Irregular Army

  The Wikileaks release of the “Collateral Murder” video, showing a US attack on unarmed children and journalists in Iraq, brought the side effects of this video-game rendering of war painfully home. The language of the soldiers heard in the video revealed a complete dehumanization of the Iraqis on the ground, with words like “nice” being used to describe the massacre. The blame must rest partly with the army’s use of video games to sell itself, which has numbed its young soldiers to the reality of war and destruction. It wasn’t as if no one knew what effect it would have. In other domains, the idea that America’s kids should be exposed to such unbridled violence was frowned upon. US lawmakers were clear: violence in video games is a corrosive force. A bill unveiled in December 2005 by Democrats Hillary Clinton and Joseph Lieberman proposed taking punitive measure against any business that sells or rents video games with an “adults-only” rating to anyone under age seventeen.84 But things were different when it came to a military that kids were increasingly reluctant to join. For them, there was literally no escape from “adults-only” violence. In 2009, it was revealed that “Explorer” scouts, aged fourteen to twenty-one, were being dressed up in combat gear, given air guns, and taught to take on “counter-terrorist” duties and other law enforcement and military roles. “This is about being a true-blooded American guy and girl. It fits right in with the honor and bravery of the Boy Scouts,” said A. J. Lowenthal, a tough-talking sheriff’s deputy and Explorer leader in Imperial, California.85 This glorification of violence and combat had a deleterious effect on the nation’s youth. In 2006, at the height of the recruitment drive, police in cities around the country blamed a spike in violent crime on increasing levels of juveniles involved in armed robbery, assaults, and other serious crimes. Minneapolis police estimated that juveniles would account for 63 percent of all suspects in violent and property offenses, an increase of 45 percent from 2002, just four years earlier.86

  Parent Fight-back

  The militarization of schools and childhood didn’t pass without heroic protest from a coalition of parents, students, and teachers, understandably upset at society’s colonization by the Pentagon. In June 2005 the New York Times ran a feature titled “Growing Problem for Military Recruiters: Parents,” citing a DOD survey which had found that only 25 percent of parents would recommend military service to their children in late 2004, down from 42 percent just a year earlier. The situation was so bad one recruiter said: “I had one father say if he saw me on his doorstep I better have some protection on me,” before adding, “We see a lot of hostility.”87 Organized counter-recruitment parents teamed up with more established groups like the Central Committee for Conscientious Objection in order to make sure as many students as possible filled out the requisite forms needed to stop their details being handed over to recruiters. One was Tina Weishaus, president of the Highland Park Middle School/High School Parent Teacher Organization in New Jersey. “The recruiters really harangue people, and this is what parents are trying to avoid,” she said.88 Local lawmakers also got in on the act. In Arcata and Eureka, the county councils voted for a Youth Protection Act which prohibited the recruitment of anyone under eigtheen within city limits, before it was ruled “unconstitutional” by a federal appeals court.89

  Students themselves were revolting. In the largely black and Hispanic New York City neighborhood of Bushwick, the kids led the fight-back against the constant harrying and intrusion into their schools. One recent graduate of a Bushwick high school, Tamara Henderson, told a story that has been replicated across the US. She remembered recruiters hanging around the school “at least once a week,” asking for students’ names and approaching them in the hallways with flyers. “I feel like they are just targeting blacks and Latino students,” she said, echoing the recruiter’s handbook. “We should be having college recruiters in our schools to present options to continue our education. Instead we are left with military recruiters, feeding us lies and empty promises.”90 This led community members to start working with local schools to counter the takeover. In 2003, the Bushwick School for Social Justice (BSSJ) was set up to work on campaigns and education, including counter-recruitment drives. Make the Road was another Bushwick-based activist collective that has organized street theater protests outside one of the two recruitment stations in the area. In one, kids dressed up in orange jumpsuits and had black hoods on to protest the 2005 Haditha massacre in which 24 Iraqi civilians were murdered. “We offer youth-led workshops on military myths, counter-recruitment and the cost of war. We also work collaboratively with other organizations on a city-wide level to fight recruitment in schools and on the streets,” said Sarah Landes, education coordinator of Make the Road. But they had a problem: if they stopped allowing military recruiters in their schools, vital funding would be cut. “Schools with high poverty populations get Title III federal funding, which we cannot do without, nor do we have the choice to not accept it,” said Mark Rush, BSSJ Assistant Principal. But they could distribute forms to students to prevent the school from being forced to turn over students’ contact information to recruiters, as mandated by No Child Left Behind. It was an amazingly successful fight back. “I believe in our five years only two students have signed up,” said Rush.

