO  Do they want to have a Bar B Q and celebrate and bring the families together who helped support this Make the Mission effort?  NO

They want to take the one night that you might have plans with your spouse (oh yeah did I say "screw date night"?) and take you to a bar so you can all hang out together get smashed and feel like shit the one day you have off to be with your family.   So they stay out til 3AM, sleep until 2PM and fall back asleep around 5PM to catch up on all the sleep they missed that week. 

And IF you get lucky enough to make mission on the month when there is a holiday  (Example:  you have to have made mission the month before to get the holiday off the next month, say 4th of July, you have to have made June's mission one full week ahead of the end of the month (June 16th) or you might as well not have made mission by the end of the month because you don't get the holiday off anyway.)  Get it?  So in June you only have 3 weeks to make Mission.

There are no rewards for making Mission, only punishment for those who didn't and for the families who supported you.

Oh the reward is slight, someone from the RS isn't in your office 3 days out of 7 breathing down your neck telling you what you did wrong all month.

There is the personal Mission: Each Marine is given a number of recruits he is supposed to bring into the corps each month.  Can be as low as one, or as high as 4.  He has 30 days to accomplish this, well not really 30, because he is supposed have gotten at least 1/2 this in the first half of the month.  If he doesn't the whole office pays, no matter what an individual does it is the total RSS Mission that really matters.  

The RSS Mission:  Depends on how many people are in the RSS, for each man in the RSS you must bring in 1 but 1 really doesn't count for crap, they really want 2.......

But if you are assigned 1 new recruit for your mission and you get two and the RSS still doesn't make mission (say 6) then your two really don't matter at all.   Now if your RSS is assigned 6 and they make it and 3 of them are yours you might get a letter that says "good job".  Oh and if you have 4 lined up and want to hold two for the next month forget it, because it's all about the team.  But if you bring in those 4 and your office still doesn't make their mission of 6, you are still screwed and will be punished with those who brought in no one.  You will still work 20 hour days 6 days a week.

............................And if you make mission it still doesn't matter because that was "then", this is "now".   It's all about THAT DAY.

You have a yearly plan, a quarterly plan, a monthly plan, a weekly plan, a daily plan.   All good ideas right?  Any business has plans, having minored in business management, I understand this.  But the plan is so BIG that it takes 20 hours a day to accomplish.   Which leaves little time for anything else.   Forget your family, forget your wife, forget anything but the MISSION.  

You will learn to hate those two words:  Making Mission

From stateside 30 days seems like a vacation, but from overseas it barely gives you enough time to arrive and find a home.   You cannot ask for an assignment, you cannot ask for a state, you cannot ask for a town, you are going where they say based on RACE.   YES, RACE.

And the move process cannot begin until they get their orders.  Once their orders are faxed or emailed to the relocation office, you can set up TMO (Military Moving People) and get your tickets purchased (you the spouse have to do this, the recruiter is still stateside).  Then if you have been living in Military housing, you have to start the checkout process with them.   AND OH BROTHER, don't ever think living in Military housing is easy.  The forms and the process is mind blowing.  

1) you must call them and set up an appointment for a housing inspection, so they can tell you what they expect from you

2) you must have 6 copies of your orders (in your hand) because they will not request them and will not call anyone for you  *goverment employees tend to be very comfortable in their jobs and have no clue as to the concept of "customer service" or feel the need to assist you in any positive manner.

Note:  To have a Housing inspection, you better have your house in tip top shape.  Clean, walls painted, closets cleaned out, etc or it will cost you big in the long run.  

In our instance, the pre-inspection was done by someone who never documented they came to my home so I had to pay another visit to housing who basically called me a liar and would not do anything without another 6 copies of my husbands orders. 

Note:  When you are overseas and going to a recruiting assignment as a family, you never actually see a copy of your "tentative" orders because they just say you are moving, not where you are moving too.  Thus confusing everyone.....YOU/TMO/HOUSING etc.  This infuriated my housing officer who basically called me a liar.   Seriously.  

I was able to obtain a moving date and airline tickets without anything else, but not HOUSING.  In this copy age we live in, why we have to go to them with 6 copies of anything is amazing to me.   And there is a copy machine in every office. 

Also in the moving process you are moved without your spouse being home yet.  Remember he has not graduated yet and cannot come home (oh yes they fly him back to overseas for 48 hours before he has to fly back to the states with you, a great big waste of time)

In the mean time, movers come and pack you out.   I had to clean my entire house, all my closets, paint my walls, clean my carpets, get the TMO arranged, do the return of furniture, check the kids out of school, check us into the hotel, sale all the cars, cancel all the insurance, and pay all the bills upfront ($750.00 for the hotel alone) knowing I would not be reimbursed until we check into our new unit. We were in the hotel for 3 days before he got home.   After not seeing him much in the past 8 months, 2 days crammed into a hotel with 2 kids, 2 cats and one car still not sold was not enough time.  Because you cannot just sell a car overseas you have at least 5/6 hours of running around to do for that paper work.   We sold our last car 8 hours before we flew out.

