Counterpoint:

Recruiters are commissioned salespeople with a potentially great product to sell. It's salary, room and board, adventure, college, and life-changing amounts of opportunity. It's also a potential lifetime of disability, PTSD or other problems but at peak? 169,000 troops were in Iraq and 6,900 have died. There are 1.4 million active personnel in the US military; statistically speaking, you're a lot better off in today's military than you were in say Vietnam, when there were 150 million fewer people in the country but twice as many active duty personnel (and nearly ten times as many US troops dead).

You're required to surrender your autonomy, however, and even with the comparatively low staffing requirements we're having a hard time meeting quotas. The recruiter hounding you legitimately believes that a stint in the military would do you good; he's just trying to figure out the best way to explain it to you. This doesn't make him right but it doesn't make him scum.

They also know a lot more about you than most people really know. It's a hell of a business: if one Marine is over $6500 in recruiting costs alone, what's the expense of actually fielding a dude to fix F-16s? Back in the Stone Age, there was a guy in some of my classes who was going through the undergraduate engineering program to get into flight school to fly tankers. Why tankers? Because he had no interest in blowing shit up and tankers were the most direct path to airline pilot he could find and that was a damn nice living. He told me that he was looking to get two million dollars worth of education for free.

Somebody out there thinks you could be a hell of an asset to Uncle Sam. You don't have to be nice to him but it doesn't hurt you to consider them as people. I, too, had a recruiter who wouldn't leave me alone. All he needed to do was look up "mechanical engineering" and "grew up in Los Alamos, NM" which led him to "surrounded by people with Q clearances" and that dude? Twice a week for a year called me on the phone to convince me to train to be a nuclear engineer on a boomer.

Did I want to tend to the reactor on a megadeth machine? Fuck off, Jack. But that woulda been a cushy goddamn gig. In retrospect I'll bet that recruiter would have gotten a new car out of my enlistment. I woulda been set for fuckin' life; they would have made me cut my hair, tho (and live underwater for months at a time) so I expressed my keen disinterest for months after graduating.

but that made him persistent, not a scumbag. Somebody took that job. I hope they love it. They're probably still doing it.