Does the US military let people with messed up vision join?

yep I was in the Army with many people with glasses

depends on how bad it is. You have probably seen those movies with people wearing those goofy ass glasses? They’re referred to as BCG’s (birth control glasses) you’d be sure not to get laid wearing them.

Not the Air Force, but I don’t know about the other parts.

@TitsMcGhee I’m in the Air Force and I’ve seen people with corrective glasses. You’re not allowed to wear contacts in training technically, you can only wear the prescribed glasses.

If you’re trying to be a pilot, you probably need at least vision correctable to 20/20

Maybe they’d pay for my laser vision correction but I heard that’s still a risky new technology

You can serve as part of any branch as long as your not blind. You will not be allowed to wear contact lenses in a combat zone and you probably won’t be allowed to pilot aircraft but you can do almost anything else.

you can still be in career fields that require good vision and hand and eye coordination as long as your vision is correctable to 20/20. I remember a retentions officer telling me that when I applied for a “boom operators position”.

Nah, if I would join I wouldn’t want to be a pilot, I’d probably would want to be in security ops.

security ops, or security forces?

Actually anything of security based, I’d like to transition later in civilian life into a corrections officer/airport security/border patrol.

Security Forces wouldn’t be a bad choice…but I can assure you. You will deploy at some point in a career field like that. I’m in it right now.

It depends on how bad your vision is. I’m a -9.5 in the left and a -7.0 in the right and I could not get in the Marine Corps after High School.

Ya you can join. You just can’t fly planes or anything that requires 100% of your vision, but there are things you can do with even if you have poor vision.

@Randy, when you say -9.5 in the left, and -7.0 in the right, what does that mean?

@Random, It’s my prescription. The negative means that I am nearsighted. I can see things close up but not far away.

The numbers represent diopters which is the unit that is used to measure the correction. Basically, the father from zero that the number is, the worse your vision.

Those that couldn’t get in didn’t request a waiver from MEPS for medical evaluation. MEPS is the acronym for Military Entrance Processing Station, your recruiter has to take you there to have you medically evaluated; after the evaluation any failures can have a waiver requested by you, only if the waver comes back negative for entrance will you be turned away.