Irregular Army

by Matt Kennard

  To a young, impressionable child this attack-dog routine was usually successful. His friend, Eric, was a case in point. “As things went further, I decided not to go [into training]. And when I told [the recruiter] that, she said I had no choice and that I had to go, so I believed her,” he recalled. He told his mom who hatched a plan to say he had gone to San Antonio and was uncontactable. But even that didn’t work. When his mom went to talk to Sergeant Marquette and told him that Eric had changed his mind and didn’t want to go, he lied to her, too. “Marquette said that I had to go, and if I didn’t, that I’d have a warrant for my arrest and I wouldn’t be able to get no government loans or nothing like that. So, my mom doesn’t really know anything about it, so she believed it, and she told me,” he said. Fortunately, Gonzalez managed to contact Eric and tell him that he didn’t have to go, that the recruiter was breaking the law, and that he could change his mind. It may have saved his life. Because of the smarts of Gonzalez, the boys didn’t have to go to the deserts of the Middle East; but how many kids have been misled and told they have no choice is unknown. These two boys had family and friends strong enough to support them. Not everyone was so lucky. “Whenever we were thinking upon not joining, they started calling us and telling us that we didn’t have a choice, you know, that we could say all we want, we don’t have a choice to go or not, if we want to or not,” Gonzalez recalled. To most kids this would have been a terrifying routine, but its success in getting kids into the military meant it remained a common one. A New York Times report revealed that the army investigated 1,118 “recruiting improprieties” in 2006 ranging from coercing young people to lying to them. The army substantiated 320 of these.63

  American high schools were always seen as a “target-rich environment” for any recruiter, for obvious reasons: the kids are often not aware of their rights and are easily manipulated by monetary inducements. The US Army Recruiting Command is explicit about how recruiters are expected to operate in the nation’s centers of learning and it’s not pretty. “Without a strong high school program you cannot have a strong grad recruiting program,” says the School Recruiting Army Handbook.64 It’s important to play to their aspirations and dreams, it continues. “For some students it is clear that college is not an option, at least for now. Let them know how the Army can fulfill their college aspirations. This is a key decision point and one you must pursue without fail.” The tactics are blatantly underhand and manipulative. “Know your student influencers,” it says. “Students such as class officers, newspaper and yearbook editors, and athletes can help build interest in the Army among the student body. Keep them informed. Tell them about the excellent educational benefits and the opportunities available in America’s Army.” It adds, “Always remember, the first to contact will be the first to contract.” Recruiters are assigned target high schools and instructed to offer their friendly services—such as basketball or track coaches. “Deliver donuts and coffee for the faculty once a month,” recruiters are told, and “participate” in Black History Month and Hispanic Heritage Month, two of the most popular recruitment demographics for the military coincidentally. “Encourage college-capable individuals to defer their college until they have served in the Army,” it advises. If they ever do get to university, recruiters are instructed to get them as freshman while they are still vulnerable: “Focus on the freshman class [there] because they will have the highest dropout rate. They often lack both the direction and funds to fully pursue their education.” In the perverse logic of the recruiters it suits to have less federal funds for college fees, the military often being the only other option.

  During the War on Terror, the resources poured into recruiting impressionable young people skyrocketed, with 1,000 new recruiters added in one year to bring high school kids round to the military’s way of thinking.65 The Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps, or JROTC, expanded across the nation, and no child was free from their solicitations, even eleven-year-olds were taking part in the programs. Furthermore, in 2007 a Congressional cap of 3,500 for the programs was lifted which spawned a massive increase in the number of operations.66 According to Congressional testimony in 2000 from the chiefs of staff of the various armed services, 30 to 50 percent of these cadets eventually enlist. The number would be higher still during the war years.67 In the War on Terror, school became boot camp as one in ten high school students in Chicago wore a military uniform to school and took classes on shooting guns from retired veterans.68 It was a process of shaping the minds of the young, planting seeds of war for fruit that would be readily pluckable when the kids reached the age of eighteen, ready to serve.

