COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Military Recruiting: Youth of Color
The Making of an American Soldier: Why Young People Join the Military
Jorge Mariscal, Alternet
June 26, 2007
In today's political climate, with two wars being fought with no
end in sight, it can be difficult for some people to understand why
young folks enlist in our military.
The conservative claim that most youth enlist due to patriotism
and the desire to "serve one's country" is misleading. The
Pentagon's own surveys show that something vague and abstract
called "duty to country" motivates only a portion of enlistees.
The vast majority of young people wind up in the military for
different reasons, ranging from economic pressure to the desire to
escape a dead-end situation at home to the promise of citizenship.
Over all, disenfranchisement may be one of the most accurate words
for why some youth enlist.
***
When mandatory military service ended in 1973, the volunteer
military was born. By the early 1980s, the term "poverty draft" had
gained currency to connote the belief that the enlisted ranks of the
military were made up of young people with limited economic
opportunities.
Today, military recruiters react angrily to the term "poverty
draft." They parse terms in order to argue that "the poor" are not
good recruiting material because they lack the necessary education.
Any inference that those currently serving do so because they have
few other options is met with a sharp rebuke, as Sen. John Kerry
learned last November when he seemed to tell a group of college
students they could either work hard in school or "get stuck in
Iraq."
President Bush led the bipartisan charge against Kerry: "The men
and
women who serve in our all-volunteer armed forces are plenty smart
and are serving because they are patriots -- and Sen. Kerry owes
them an apology."
In reality, Kerry's "botched joke" -- Kerry said he was talking
about President Bush and not the troops -- contained a kernel of
truth. It is not so much that one either studies hard or winds up in
Iraq but rather that many U.S. troops enlist because access to
higher education is closed off to them. Although they may be "plenty
smart," financial hardship drives many to view the military's
promise of money for college as their only hope to study beyond high
school.
Recruiters may not explicitly target "the poor," but there is
mounting evidence that they target those whose career options are
severely limited. According to a 2007 Associated Press
analysis, "nearly three-fourths of [U.S. troops] killed in Iraq came
from towns where the per capita income was below the national
average. More than half came from towns where the percentage of
people living in poverty topped the national average."
It perhaps should come as no surprise that the Army GED Plus
Enlistment Program, in which applicants without high school diplomas
are allowed to enlist while they complete a high school equivalency
certificate, is focused on inner-city areas.
When working-class youth make it to their local community
college, they often encounter military recruiters working hard to
discourage them. "You're not going anywhere here," recruiters
say. "This place is a dead end. I can offer you more." Pentagon-
sponsored studies -- such as the RAND Corporation' s "Recruiting
Youth in the College Market: Current Practices and Future Policy
Options" -- speak openly about college as the recruiter's number one
competitor for the youth market.
Add in race as a supplemental factor for how class determines
the propensity to enlist and you begin to understand why communities
of color believe military recruiters disproportionately target their
children. Recruiters swear they don't target by race. But the
millions of Pentagon dollars spent on special recruiting campaigns
for Latino and African-American youth contradicts their claim.
According to an Army Web site, the goal of the "Hispanic H2 Tour"
was to "Build confidence, trust, and preference of the Army within
the Hispanic community." The "Takin' it to the Streets Tour" was
designed to accelerate recruitment in the African-American community
where recruiters are particularly hard-pressed and faced with
declining interest in the military as a career. In short, the nexus
between class, race, and the "volunteer armed forces" is an
unavoidable fact.
***
Not all recruits, of course, are driven by financial need. In
working-class communities of every color, there are often long-
standing traditions of military service and links between service
and privileged forms of masculinity. For communities often marked
as "foreign," such as Latinos and Asians, there is pressure to serve
in order to prove that one is "American." For recent immigrants,
there is the lure of gaining legal resident status or citizenship.
Economic pressure, however, is an undeniable motivation -- yet to
assert that fact in public often leads to confrontations with
conservatives who ask, "How dare you question our troops'
patriotism?"
