Longtime recruiter reflects on the recruit he knows best: himself

Freddie Sellers credits the Marine Corps with making him a man, whether he was ready to be one or not.

He joined the Corps at 18 looking to trade working on a farm, where he was at the mercy of nature and didn’t see much of a future for himself, for a relatively “easy” life serving his country. But life in the military was not easier, and he couldn’t have prepared himself for the journey this profession would take him on.

Sellers, now 100% disabled, lives in Lilesville where he can sit on his porch looking over a peaceful peach orchard on the adjacent property while his pack of loving dogs sunbath and wrestle in his yard. He spent six years in the Marine Corps from 1972 to 1978. He served primarily the South Atlantic as a part of the Fleet Marine Force. His unit was attached to an artillery unit and also travelled with some Special Forces.

They would go on “floats” for about six months at the time. While Sellers said wasn’t involved in any “declared” conflict, he and his unit went where they were needed and Sellers said his life was put in danger multiple times.

“I’m here, that’s about it,” Sellers said of how he survived those harrowing moments. “I did what I’d been taught to do. My training took over.”

Still, the toughest part was basic training. It was 13 weeks of intense workouts and drills that started every day at 4 a.m. By 5 a.m., they had to be dressed, have their beds made up, and taken care of their hygiene. Basic weeded out many of his counterparts who couldn’t handle it. But for Sellers, these weeks “defined” who he was, and his graduation from basic was “the proudest day of my life,” made all the more sweeter by the close brush with being sent home.

Sellers suffered a stress fracture that made him unable to keep up with the others. He resisted his superiors’ attempts to send him home, and recovered back to full health on a hard fought second chance.

“I’ll always be a Marine,” Sellers said.

And after six years of service he left for seven years to go to college and start a family, but college didn’t satisfy him so he decided to try to rejoin. At that point he had been out for too long to go back to the Marines, and instead he joined the National Guard where he served as a recruiter for 17 years, dedicated to leading other young men and women to the military where he hoped they would learn the lessons he did.

Sellers was a decorated recruiter, making mission — meaning he hit his quota of securing four new recruits per month — 15 out of his 17 years. The two years he didn’t make mission were his first and last years. He received 18 awards for his recruiting, and won others for other aspects of his service, but would have received more were it not for his intentional avoidance of the Washington D.C. awards banquets. To avoid these, he went so far as to credit other recruiters with his recruits.

The job of a recruiter is an intense one, with recruiters working anywhere from 12 to 16 hours per day under a great deal of pressure. Part of the difficulty, Sellers said, was that, “You’re trying to sell something to somebody that most people don’t want.”

Plus the recruiters have to find recruits that meet the physical and academic requirements, that are able to fight off peer pressure and have to convince the parents that joining the military is a good idea. For himself, joining the military was just a matter of choosing “something” over “nothing,” the latter of which referred to his future as a farmer. The military would offer him a solid salary, good benefits, provide housing and food, uniforms, etc. and the rest of his money was his to do with what he pleased.

“That sounded pretty good,” he said.

Sellers’s pitch would start off with a simple question: What are you going to do with yourself?

“I sit down and tell them, ‘Look, you’re going to college, or you’re going to go to work — what are you going to do?’” he said. “‘Basically, you need to make up your mind on something you need to do.’

“A lot of them tell you, ‘Well, I don’t know what I’m gonna do,’” Sellers continued. “Well, I’ll give you an option you might like.”

Sellers said it was clear whether the military had nothing to offer someone. He could tell just by talking to them sometimes, and other times he’d judge by the aptitude test to judge their interests. In these instances, he would “talk them out of it.”

“There’s some kids that’s not cut out to be in the military,” he said.

Dealing with kids for so long, Sellers has a closer look than most on what issues young people have faced at different points in our culture. One thing that’s held true from the time he was an active recruiter to now is the peer pressure kids face to follow the crowd on doing drugs. The only real difference is kids’ reliance on technology for so much of their lives.

“You get respect, you get knowledge, you feel better about yourself and you have a drive to keep on going,” Sellers said of what the military can add to your life. “The military puts something in you that you can’t get nowhere else. It’s really hard to explain. Real hard.”