Once you land back stateside, you begin the house hunt.  If you are lucky and arrive in the same state with family you can at least save a little money instead of once again paying hotel bills that you won't recoup for weeks.   This can move can cost you THOUSANDS of dollars out of your pocket.

I found our home online, leased it unseen (except for pictures) and only because I am older than the average bear was it easier for me.

We found our cars in about 3 days, paid cash for one and got a loan for another.  

Note:  Did I say that in school the recruiter is told he will get to time to help his family find a home or help them move in, it must ALL BE DONE by the spouse.  Normally a family is given 10 days house hunting to get there, find a home, unpack etc.

When you are overseas you WILL not receive any of your belongings for at least 30-45 days.   Ours was 60.  

Air Matresses, and newly purchased sheets and blankets for SIXTY DAYS.   No washer, no dryer and only courtesy of the leasing agent did we have a refrigerator.

And no contact from the Command.  Not one person called to welcome me to our new state and RS(Recruiting Station).  They just snatched my husband up kept him for 14/16 hours day, gave him one day off (Sunday is the only day a recruiter gets off) they packed him off to a nice hotel with TV's, beds and plenty of room for a week to do PAR Training.  While the kids and I had nothing.   We lived out of suitcases, fast food (no kitchen supplies remember) and about froze to death because we came from a tropical climate to WINTER in the midwest. 

62 DAYS AFTER WE ARRIVED IN OUR NEW STATE, 245 boxes were delivered with our household items.  My husband was allowed to come home for 1 hour, to sign for furniture because I was picking up kids from school.  ONE HOUR.

But my husband is a quiet guy, he thinks the Military is a personal choice, not one that is sold to you.  But I encourage him in that the Marine Corps is just like any other corporation and to survive it needs to recruit.  A tough job right and someone needs to do it. 

Thanks to the computer world we live in, we are able to talk almost every evening via the internet and I hear what he wants me to hear about school and I tell him what I think he needs to know about the move and we make financial decisions via the internet.  Because after almost 6 years overseas, we will need to find a new home, vehicles, and prepare the children for another move.  And this is going to cost MONEY.   And he tells me about the guys that are failing and being sent home because they cannot sell the Marine Corps for whatever reason.

He is so smart my husband the Marine, he always finishes tops in his class and in any school, I am so proud of him.  And this was no exception.  He finished in the top 5. 

For the past 6 years we have been living overseas and it was wonderful.  His office was down the street and my office was down the street and we worked normal hours and went stateside every 2 years and had some awsome vacations.  

In June of 200_, he received orders to go with the MEU, on ship.   So from June to November we rarely saw him.  Once he came home for less than 24 hours after having been gone for 2 months.   Then in November we received orders for him to report to Recruiting school, report date of January.   He left on the MEU again until right before Christmas, was home for 3 weeks and left for recruiters school right after new years along with the 250 other of the Marine Corps finest (that aren't in Iraq and other world wide locations).  

Now I am an optimistic person.  I loved the idea........I am pro-Marine Corps, noone loves the Marine Corps as much as I do.  I always said "I could sell the Marine Corps to God, if someone else hadn't already."  I was ready to take on this assignment and the move and everything else.  He was not optimistic, but hell I could be optimistic for everyone.  

First thing I did to try and figure out how to help my husband was to hit the internet.  I knew this new assignment would take us both into exciting new ventures and I was ready for the challenge, anything for the Corps, they had given us so much.   I found a group on yahoo called the "Recruiters Wives"......NEVER EVER GO THERE.   First it takes an act of congress to get you on as a member.   Once you do get in (they call it a secured site, why yes it is) you are inundated with horror stories of everything from "cheating husbands" getting caught with young females they are trying to recruit to meet the unrealistic quota's to the old saying of "do the mother to get the son"......and men forging documents to get young men in to meet the "quota"... QUOTA, QUOTA, QUOTA!

And then you get blasted with the HOURS....and how the additional pay of $450.00 they give the family doesn't even cover the dry cleaning much less the long hours.  One woman quoted her salary for one month with the hours her husband worked at about $.50 an hour.  

Young couples out there with young children trying to build families only with no father in the picture.  Labor with no husband, emergency room visits with no husband, located in a strange town with no jobs available for spouses, no military environment to provided family support.  Some spouses gave up $50,000 plus a year jobs to follow their spouse into this field.  But then that is one of the realities of the military life.

But I had been involved in the military community for 30 years and we didn't have small children anymore and I knew I could do this.  I pictured it much like a religious mission, but one I could do with him, help him, be a part of.  Together we would find some of the best Marine's the community we were assigned to had to offer. 

Man was I in for a surprise......so this is my blog about the life of a Recruiter and his wife and what REALLY goes on out there.