COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Guest Viewpoint: Potential recruits need the facts
By David Duemler, Register Guard
March 7, 2005
The Feb. 16 Register-Guard presented a picture of young people eager to join the military so they could "go rock-climbing," "go to other countries," or have fun "blowing things up." Turns out, Iraq is not a rock-climbing expedition.
Despite a recent increase in the number of recruiters, recruiting is down for the Marines, Army National Guard and Army Reserve. True, recruiters find no shortage of high school kids willing to do push-ups for free prizes. But joining up is another matter.
This slowdown may be in part a result of Pentagon policies. The Jan. 12 Register-Guard presented the thoughts of Lt. Gen. James Helmly, who complained that policies such as extended tours and call-backs have "damaged morale" and "undermined retention."
At the Lane County Youth Career Fair, I helped to staff the table for the Committee for Countering Military Recruitment. Our task is to present kids with information that they'll never get from the recruiters.
If a recruiter holds out a promise of tens of thousands of dollars of college aid, we let kids know that less than 50 percent actually receive any money towards college.
If a recruiter implies that people can learn valuable job skills by joining the military, we let them know that only a small minority of recruits actually report developing job skills that are applicable to the civilian sector.
We don't tell kids not to join. It's their decision. But without us there, kids too young to vote are making one of the most important decisions of their lives on the basis of a multibillion dollar advertising campaign and information provided by someone trying to meet a recruiting quota.
Every year, veterans come to our table. Some had a positive military experience, some a negative one. Some are very grateful to us for being there. They share their stories about being misled by military recruiters. They had no legal recourse. You can't sue the military. The only hope is to make an informed decision in the first place, and fundamentally, that requires getting information from an independent source. For some kids, we are that source. We are their only hope.
In her cover article in the March 2005 issue of Harper's magazine, Kathy Dobie cites a Pentagon estimate that since the start of the Iraq conflict, more than 5,500 military personnel have deserted. Dobie finds that in most cases, people desert, go AWOL, due to a feeling that the military has treated them unfairly - "the sense of betrayal is felt at a profound level that's difficult for any civilian to understand."
Jeremiah Adler of Portland joined the Army because he wanted to be tough. But when the drill sergeant referred to Arabs as the "ah-la-la-la-las" and denigrated them to the hoots and hollers of the other recruits, Jeremiah thought, "Oh my God, what am I doing here?"
Jeremiah went AWOL, and when he arrived home in Portland, said "Well, Mom, I guess I'm going to have to find a different way to become a man besides learning to kill."
In his book "Freaks, Geeks and Cool Kids," Murray Milner presents a study of the various cliques that form in the artificial and age-limited social environment of American high schools.
In some schools, male athletic skill and toughness are the keys to high status. But in pluralistic schools, this is not the case. And many males mature out of the macho bit by their senior year or shortly after graduation.
In other words, there is a relatively narrow window in which recruiters can find a target-rich environment. At the Committee for Countering Military Recruitment, our hope is that young men and women will make a decision based on thorough information, not based on a push-up-induced adrenaline rush.
David Duemler is a writer and a instructor of psychology at Lane Community College. He volunteers with the Committee for Countering Military Recruitment (www.countermilitary.org), a joint project of Eugene PeaceWorks and Community Alliance of Lane County.
This archive consists of a topically organized selection of
articles culled by members of the Counter-Recruitment List Serve from printed
publications and web sites. The archive is not complete. We have chosen
material relevant to the work of