We Want You! No, not you, fatty. The other guy.

Army recruiter Lt. Vic Easel has a sad look on his leathery face. Even his closely-cropped hair seems downtrodden.

“Why so glum, Lt. Vic?” I ask him at the table he’s set up at the local high school.

“Recruitment is down, and so am I,” says Lt. Vic. “People don’t want to join the Army these days… and most of the ones that do want to join we really don’t want. Like only one out of every four is a quality recruit.”

“The Army actually rejects people?” I say. “Like who?”

“Fatties, kids on Ritalin, criminals, and unfunctional retards,” says Lt. Vic.

“What qualifies as an unfunctional retard?” I ask.

“We have an apitude test called the Armed Forces Qualification Test,” says Lt. Vic. “If you score below the 10th percentile, we don’t take you. And if you score in the 10th to 30th percentiles and you don’t have a high school diploma we can’t take you either. But for the love of God, you get into the 20th percentile if you can spell your name and address correctly!”

“Just like on the old SAT test,” I say.

“And even if we do rig the test so they barely pass, there’s still the problem of them being chubby fat-asses who can’t do anything but sweat and breathe heavily,” Lt. Vic says.

“And to think that over 60 years ago they started the School Lunch Program because recruits were too skinny,” I say.

“And even if I do find a not-fatty kid, more than likely he’s on Ritalin or some other drug for whatever malfunction he’s got in his head,” says Lt. Vic. “Everyone’s got ADHD or depression or schizophrenia these days.”

“Pills and active military duty don’t mix?” I say. “I would have thought the Army would be for better soldiering through chemistry.”

“Are you kidding?” says Lt. Vic. “If the only thing keeping you sane is a steady diet of pills, then you’re going to lose your damn mind when shit starts blowing up around you.”

“No fatties… no kids on prescription medication… no severely dumb kids… what about jocks?” I say. “There’s still athletes running the social order in American high schools, and they’re just smart enough to pass their classes and be eligible to play their sports.”

“They have no reason to join,” says Lt. Vic. “The great athletes will get a free ride at college from scholarships, and the others don’t want to get into something where they could get killed or lose a limb. I tell them they get to go to Germany, but they can’t even find Germany on a map if you spotted them Western Europe. And even when I play to their bullying asshole tendencies and tell them they can do gay humiliating stuff to prisoners, they just laugh and say ‘Yeah, but we can do that in college too. It’s called a fraternity. And we don’t get shot at.’”

“What kind of kids are we raising today who don’t want to violate the human dignity of a foreign people?” I say, shaking my head.

“I know,” says Lt. Vic. “That’s the ancient military recruiting tool: the chance to kill or maim people of a different culture. From the days of the Pharoah and Genghis Khan and Saladin to our modern era, brutalizing people different than you was a reliable secret selling point in a recruiter’s pitch. But now everyone can kill someone different from them on their damn XBoxes, safe and sound in their living rooms with no Amnesty International or Red Cross poking their noses in.”

“What about kids from other high school clubs?” I ask.

“AV geeks want to go to film school, not Tikrit,” says Lt. Vic. “Most of the student council kids want to be the politicians, not the grunts. And we need our Young Republicans at home to fight the battle of ideas by putting stickers on their cars so that one day they may grow up to join the think tanks that will fuel our future wars.”

“Mmmm…future war,” I say in Homer Simpson fashion. My mind starts flickering with images of biped cat cyborgs shooting lasers at genetically-altered human-werewolf hybrid soldiers in a wasteland battleground of the future, where the lucky ones died in the nuclear strike. Because then came the robot cats…sweeping up the remnants of humanity and putting them to work in the kitty litter mines. Those that couldn’t work were fed to the Fancy Feast machines, and those machines ran night and day. We were this close to going out…but one man turned the tide. One man taught us how to fight back. His name was Connor. John Connor. Your son.

“Hey, are you all right?” Lt. Vic asks. Apparently I had been imagining my future war for about five minutes.

“Oh…yeah, I’m cool,” I say. “Where were we? Oh yeah. High school clubs. What about the theater kids?”

Lt. Vic gives me a look as if to say I should know better.

“Oh right…the gay thing,” I say. “You know, you might want to loosen up on that. You’d get a lot of good recruits out of the gay teen community. They’re usually in shape, they’re pretty smart, and depending on if their parents haven’t been very accepting of their sexual orientation they’ve got no problem moving far away from home.”

“And while I’m at it, maybe I can suggest to the Pentagon that we invest billions in a battalion of elf-piloted unicorns who shoot lightning from their horns,” says Lt. Vic.

I can tell the Lieutenant is being sarcastic. Unicorns can’t shoot lightning.

“If I don’t get my numbers up, they’ll reassign me to combat,” says Lt. Vic. “I’m not sure I want to end up in Iran.”

“Don’t you mean Iraq?” I say. “Or Afghanistan?”

“Those are the wars of today,” says Lt. Vic. “I’m talking about tomorrow and the wars of the near future.”

I don’t lose myself in thoughts of the wars of the near future, as they’re not very interesting. No robot death squads. No Unreal Tournament armored troops with razor disc guns. No spaceship dog fights. Boring.

Just then, some high school teacher walks over and asks me who I am and why I’m in the building. So I break open a canister of tear gas and make my escape.