If you want to be an officer, go get decent grades at college, and apply at a recruiting officer for one of their programs. If you want to be 'enlisted', visit a recruiting office and take a short practice version of the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB). What they are looking for is a lack of criminal activities, good health (fitness, eye sight, hearing, etc.), and decent potential to learn new information and skills. If you have any sort of ties to another country, they will want to know about these as well. If you have taken prescription drugs for any ongoing condition, this will either bar you, or require a waiver. Don't let the recruiter be lazy, go for the waiver and don't hide it. The recruiters don't want to have to do the extra work to help you with your waivers. They work off a quota system, and will be sent back to a ship if they can't meet their quotas, so they are under a lot of pressure to spend as little time on each potential applicant as possible. The recruiter is telling you to just not talk about it to save themselves some effort, but remember that fraudulent enlistment, even you don't realize that this is what they are trying to get you to do, is a crime. It will also put you in an awkward position for the rest of your career if you find out after the fact that they didn't record what you told them verbally. Make sure that they write down everything you tell them, and that it actually gets submitted, and properly waived. Personally, my recruiter spent time with me, was honest, and helped me out with things not directly related to the Navy recruitment process. However, he was not the first recruiter I talked to, and a few of them tried to pull the non-sense I warned about above. Visit a few different offices for any branch that you are considering; ideally visit ones that are hundreds of miles from each other. If you don't feel like you are being adequately serviced at any point, work with a different recruiter. Their is a head recruiter at every office, and they in turn are over seen by a regional recruiter. Once you agree to join and have selected a job, you are placed in the Delayed Entry Program. Time in DEP counts towards the eight years you are actually on the hook for no matter you initial contract says, and consists of going to meetings and exercising. If you aren't in decent shape, purposefully pick a far off ship date when you are at MEPS so that boot camp will suck less for you. You don't need the extra negative attention that looking or being fat is going to garner in that environment, and it negatively affects the 80 or so people with which you are going to spend a few months in close quarters. It also gives you time to memorize all the things that everyone else in boot camp is going to be learning. They aren't teaching you anything at your DEP office? Tell your recruiter that you are attending DEP meetings at another office. Before 'shipping out' you will again be sent to MEPS for a final screening before flying to Great Lakes.