  That success was ruefully noted by the military brass, who, not understanding why their drive was not working, turned on the young themselves. A 2007 navy presentation put the blame for the decline in enlistment on the reluctance of so-called “millennials” to sign on the dotted line. After detailing the falling numbers of recruits, it went on to decode youth lingo for the benefit of the audience—like “OMG,” for “oh my god”—before asserting that “this is not just about a generation gap, this is an alien life force.” The youth of America had apparently become “narcissistic praise monkeys” who “can get disgruntled if not praised for simply ‘showing up’ at work.”91 “The military is no longer on kids’ radar,” it laments, with many preferring college. Recruiters, therefore, had to try harder to exploit that educational dream. The report refers to an unnamed teenager who had said, “(If I join the Navy) I’d miss out on having the excuse of being a college kid and being irresponsible.” But, in truth, it was the Iraq war that had turned the “millennials” anti-military, with 32 percent claiming it had made them “less patriotic,” and 67 percent contending they are “less likely to join the military.” It was a testament to the independence of the nation’s youth in the face of relentless pressure and propaganda from authority figures. With this “over-praised” generation resisting being manipulated into service in the War on Terror in the numbers needed, the military turned to a more pliant, war-weary generation: their grandparents.

  GRANDPA GOES TO WAR

  Virtually every one of them is called Mom, Dad, Grandma, Grandpa, but they bring a special flair to every soldier in that group.

  Colonel Kevin A. Shwedo, Army Accessions Command, 200692

  Charles P. Gaffney, Jr. had already been a soldier. In the mid-1980s, after quitting his job as an automobile specialist, he spent six years in the army, most of it in Germany, doing what he believed was his patriotic duty as an American citizen. When he discharged himself years later, he was looking for a fresh start. He moved to Las Vegas to pursue a post-military life, getting a job with a local Porsche dealership. At the time, serving in the armed forces again didn’t occur to him—America had no direct threats and he had served his time with honor. But that would change on September 11, 2001. Like thousands of others, watching the destruction wreaked on the country he loved sent the lust to serve running through his veins again. In the years immediately following, however, he didn’t reenlist: he now had twin baby daughters to take care of, and in any case his age prohibited him from joining up. He couldn’t even contemplate the decision. Until January 2006, that is, when the situation changed. As the military scrambled for troops, the army raised its maximum age for recruitment into the service from thirty-five to forty. Gaffney was forty years old, just within the new limits. It s
eemed the perfect opportunity for the M-4 assault-rifle expert to get back to fighting for his country, so in August 2006 he entered the Arizona Army National Guard, a position that in less extraordinary times might not have meant combat. But this was the War on Terror, and Gaffney soon became one of the hundreds of thousands of reserve soldiers shipped off for a tour in Iraq, which finished at the end of 2007. “I won’t say I was upset he was going back, but I didn’t want him to,” his dad said later. Gaffney still had the same passion for the cause he had back in the eighties. “He told me it was for people’s rights around the world, for them to say what they want to say without other people beating them down,” his dad added.93

  In keeping with the extended deployments of these years, Gaffney was redeployed in 2008 with the 101st Airborne Division, this time to Afghanistan. It would be his last trip. He never saw his baby girls again. On Christmas Eve of that year, just a few months after he arrived in the country, he was slain at his combat outpost in Paktika province in eastern Afghanistan after it came under sustained enemy rocket fire. He was forty-two years old, another American warrior who couldn’t put down his gun. He had believed the rhetoric of the War on Terror and sacrificed himself to bring democracy and freedom to foreign peoples and to protect his daughters. His memorial service at East Lawn was a poignant occasion, attended by more than 200 people who wanted to pay their respects and honor the fallen soldier who had received both the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart. The service finished with a three-volley rifle salute and one report noted “some attending the service sobbed quietly.”94 “We want to ensure that the sacrifice this soldier made will never be forgotten,” said Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Kunk, rear detachment commander of the 101st Airborne. “This soldier had other choices, but chose the Army, because he believed his service to our country was important.”95

