I had really hoped that this topic would hurry up and die a quiet death without too many more comments, but that totally didn't happen.
I wasn't terribly anxious to reveal to everyone that after soliciting the advice of the regulars of the forum, which was then graciously given, I pretty much rejected all of it across the board. But that's exactly what I did.
You can get mad at me and tell me I have no sense of duty. That's okay. I used to be a flagrantly pro-war columnist for a very liberal university newspaper. Much worse things have been said about me before.
Anyway, I decided that NC1 was a scumbag who lied to me and, for whatever reason, cheated me out of $8,000. The "SEAL bonus" excuse was obviously a bunch of baloney. And yeah, if I had turned the documents over to the police, he would deserve everything he had coming. But for all that, I wasn't anxious to ruin his career and life. To do so just wouldn't be worth $8,000 of a signing bonus to me. And yeah, I hear the argument that I'm duty-obligated to report the incident in the interest of preventing future recruits from falling victim to similar occurrences. Point taken.
But the truth is I felt I needed to look out for my own interests too, and therefore, had to content myself with the thought that future forgery victims of NC1 are free to involve the police themselves if they so choose. Perhaps a future recruit will do the 'right thing.'
What I have not explained here is that I was instructed to lie to MEPS at a time when it had not yet occurred to me that recruiters and MEPS doctors can have different motives and work with different ends in mind. I therefore consented, thinking that Petty Officer X knows how things run at MEPS much better than I do, and I should just do what he says in order to save everyone a lot of tedious paperwork. So when the recruiter told me to proceed as though I had never seen a psychologist or taken medication, I said fine.
But having become a bit more privy during my time in DEP to all the recruiter-MEPS dynamics, I realized that I had made a mistake and supposing that NC1 probably knew that I had falsified information at MEPS (in retrospect, I don't think he did know), I decided I needed NC1's help and advice in order to correct this. We quite recently worked through it, and I declared the relevant medical documents to MEPS some time ago. I would imagine that if they planned to disqualify me on medical grounds that I would have known about it by now.
So anyway, that's my rationale for letting NC1 off the hook. If that's not good enough, I'll be more than happy to launch into a sappy philosophical discourse on the merits of justice vs. mercy.
But there is actually a final chapter to the narrative that readers will probably enjoy.
So anyway, I went back into the recruiting office, pointed out the forgery to a recruiter (NC1 wasn't in the office at the time), and offered to sign the documents myself. Recruiter had to call NC1 and discuss it with him.
"No, he'll sign it," I heard her say, in response to what I would like to think was a nervous question.
She was on the phone five minutes, and hung up to tell me that they had no way of finding out how the documents had become forged, inasmuch as the Petty Officer at MEPS who had drawn up the paperwork six days ago was now retired and could not be contacted! I laughed out loud.
"That's bizarre!" I exclaimed.
"No, no. These things happen you know," she told me casually with no trace of a smile.
She proceeded to carefully apply white out to the sections on which I had claimed forgeries, after which I signed them myself (only the two sheets relevant to the signing bonus had been forged; the other sections were identical to the same pages of the original contract and had obviously been photocopied with my signature already signed).
So, the conclusion is that I'm only getting a $19K bonus. But, you know, at least I took care of that whole 'lying to MEPS' issue.
Also, I'm living in an extra upstairs bedroom in my parents' house to minimize rent and food expenses. And I'm living off the miniscule remains of my student loans and whatever other money I've been able to scrape together doing various temp jobs. So I have something of a hard time seriously complaining for very long about $19,000.