  One of the main incentives offered was money—a lot of money from the perspective of a sixteen-year-old. In 2005, the army moved to raise the average bonus given to recruits when they signed on the dotted line from $14,000 to $17,000, with the possibility of as much as $30,000 for hard-to-fill vacancies.69 Another of the military’s slogans was “Join the Armed Forces, get a free education,”70 an offer many of America’s poorest kids couldn’t turn down, even though it was not true. It’s why Phylicia Coley, a tenth-grader with an A average, said she was thinking about enlisting. “That’s the most important consideration,” she said. “I want to be a psychiatrist. I want to go to a good school.” In 2008, the GI Bill provided soldiers in the service for three years or more with an average $6,600 per year in educational benefits, with a maximum of $39,636 for four years. But tuition, room and board, and fees at most universities cost a lot more: in the majority of cases, the GI Bill benefits don’t even cover half the costs of attending college full-time. But that’s not what the recruiter told Coley. “He said the Army pays for everything,” she said after being briefed by him. There were other means of reeling in high school students as well, one being getting them to take the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, or ASVAB. The military describes it as a must if “you’re serious about joining the military,” or if the Pentagon is serious about you joining the military.71 It’s a timed multi-aptitude test, which is taken at over 14,000 schools and military institutions nationwide. Career counselors are the main conduit through which the students come across it, and they are encouraged to promote it. There’s even a Dummies Guide to the test to help students get a good score. The test is supposed to give the military a better idea of where the student would be best placed in the military: “These tests will give you an idea of how you’ll score, and identify areas that need improvement,” the military says. “Don’t skimp on preparing for this test. It’s your future. Get the most out of it.”72

  No Child Left Unrecruited

  The penetration of the military into the nation’s bastions of learning had been gathering pace for decades. In 1996, in the middle of Bill Clinton’s tenure, the Solomon Amendment, named for its sponsor, US Representative Gerald B. H. Solomon, permitted the denial of federal funding to any educational institution which refused to allow military recruiters to go about their business on campus. This increased level of aggressive recruitment was facilitated and supported by one of George W. Bush’s flagship pieces of legislation. In 2001 the No Child Left Behind Act was signed into law with great fanfare and bipartisan support. The act was supposed to enforce a more standardized testing regimen, but deep into its thousands of pages was a directive that would prove to be of huge help to recruiters looking to pester high school students to sign up. Though it drew no comment from the media at the time, which probably didn’t have time to read the whole thing, the Act stipulated: “each local educational agency receiving assistance under this Act shall provide, on a request made by military recruiters or an institution of higher education, access to secondary school students names, addresses, and telephone listings.”73 In other words, high schools would now be obliged to hand over the phone numbers of all their pupils (no matter how young) to military recruiters, so a process of grooming them for service in the US military could get underway. It represented the manipulation of US youth at its worst. Before the age of eigh
teen, young people were not trusted to vote, to make legal or medical decisions, among others, but now they were ready to be solicited for the job of putting their life on the line.

  There was a little-known proviso which did concede that a “secondary school student or the parent of the student may request that the student’s name, address, and telephone listing . . . not be released without prior written parental consent.” But in the end this turned out to be a hugely misleading, as only parents with a thorough knowledge of the Act—unsurprisingly, not many—were aware of the clause. Investigative journalist David Goodman did the most serious research into the effects of this policy.74 He found that the Pentagon had gathered the names of 34 million young people, what they called “the largest repository of 16-25-year-old youth data in the country,” in something they called the JAMRS database, or the Joint Advertising Market Research & Studies program run by the DOD. Worryingly, the data has also been retrieved by private data firms, such as the Student Marketing Group and American Student List, who were paid up to $600,000 by the Pentagon every year to aggregate young people’s purchasing choices.

  The result was a full-scale militarization of high schools throughout America. A concerned BBC report profiled Sergeant Larry Arnold, a career soldier “with a charming line of fast-paced chatter” who “circulates through the town like a salesman.”75 The victims of his sales routine were the youth of Kokomo, Indiana—population 46,000—many of whom receive “cold calls” from the sergeant in order to get them to enlist. “He uses lists of student that federal law requires the schools to provide to military recruiters,” the article notes, without referencing the offending No Child Left Behind Act. Therefore “it is not uncommon for students to get calls from every branch of the service.” Sgt. Arnold said that army recruiters will make 300 calls a day, adding, “Pressure is always there. It’s the army, it’s your mission, and they drill that into you every day.” There was one case which particularly caught the eye:

  Sgt 1st Class Arnold met 17-year-old Matthew, a quiet boy who may or may not be able to graduate from high school in the spring of 2007. He was not certain. If that was not enough cause for concern, Matthew’s mother also confided that her son was taking two medications a day for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Despite that clearly disqualifying medical condition, Sgt 1st Class Arnold admitted he was tempted to sign him up anyway.

