COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Military Recruiting: Personnel Crunch
'Reading Eagle' Gets Documents About National Guard Recruiters Altering Papers
Associated Press
November 26, 2007
READING, Pa. Two Pennsylvania National Guard recruiters are beingdisciplined for altering documentation in their pursuit of two former
Reading High School students, a Guard spokesman said.
An Allentown recruiter was reduced in rank from staff sergeant to
sergeant, while disciplinary action against a Philadelphia recruiter
is pending, said Lt. Col. Christopher Cleaver, a Guard spokesman.
Capt. Bill Jimenez, head of the U.S. Marine Corps Junior ROTC program
at Reading High School, said the two cases prompted him to stop
referring students to the state National Guard.
"I told the Guard recruiters in Reading about this and they said they
thought it was wrong, and in their next breath they were asking me
what the kid's status was now," Jimenez said. "They didn't care about
the fraud, they wanted to get the kid."
Jimenez provided documents to the Reading Eagle newspaper showing
that the two recruiters filed fraudulent documents and tried to
mislead school officials to get the former students to enlist.
The recruiters were being disciplined for not following policy and
procedures, Pennsylvania National Guard spokesman Kevin Cramsey said Monday.
"This is not the way we do business in recruiting. As soon as we
found out, we took corrective action," Cramsey said.
The Philadelphia recruiter altered a letter in trying to get a
transcript for a former Reading High student, Jimenez said.
Rather than pay a $5 fee and wait for the teen's transcript to be
sent to the Guard, the recruiter tried to get the paperwork by saying
he was from a fictitious Philadelphia university, Jimenez said. The
recruiter sent a fax in which he changed the National Guard logo to
read "Admissions Department" and deleted some references to the
Guard, but kept the phone and fax numbers of the recruiting office,
Jimenez said.
The Allentown recruiter filed enlistment documents that showed that a
recruit who had dropped out of Reading High in 2006 was a student at
William Allen High School in Allentown, Jimenez said.
The teen wasn't at the Allentown school, Jimenez said. Jimenez said
he reported that to the National Guard, which discharged the recruit
for filing fraudulent enlistment papers.
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