Recruitment Poster Quotes

I can just imagine the recruiting poster. 'Ghost whisperers wanted: no experience necessary. Death wish and masochistic tendencies a must.

What horrifies me most about war memorials is that no anti-war sentiments are ever displayed. It's as if war is fun or noble, when actually it's all about shit and snot and blood and guts and soldiers stomachs hanging out and people with their faces blown off. But they never showed that side of it. Perhaps, if they did, there'd be less of it. I remember seeing a picture of a soldier in Vietnam who was sitting, waiting to die, with his jaw missing. His head now started at the top row of teeth; everything beneath that was gone. They didn't put that on the recruitment posters, did they? But that's what war is to me. And I don't care who we're fighting, I don't hate them enough to do something like that to them.

If and American flag had been waving behind her, she'd have looked like a very sexy Marine Corps recruiting poster. The few, the proud, the cottontailed.

Betty once had self-image problems, but she overcame them. A Morninglight poster decorates her wall. Much-read pamphlets sit in her bathroom. Philip Marquard's audio book on self-actualisation plays in her earphones. Fresh signatures fill the forms on her clipboard. Bottles of Morninglight dietary supplements and nutrient pills fill her medicine cabinet. By her bed is an autographed picture of Philip Marquard, the one she secretly kisses before going to sleep. Every night she dreams of freeing herself from her mortal shell and ascending into the cosmos to soar with the whale-mollusc gods. There are new recruits chained to Betty's walls. She has their signatures. They tested as having self-image problems, as she once had. Smiling, she tells them they are all beautiful. She opens them with a knife, shows them the beauty inside. "Look!" she says, tears streaming. "We are all made of stars!" Then she practises eating stars, waiting for enlightenment to take hold.

In the campaign of 1876, Robert G. Ingersoll came to Madison to speak. I had heard of him for years; when I was a boy on the farm a relative of ours had testified in a case in which Ingersoll had appeared as an attorney and he had told the glowing stories of the plea that Ingersoll had made. Then, in the spring of 1876, Ingersoll delivered the Memorial Day address at Indianapolis. It was widely published shortly after it was delivered and it startled and enthralled the whole country. I remember that it was printed on a poster as large as a door and hung in the post-office at Madison. I can scarcely convey now, or even understand, the emotional effect the reading of it produced upon me. Oblivious of my surroundings, I read it with tears streaming down my face. It began, I remember: "The past rises before me like a dream. Again we are in the great struggle for national life.We hear the sounds of preparation--the music of boisterous drums--the silver voices of heroic bugles. We see the pale cheeks of women and the flushed faces of men; and in those assemblages we see all the dead whose dust we have covered with flowers..." I was fairly entranced. he pictured the recruiting of the troops, the husbands and fathers with their families on the last evening, the lover under the trees and the stars; then the beat of drums, the waving flags, the marching away; the wife at the turn of the lane holds her baby aloft in her arms--a wave of the hand and he has gone; then you see him again in the heat of the charge. It was wonderful how it seized upon my youthful imagination. When he came to Madison I crowded myself into the assembly chamber to hear him: I would not have missed it for every worldly thing I possessed. And he did not disappoint me. A large handsome man of perfect build, with a face as round as a child's and a compelling smile--all the arts of the old-time oratory were his in high degree. He was witty, he was droll, he was eloquent: he was as full of sentiment as an old violin. Often, while speaking, he would pause, break into a smile, and the audience, in anticipation of what was to come, would follow him in irresistible peals of laughter. I cannot remember much that he said, but the impression he made upon me was indelible. After that I got Ingersoll's books and never afterward lost an opportunity to hear him speak. He was the greatest orater, I think, that I have ever heard; and the greatest of his lectures, I have always thought, was the one on Shakespeare. Ingersoll had a tremendous influence upon me, as indeed he had upon many young men of that time. It was not that he changed my beliefs, but that he liberated my mind. Freedom was what he preached: he wanted the shackles off everywhere. He wanted men to think boldly about all things: he demanded intellectual and moral courage. He wanted men to follow wherever truth might lead them. He was a rare, bold, heroic figure.

Gemini 4 helped create a media misapprehension that I was a Marine. Jim Maloney, a reporter for the Houston Post, a morning newspaper, always covered my late night press conferences. Since the Gemini 4 mission was the first flown from Houston and the first with three flight directors, he wrote an article on Kraft, Hodge, and myself. Adding some color he described me as “an ex-fighter pilot who you would trust with your life. Stocky, crew-cut and blond, Kranz is a bloodthirsty model for a Marine Corps recruiting poster.” The next evening after the press conference I corrected him, “Jim, you got it wrong in your article. I’m Air Force, not a Marine.” He corrected me, saying, “I didn’t say you were a Marine. I said you looked like a poster boy for the Marines!

his desk, reading the paper. He looked like he had gotten eight hours of sound sleep and spent the last hour at the gym. Recruiting poster. He set his paper aside and asked if we were OK, that we looked a little under the weather. When we replied that we were fine, he said, “OK, get to work.” The bar scene was never mentioned again. Jim eventually became so depressed, he decided to volunteer for another tour in Vietnam. However, he only had months to serve, and the army refused to deploy him. Jim found a way. He got into his Olds 4-4-2 and headed toward Louisville. Between Ft. Knox and Louisville was the small town of West Point. It occupied the southeastern bank of the Ohio River and was a notorious speed trap. Local residents claimed that the majority of the municipal budget was covered by speeding fines collected from the Ft. Knox troops. Jim ran through the northbound radar trap in excess of 100 mph. After the policeman wrote him up for reckless driving, Jim turned around and ran through the southbound speed trap at 110. He was arrested immediately. When it came time for his disciplinary process, he was busted back to E-4.

Plainly, by the turn of the century, the Marines' combatant image was etched onto the imaginations of the American people. The recruiting posters told the story. In 1907, when Army posters said, "Join the Army and Learn a Trade," and Navy posters said, "Join the Navy and See the World," the Marine posters came to the point with disarming simplicity, "First to Fight.

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.

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

If an American flag had been waving behind her, she'd have looked like a very sexy Marine Corps recruiting poster. The few, the proud, the cottontailed.

It sounds like an army recruitment poster. Or a cult. To be honest, either of those options seems better than sitting here for the next month getting run over by toy trucks and patronized by my dad.