HarryPalmer
War Hero
The empty promises of an army under siege
MANCHÃN MAGAN
Sat, Jan 24, 2009
The US army spends billions on touring schools and recruitment offices with promises of college fees and thousands of dollars in bonuses to meet its quota of 100,000 recruits a year. A group of war veterans, however, say that the targeted teenagers are only getting half the story, writes MANCHÃN MAGAN.
THE SANTA FE PLACE shopping centre in New Mexico is like any other US mall â clumps of teenagers in skater-boy or emo-girl clothes slurp oversized drinks as they wander aimlessly around Gap, Victoriaâs Secret and Radio Shack, yet at the far end, between JC Penney and the Pretzel Zone, is something quite alien: a line of army, navy, marine and air-force recruiting offices, all with glossy airbrushed images of gung-ho young recruits in high-tech battledress and Apache helicopters looming overhead.
âAre you army strong?â demands a sign above a panel of photographs of local youths whoâve just enlisted. Their names, schools and the unit in which they will serve are listed â as well as the most important line, the cash bonus each receives upon entry and the extra funds promised for college education. A mischievous-looking Hispanic boy from Mesa Vista High School is getting a $20,000 (â¬15,41bonus as well as a possible $37,000 (â¬28,524) for his college education, while a curly-haired blonde girl from Santa Fe Community College gets a whopping $37,000 (â¬28,524) for joining a mortuary-affairs unit.
That morning on NPR radio a woman recounted her experiences in mortuary affairs in Iraq. âI saw brains leaking out from heads, and saw eyes that had been popped out of sockets,â Charlotte Brooke recalled. âBodily fluids dripped on my boots.â Could that be worth a $37,000 bonus â even in a poor US state such as New Mexico where the average annual income is less than that?
Inside the army recruiting office the atmosphere is ebullient. The team of recruiters, which covers 27,000km of mostly desert, has been unusually busy all day with kids looking for information. Senior officer sergeant first class Pilar Sauceda says the army would like him to think that this is due to a recent $1.35 billion (â¬1.04 billion) âArmy Strongâ advertising campaign, but he isnât so sure. Heâs just glad of the break. His job has been getting increasingly difficult as the number of dead service personnel continues to rise â last year was the highest since the war began. As recruit numbers decrease the army has had to lower its acceptance criteria, allowing in more high-school dropouts and applicants with low aptitude scores and criminal backgrounds, and also giving more waivers for medical problems, such as attention deficit disorder.
The army needs 100,000 new recruits each year, according to Sauceda, and he and his men are expected to meet a recruitment target each month â the pressure gets higher as the month goes on. If they donât succeed they may find themselves strapping their battle-gear back on and being shipped out. Amid allegations of unethical behaviour, the US army closed all recruiting offices for a day in 2005 to retrain them in proper practice. Sauceda promises his men behave well. He wants to shake off the image of recruiters as âused car salesmenâ.
âPeople expect the truth,â he says. âThe parents and girlfriends will look me in the eye and insist, almost threaten me, to bring their boy back alive.â
Most of the recruitersâ time is spent going around high schools, youth events and public festivals â anywhere theyâre likely to come upon young people who are uncertain about their future. The armyâs recruiting manual outlines that each student should be contacted at least three times. âFirst during the summer . . . this plants awareness of the army in their minds. Remember, first to contact, first to contract . . . You will probably need to tailor your sales message.â
THEIR WORK IS made more difficult by âcounter-recruitersâ â voluntary groups of concerned parents and disillusioned military veterans who aim to inform students about the recruitersâ âmisinformationâ. Tim Origer is a Vietnam veteran who helped devise a full disclosure recruitment programme for the organisation Veterans for Peace. They use it when the visit schools to provide information in response to the recruitersâ pitches. Origer says the âtruthâ offered by most recruiters follows the âdonât ask, donât tellâ policy.
