I feel as if the recruitment officer was not always entirely honest with me. He is a personal friend of my buddy in his unit, but I felt like it was pulling teeth to get him to tell me about stop-loss orders, length of deployments, and other things that I would really need to know. It makes me very uncomfortable not knowing about potential downsides, whereas if I was just told about them straight-up, I'd probably be OK with them.

Maybe you could try call several recruiters and see if the information matches. I have dealt with them for reasons other than getting into the army and while they are usually nice they seem like car salesmen.