Hey everybody, I've been offered a Nuke job for the Navy, but I'm obviously having some reservations. I've already been processed at MEPS and told them what they "needed" to hear, I got a 99 on my AFQT, and I line-score qualified by more than ten points for a nuke job. But I've been having a major personal moral issue, one with my recruiter, and in fact the entire branch he works for.
You can glaze over this part:
Backing up, I started smoking pot my last year of high school, and I smoked it pretty heavily the first semester I spent at community college. It tapered off significantly since then, and I haven't done it but twice in the past year. I wouldn't call my pot use experimental, but not chronic either. It was very leisurely, if I can describe it as that. I never had a pot addiction or a strong craving to do it, but I had a lot of friends (enablers) who always wanted to do it, and at the time it was hard to find a reason not to. My friends smoked pot, my coworkers smoked pot, even my bosses smoked pot. I was delivering pizza that summer, and even regularly got offered pot by people I was delivering to. Let's just say I was living in a very pot-heavy town, and as a first-semester college student there was little explicit incentive to stay away from it.
Well, I screwed up my first semester of school, and went up to visit my parents for a semester and get my head on straight. When I went back, I dissolved ties with many of the people I had been disillusioned about, and cut back on weed smoking significantly. I was biking ten miles a day (because my car broke down) and I gt a 4.0 for that semester. I moved back in with my parents in December when the restuarant I worked for wen out of business with the economic downturn, and stopped smoking almost completely.
Members of my family told me my past was my own business, and when I went into the recruiter office I initially followed that mantra. I went in with a friend, and I stayed tight-lipped as the CO of the office went over the initial questions with us. My friend told the truth, and everything seemed fine. He didn't get chastised or made to believe that it would adversely effect his recruitment. I felt really guilty after that.
Well, when we sat down with the recruiter to fill out out paperwork for MEPS and our SF-86 forms, I tried to come clean about my pot usage, saying I did not want to proceed without getting that off of my chest. He shut the door and had a private talk with us. He told us point-blank to lie about everything. My friend who had already told the recruiter's commanding officer that he had smoked pot now lied about it on his paperwork, and I did too. He also told my friend to go online and change his NASIS forms in which he disclosed that he had asthma as a child. He said there was no way for the military to access medical histories without us, and that my friends would never narc on me. We followed his instructions. On the way to Meps we got a call from the Chief who asked us if we had ever been asked to lie, had criminal charges etc.; and he asked my friend if he had ever smoked pot. This was the man who my friend had confessed his pot usage to when we first showed up a month ago, but now my friend lied to him and he accepted the lie without hesitation. This led to my suspecting that the office we went to, if not the whole military, is very corrupt and nod-nod wink-wink.
When we got to MEPS I was completely truthful about everything except my pot usage, and they offered me a Nuke contract, but I did not sign anything because my friend and I both wanted to do CTI at the tame and take the DLAB first. Now I'm fairly certain I want the Nuke opportunity.
But it's really been eating away at me. I'm not sure if I can just bury a chunk of my past that large. If I lie now, that's potentially twenty years of lying, trying to lie on a polygraph, lying to any new people I meet, possibly getting caught and kicked out/fined, and just generally hating myself and looking over my shoulder all the time. I don't want my Navy career to be like the "Tell Tale Heart."
So what do you guys think? I tried telling my recruiter today that my friend and I wanted to come in and see about making changes to our forms before we enter the DEP and really make things hard for ourselves. He didn't seem to happy about that, and he said we'd have to talk to the chief on Monday to see if he still wanted to "deal" with us. That statement made me feel kind of betrayed, but what should I expect, really? Am I opening up a world of pain by coming clean, or am I doing the right thing? Do you think I still have a shot at becoming a nuke after this? Was he just blowing smoke up my ass with that comment?
I'm fully committed to not being involved with any drugs while in the military, regardless of how mild. And honestly, with as much stress as this has caused me, I don't care if I ever see pot again.
Something else we were considering is going to the recruiting station a county over and asking them what they think, perhaps even continuing with them, as we feel there's a chance that the people we're currently working with would rather just get rid of us.
Also, so we're clear, It was ultimately my decision to lie at MEPS, and I take full respnsibility for that. It was an adult decision, and a bad one at that.