  The US military was acting like an African militia with grooming for service extended to kids as young as eleven in some cases. In the process, they were breaking the law. A report, Soldiers of Misfortune, by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) found that the US government was actually in contravention of an international protocol prohibiting the recruitment of children into military service when they are under eighteen years old.76 It also noted that the US military disproportionately targets poor and minority public school students, but its findings were dutifully ignored after being submitted to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child. Maybe that was because the US is one of only two countries (the other is Somalia) to have never ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Even so, the Senate puts the age minimum for recruitment at seventeen, but the report found that recruiters “regularly target” younger children, “heavily recruiting on high school campuses, in school lunchrooms, and in classes.” The ACLU surveyed 1,000 children aged from fourteen to seventeen who were enrolled in New York City high schools as part of the report. One in five of the respondents said that class time had been given over to military recruiters, and 35 percent said that military recruiters had access to multiple locations in the schools where they could meet students. The ACLU contended that in their desperation the Pentagon had used the JROTC, which has access to thousands of junior high schools, middle schools, and high schools across the country, to systematically target children. Military recruiters use “exaggerated promises of financial rewards for enlistment, which undermines the voluntariness of their enlistment,” the report noted. It detailed the use of “coercion, deception, and even sexual abuse” by recruiters. Punishment for such transgressions was rare. “The United States military’s procedures for recruiting students plainly violate international standards and fail to protect youth from abusive and aggressive recruitment tactics,” said Jennifer Turner of the ACLU Human Rights Project. African child soldiers, meet African American child soldiers.

  Virtual War

  The tireless effort to bring children into the orbit of the military was gathering pace even outside of schools, with underhand manipulation the order of the day. In 2009, Students for a Democratic Society found military recruiters scouting out Summerfest, the largest music festival in Milwaukee. They hadn’t been an easy spot at first, as this time they were moonlighting as professional models, a developing tactic from the military that preyed on the sexual desires of pubescent America. Recruitment brass had enlisted the help of Encore Nationwide, providers of promotional models, to seduce America’s young into service. Sex was soon supplemented by video games. There was a concerted effort to “make war fun,” a job taken on by the army’s first official marketing officer, Edward Walters, a thirty-eight-year-old West Point graduate and former marketing man for Kraft Foods. One of his first initiatives got underway in August 2008, in the form of the first and only Army Experience Center in Philadelphia (cost $12 million), a new variation on the recruitment office theme—this time providing arcade video games and a merchandise shop to reel the kids in. A 14,500-square-foot “virtual educational facility,” it offered all the experiences of war played out in on-screen games and simulated exercises. Little kids could sit in a Humvee and think longingly of the deserts of the Middle East. The target demographic was hinted at by its location close to a popular entertainment complex and indoor skate park. Even so, the army maintained that it was not a recruitment center, although the twenty soldiers working in the facility were trained recruiters.77

  Walters told the press that the army store was a “new kind of recruitment office . . . We’re moving away from normal recruiting offices and desks to places where men and women can experience military service,” he said, adding, “We’ve been doing that with innovative techniques like interaction with real soldiers and high-tech virtual experiences.” In 2006, advertising agency McCann Erickson was enlisted to dream up a $200 million campaign with the “Army Strong” slogan to bring in even more kids.78 “Traditional marketing has been challenging,” Walters told the New York Post for its article entitled “An Army of Fun.” “When you’re just focused on TV and the Web, it’s hard to get the full message out there.” 79 In June 2010, however, it was revealed that the Center was to close down—a strange course of events considering the cost and its relative success: a newspaper report said that at least 236 recruits had joined the army through the Center and it had been attended by 40,000 people.80 The organizers of resistance to the Center, who set up a website “Shut Down the Army Experience Center,” claimed victory and said it had planned a protest just before the scheduled closing date.81 Unbelievably, the military claimed that the installation was not intended to be permanent, but that its technology would be replicated around the country. The use of video games to glorify military combat, sanitizing its perception among the young, had, in fact, been a long-term strategy. In 2002, the Army Game Project had been released for download from the internet, allowing players to “fire on a rifle range, run an obstacle course, attend sniper school, train in urban combat and parachute from a C-17 transport.”82 It soon had eight million players worldwide. It was a serious operation to build, created primarily by the Modeling, Virtual Environment and Simulation Institute at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. Help was also at hand from the bright lights of Hollywood, as Star Wars creator George Lucas’s company, Skywalker Sound, provided them with sound effects from the Terminator 2 movie. Soon after, an army office was opened with a staff of fifteen full-time video-game designers. The army proceeded to release the Virtual Army Experience, which it bo
asted was “based on actual missions” in its promotional video complete with images of Iraq. The game was the standard murder-fest, in which the player hunts down and kills the enemy, while, for instance, on patrol in Iraq. One journalist called it “a shoot-em-up, get-the-bad guys kind of affair.”83 It was the ultimate entertainment, except this time it was used to sign up kids for real war.