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http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print.cgi?file=/views05/0622-27.htm

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Wednesday, June 22, 2005

The Nation

Recruiters Sink to New Lows

by Katrina vanden Heuvel

 

During the Vietnam War, protesters burned draft cards,

rallied on campuses and marched on Robert McNamara's

Pentagon. Today, with the war in Iraq raging on and on,

parents, teachers and other community leaders are

spearheading a new antiwar effort, telling the military to

keep their hands off the children. The Times' Bob Herbert

put it well: " The parents of the kids being sought by

recruiters to fight this unpopular war are creating a highly

vocal and potentially very effective antiwar movement. "

 

The debacle in Iraq has made recruiting an impossibly

difficult job and recruiters are sinking to new lows in the

face of growing pressure to fulfill monthly quotas as well

as fierce opposition from parents who don't support the

President's botched Iraq war mission.

 

While the stunning list of recruiting abuses has received

some needed media attention, it's worth reviewing the

extremes to which the military has gone to fill its ranks.

In Houston, one recruiter warned a potential recruit that if

he backed out of a meeting, " we'll have a warrant " for the

potential recruit's arrest. In Colorado, a high school

student, David McSwane, who wanted to see " how far the Army

would go during a war to get one more soldier, " told

recruiters that he didn't finish high school and that he had

a drug problem. " No problem, " the recruiters responded.

McSwane was told to create a diploma from scratch and to buy

products at a store that would help him beat the drug test.

 

Recruiters have urged teens to lie to their parents and have

ignored medical and police records of potential recruits to

not compromise recruiting goals. In Ohio, two recruiters

signed up a 21-one-year-old man with bipolar disorder who

had just been released from a psychiatric ward. The

violations, all told, forced the Army into halting all

recruiting for a day last May so it could re-train its

recruiters and remind them of the ethical considerations

entailed in their jobs.

 

Despite this recent recruit-at-all-costs mentality, the Army

has now failed to meet its monthly recruiting quotas for

four months straight. (It's beginning to re-jigger its goals

in mid-stream and even then it still can't meet its quotas.)

There's even talk among retired military brass and other

defense experts that the all-volunteer Army is stretched so

thin in Iraq that it can't sustain the mission much longer.

 

Hence, recruiting violations in the Army have nearly doubled

to 320 in 2004 from 199 in 1999, and as my colleague Ari

Berman pointed out the Army has added 1,200 recruiters,

" upped enlistment bonuses from $6,000 to $20,000 per

recruit, " and created 15-month enlistments as an alternative

to the standard two-year enlistment period. The Army is also

accepting into its ranks a greater number of high school

dropouts and lower-scoring applicants as well.

 

" The problem is that no one wants to join, " one recruiter

recently told the Times. " We have to play fast and loose

with the rules just to get by. " The standards for those

already in are also being adjusted: The Wall Street Journal

recently reported on an internal army memo which said that

battalion commanders could no longer kick out of the

military enlistees who had abused drugs and alcohol, gotten

pregnant or were unfit for duty.

 

If you want to understand just how dire the situation is,

you need to know that the Army is busily exploiting a

provision in the No Child Left Behind law that allows

recruiters to go into public schools receiving federal

funding, gain access to students' personal data and

cultivate potential recruits with a virtually unfettered

hand. According to an Army manual, savvy recruiters should

eat in the school cafeteria, befriend administrators, bring

coffee and donuts for teachers and buddy up to team captains

and student body presidents to win the hearts and minds of

other students.

 

Activists are holding rallies to raise awareness, urging

families to tell schools to keep their personal data

private. A student-led campaign at a high school in

Montclair, New Jersey, convinced more than 80 percent of the

student body to keep their private information hidden from

recruiters.

 

Then there's NASCAR. Our US military is spending millions of

dollars a year recruiting young men at NASCAR races. As the

Air Force's superintendent of motorsports said (according to

the AP, that's actually his job­superintendent of

motorsports), NASCAR is the military's " target market. " The

Army alone is spending $16 million a year at NASCAR events.

Each branch of the Armed Forces sponsors NASCAR race drivers

and they set up recruiting booths outside of NASCAR events.

This " belly-to-belly selling, " the superintendent of

motorsports explained, enables the military to woo potential

recruits " face to face. "

 

Recruiters are paying a high price, suffering from

depression, headaches and stomach problems brought on by the

tremendous pressure of having to find two new recruits per

month to meet their quotas, avoid their commanders' wrath

and fulfill their mission. One Texas recruiter told the New

York Times' Damien Cave that he'd rather be fighting on the

front lines of the war in Iraq than recruiting weary

teenagers and coping with anxious parents in the states.

 

" The evidence is overwhelming that the Army is slowly being

worn down by its commitment in Iraq, " a Pentagon adviser and

military analyst at the Lexington Institute told Newsday.

The handwriting is on the wall: This is a failed war, and

the American people are refusing in their wisdom to fight it.

 

 

 

" God was my co-pilot, but we crashed in the Andes and I had to eat him. "