Unless you ask the specific ârightâ question you will not be told, for example, that the contract you sign is binding only to you, not the army, and that the fees promised for college are not guaranteed. Only 5 per cent of recruits get the full amount offered, while two-thirds get nothing at all.
âWar is not about winning hearts or minds; itâs about killing the enemy before they kill you,â Origer and his fellow Iraq and Vietnam veterans tell the teens in schools. âKids need to know itâs not just smart bombs and surgical strikes â the building you blow up might contain an insurgent, but women and children too. You have to live with that for your life.â
Despite their differences, Sauceda and Origer have much in common â both proudly list youngsters they have managed to âconvinceâ in the last few days. Origer accepts that he cannot compete with the recruitersâ resources: they tour schools and public events with Nascar sports cars, mobile rock-climbing walls and military Humvees equipped with computer games and rifle simulators; he relies on what he calls the studentsâ âinner bullshit detectorâ. He tells them how he is still haunted by the memory of the night he and his men blew up a Vietnamese shack because it had a candle burning inside â only later to discover that it was occupied by an elderly man who had got up to go to the lavatory.
âThey know weâre telling the truth,â Origer says. âWeâve no quota to fill.â But he readily admits that his group arenât as engaging as the recruiters, who are specially chosen to be the armyâs poster-boys â the brightest and best. They are the âsort of person youâd trust â the friend youâd want to have,â Origer says. On a MySpace page, one of Saucedaâs recruiting officers describes himself as having âa Bachelors degree in being smooth and a minor in slappin the taste outta yo mouthâ. Another says heâs a âquiet, shy guy . . . you know, the kind that holds on to a red stapler and youâre kind of weirded out by because you know he probably has guns . . . lots of gunsâ. In contrast, Tim Origer describes himself as âa grizzly Vietnam Vet with a prosthetic legâ.
As the Iraq war becomes increasingly unpopular, Sauceda finds it more difficult to gain access to schools, particularly in wealthier areas. Principals and guidance teachers restrict access, although by doing so they endanger their funding.
In 2002 Donald Rumsfeld enacted a law that gave recruiters free access to all public secondary schools and made it compulsory to provide them with pupilsâ private contact details as part of the âNo Child Left Behindâ initiative. This, backed up by the Pentagonâs Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps database (which contains details of 30 million 16-25-year-olds, including e-mail addresses, mobile numbers, ethnicities and extracurricular activities) allows Sauceda and his men to target students individually.
Sauceda says that at first, he looks for students with a bold, determined gaze â patriotic, flag-waving youths. After that, he tries to find the ones who need help paying for college. His aim is to become a friendly, trusted figure in the studentsâ lives and to inform them of the options available.
THE ARMY PROVIDES a stable, rewarding career and, for many, itâs their only hope of college. Sauceda acknowledges that the $400-a-month wage is low, but says the cash bonus, healthcare and college fees make for a fair offer. He is always upfront with the recruits. The first question they ask is, âwill I end up in Iraq?â, and he admits that in all likelihood they will. After their nine weeksâ basic training they could be shipped out within 72 hours if they are in a rapid deployment unit. He tries to avoid the students who are obviously afraid of him, the ones who think he is out to ensnare them.
Tim Origer says that he often finds himself face-to-face with recruiters as they trail each other around various schools and youth events and he realises that they have a lot more in common than they would like to admit.
Both groups, he says, recognise that army life is brutal, that 18 US soldiers commit suicide each day, that post-traumatic stress disorder means many veterans are not fit for college, even if they do end up getting the promised funds, but the basic truth is that for many young people in New Mexico the army offers the only chance of escape from the spiralling poverty that entrapped their parents and grandparents. Itâs a risk worth taking.
As one of the teenagers hanging around the mall said when I asked him what he thought of the recruiting offices, âtheyâre still trying to draft us, the only difference is that now itâs an economic draftâ.
© 2009 The Irish Times
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