But any simplistic understanding of "patriotism" does not begin
to capture the myriad of subjective motivations that often coexist
alongside economic motives. Altruism -- or as youth often put it, "I
want to make a difference" -- is also a major reason a significant
number of people enlist.
It is a terrible irony that contemporary American society
provides working-class youth with few other outlets besides the
military for their desire for agency, personal empowerment, and
social commitment. It is especially tragic whenever U.S. foreign
policy turns away from national defense and back toward the imperial
tradition of military adventurism, as it did in Vietnam and Iraq.
Within a worldview of pre-emptive war and wars of choice, the
altruism and good intentions of young people become one more
sentiment to be manipulated and exploited in order to further the
aims of a small group of policymakers.
In this scenario, the desire to "make a difference," once
inserted
into the military apparatus, means young Americans may have to kill
innocent people or become brutalized by the realities of combat.
Take the tragic example of Sgt. Paul Cortez, who graduated in 2000
from Central High School in the working-class town of Barstow,
Calif., joined the Army, and was sent to Iraq. On March 12, 2006, he
participated in the gang rape of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and the
murder of her and her entire family.
When asked about Cortez, a classmate said: "He would never do
something like that. He would never hurt a female. He would never
hit one or even raise his hand to one. Fighting for his country is
one thing, but not when it comes to raping and murdering. That's not
him."
Let us accept the claim that "that's not him." Nevertheless,
because of a series of unspeakable and unpardonable events within
the context of an illegal and immoral war, "that" is what he became.
On February 21, 2007, Cortez pled guilty to the rape and four counts
of felony murder. He was convicted a few days later, sentenced to
life in prison and a lifetime in his own personal hell.
As ex-Marine Martin Smith wrote recently in Counterpunch: "It
speaks volumes that in order for young working-class men and women
to gain self-confidence or self-worth, they seek to join an
institution that trains them how to destroy, maim, and kill. The
desire to become a Marine -- as a journey to one's manhood or as a
path to self-improvement -- is a stinging indictment of the
pathology of our class-ridden world."
Like a large mammal insensitive to its offspring's needs and
whereabouts, America is rolling over on the aspirations of its
children and crushing them in the process.
Many U.S. troops crack under the pressure of combat and its
aftershocks. At least one in eight of all Iraq veterans suffering
from post-traumatic stress, according to a 2004 Pentagon study
published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Dr. Matthew J. Friedman, executive director of the Department
of Veterans Affairs' National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress
Disorder, stated that the study's results were far too conservative.
As the war in Iraq drags on, many more young veterans will
experience some debilitating form of PTSD.
Others are opting for conscientious objector (CO) status.
Hundreds of troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan have either begun
or completed the CO process. According to Bill Galvin of the Center
on Conscience and War: "For some people, the training gets to them.
From stabbing dummies, to shouting 'Kill!' or 'Blood makes the grass
grow!' But in the last year or two, we've been hearing people
talking about their experiences in the war, or talking about the
children they've witnessed being killed, or the civilians that were
murdered. Some of them are wrestling with the guilt about people
they may have killed or families they may have ruined."
Most people are not predisposed to kill, and so it should
concern us that our children are being increasingly militarized in
their schools and the culture as a whole. To take only one example:
What does it mean for a society to put young people from ages 8 to
18 in military uniforms and call it "leadership training"? This is
precisely what each of the more than 300 units of the Young Marines
program is doing at a neighborhood school near you.
From rural America to the urban cores of deindustrialized cities, a
military caste system is slowly taking shape. If recent history is
any indication, our politicians will use our military less for
national defense than for adventures premised on control of
resources, strategic advantage, and ideological fantasies. As in the
final decades of every declining empire, it's likely that many wars
loom in our future.
Exactly who will have to fight and die in those wars will be
determined by economic class. In order to accomplish their goals,
the recruiters and politicians will exploit the hopes and dreams of
mostly well-intentioned youth from humble origins who are looking
for a way to contribute to a society that has lost its moral
compass. As they did in Vietnam and again in Iraq, young women and
men will serve their country. But how well will their country have
served them?
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