Firefighter Recruit Quotes

NFL player named Pat Tillman who played for the Arizona Cardinals quit football, turning down a several million dollar contract to join the Army so he could fight in the War on Terror. He was later killed on the battlefield and quickly became a poster boy of bravery and a recruiting tool for the military.571 He was hailed as the NFL hero who supposedly died in a firefight with the enemy, but it later came out that he actually died from friendly fire that came from one or several men from his own unit.572 Tillman’s own mother would later denounce the military for using her son as a “propaganda tool.”573

Back in 2003, the Oregon Center for Nursing produced a striking recruitment poster, which asked, ARE YOU MAN ENOUGH . . . TO BE A NURSE? The ad featured nine nurses who, as the Center’s Deborah Burton, explained, “embody male characteristics in our society.” Among them were a former Navy SEAL, a biker, a karate champion, a rugby player, a snowboarder, and an ex-firefighter. The campaign generated media attention. It was certainly a bold effort with precisely the right intent. But it didn’t seem to move the dial in terms of the rate of recruitment of men in the state.64 It also seems like the ad might have overdone the contrast between stereotypes of nursing and stereotypes of men. Subsequent studies suggest that this approach can backfire, by highlighting what psychologists call the “role incongruity” between ideas of masculinity and those of nursing.

But instead of recruitment efforts being concentrated on the military for those who had the drive and the self-discipline to become top-of-the-line firefighters and eventually officers who would lead the department, or looking at potential personnel from higher education institutions such as the local community colleges, the recruiting focused on shopping malls and high schools.