COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: War Protests: General
DAVE AIRHART
TIM DICKINSON, Rolling Stone
Dec 15, 2005
AN ARMY OF ONE In the TV spots, a burly recruit scales a sheer cliffface, braving death -- only to be transformed, upon reaching the
top, into a steely-eyed, sword-wielding Marine. But on a crisp day
in October, college freshman Dave Airhart staged a stunning reversal
of such pro-military images. The rugged, twenty-four-year-old
Marine -- a veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan -- scaled a
climbing wall set up by a military recruiter on the campus of Kent
State University, only to reveal himself, upon reaching the top, as
a determined anti-war activist. The message on the banner he
unfurled: "Kent, Ohio for Peace."
Airhart's anti-war drama -- taking place on the same campus where
National Guardsmen massacred four students at a Vietnam War protest
in 1970 -- became the nation's most-watched struggle over the war.
Enraged by the banner, a military recruiter screamed, "Get the fuck
off the tower!" and scrambled up the wall after Airhart, forcing the
combat vet to ditch his harness and climb down the steel beams on
the back side of the wall. Once on solid ground, the anthropology
undergraduate was charged with disorderly conduct and threatened
with expulsion.
Battling to keep his peers out of the military may seem an unlikely
cause for a man who eagerly enlisted in the Marines at age eighteen.
But Airhart has seen the horrors of war up close. "I can't imagine
many people having a more well-rounded perspective of the war on
terror than me," he says. Airhart saw friends killed by friendly
fire, unarmed civilians shot for no reason and prisoners abused by
his fellow Marines at Guantanamo, where he served as a guard. "I was
there four months," he says, "and there wasn't a day that there
wasn't some sort of prisoner-beating festivity going on."
After "four miserable years," Airhart received an honorable
discharge in 2004. An Akron, Ohio, native, he enrolled at Kent State
in large part because of the school's anti-war reputation. On
campus, he joined the local branch of the Campus Antiwar Network, a
student group with chapters at more than a hundred colleges and
universities nationwide. CAN's strategy is simple: Deny the military
fresh recruits, and the Pentagon -- already facing a 7,000-troop
shortfall -- will be unable to sustain the war. Although federal law
requires universities to open their campuses to military recruiters
in return for student aid, CAN has succeeded in kicking recruiters
out of schools from Seattle to New York. In November, the student
group scored a major coup when San Francisco passed a ballot measure
barring military recruiters from the city's high school and college
campuses -- a move that inspired Bill O'Reilly to invite Al Qaeda to
strike the city.
Airhart has made it his personal mission to protect his classmates
from recruiters who distort the truth to seduce them into
service. "I wish that I could have had someone who had been in the
military tell me, 'Hey, your recruiter is full of shit. He gets
bonuses for recruiting people, so he'll do whatever it takes to get
people to join.' It's like the rock-climbing wall they put up at
Kent -- what's that have to do with going to war?"
Airhart himself has received widespread support, including an
international petition campaign called "Hands Off Dave." The
pressure worked: In November, Kent State did an abrupt about-face,
canceling Airhart's disciplinary hearing and dropping all charges
against him.
"Dave is drawing attention to the immoral use of fun and games to
recruit students," says anti-war leader Cindy Sheehan. "My son,
Casey, was recruited out of college. His recruiter promised him the
sun and moon to enlist. But he delivered only an early grave."
This archive consists of a topically organized selection of
articles culled by members of the Counter-Recruitment List Serve from printed
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material relevant to the work of