  Gaffney was a hero to many, but countless others would follow the same path. When the age increase to forty didn’t work, six months later it was pushed up further to forty-two. In the six months following the first regulation change, the army recruited 300 soldiers over thirty-five years old, but only five of those were aged forty or older, one of which was Gaffney.96 Over the whole year, the army enlisted 653 soldiers aged thirty-five or older—without them it would have missed its target of 80,000 recruits for that year.97 The military paid lip service to the benefits of having older recruits but omitted to mention that it was chronic troop shortages that brought about the regulation change rather than some sort of eureka moment. “A few years ago, we had a marathon runner with a master’s degree who spoke Russian, and he wanted to join the Army,” said a Pentagon spokesman. “We said no because he was 40. Where is the sense in that?”98 The army was now, apparently, on the lookout for recruits with more refined qualities (contradicted somewhat by their penchant for criminals and extremists). “What we’re gaining in terms of experience and maturity and desire is phenomenal,” assured Colonel Kevin A. Shwedo, a director at Army Accessions Command, which oversees recruiting. “Virtually every one of them is called Mom, Dad, Grandma, Grandpa, but they bring a special flair to every soldier in that group.”99 He wasn’t joking, either. In 2001, the military had established another enfranchisement program in which retired military personnel could be pulled out of their summer homes on Cape Cod and sent back into active-duty in support of “contingency operations.” The so-called Retiree Recall initiative was, specifically, to “close gaps in hard-to-fill specialities.”100 But by 2009 nearly 3,000 veterans had passed through the program, while nearly 750 served in the Middle East—more than 1,000 were in the service in the same year.101

  While a gray-haired Clint Eastwood may be capable of looking poised on screen, gun in hand, it was unclear if that could be duplicated in the real world. The military was intent on finding out. Grandpa now had a chance to stop telling his Gulf War I stories to the grandkids and join Gulf War II. Even a Vietnam veteran—Steven Hutchison, who retired from the army in 1988 as a member of the 101st Airborne division and was decorated with a Bronze Star and a Meritorious Service Medal—was among the first retiree recalls. In a familiar story, the events of 9/11 had pushed this soldier, who had experienced the Tet Offensive in 1968, to serve again. At the time, his wife dissuaded him, arguing that he had done enough to serve his country already. But she died of breast cancer in 2006, after being helped through her illness by her doting husband. In the heat of the trauma, Hutchinson had nothing left to stop him and signed up again at the age of fifty-nine. The military sent him on a tour of Afghanistan, initially in a non-combat role. When he came back to the US he arrived at Fort Riley to meet his new unit and some were shocked at his age. “I thought 40-something, maybe 50,” said Staff Sergeant Rivas Nestor, who was seven years old when Hutchison retired from the military. Nevertheless, his unit was sent to Iraq as part of the First Infantry Division. Less than a month shy of his sixty-first birthday Major Hutchison was killed by a roadside bomb that exploded next to his vehicle near Umm Qasr. He was the oldest American soldier to die in Iraq.

  Despite their apparent enthusiasm for bringing in the oldies, the army did stop the practice briefly after reaching the numbers it wanted through the “Grow the Army” program, which cost $15.1 billion in 2009, more than double the previous year.102 But in September 2009 a message went out from Vice Chief of Staff, General Peter Chiarelli, reinstating the program “due to the recent approval of a temporary increase in active component end strength.”103 President Obama was now seeking to increase army strength by 22,000 over three years. The change allowed retirees on duty to apply for a one-year extension at the end of their current tour, and it opened the program to new applicants. “Retirees up to 70 years old can apply for a one-year tour, with the chance of renewal, through the program,” the military promised. It was, however, understandable why the army had stopped the programs when recruiting figures were better. The older recruits were leaving the army at nearly double the rate of their younger peers: among the recruits signed up when the age restriction was raised, 11.4 percent from the thirty-five-and-up category left the army before serving a full year, a marked increase from the 6.5 percent among the rest of the recruits.104 Older soldiers also found it harder to handle the rigors of combat. The army claimed publicly that it did not segregate older recruits in basic training or consider age when deploying them to different areas, but training exercises were undoubtedly a problem. “The type of training they receive is pretty much geared in one direction and focused on 18 and 20 year olds just coming in,” Sergeant First Class Chris Patterson said. “When the older Soldier comes in, we don’t know the kind of person we are getting. They bring to bear some experiences we haven’t had. And we also have to take their physical strengths and abilities into consideration.” This created problems for operational performance. The military knew it would have to change certain procedures to deal with this batch of older recruits: immediately they moved to lower the physical benchmark for them. On recruitment, a seventeen-year-old, for example, would be expected to do forty-seven sit-ups and thirty-five push-ups. For a forty-one-year-old this was a little easier with just twenty-nine sit-ups and twenty-four push-ups needed to prove themselves Army Good.

  Unfortunately, bullets and IEDs don’t discriminate in the same way. “Our training program has to ensure that every soldier is going to be able to outmaneuver, outfight, and win on today’s battlefield,” claimed Colonel Shwedo. But the truth was that older recruits like Gaffney and Hutchinson were at much greater risk of death and injury. In June 2010 it was reported that 566, or 12.1 percent, of the deaths in the War on Terror had been suffered by over-thirty-fives, a figure which dwarfed their representation in the fighting force.105 The problem of PTSD was also more chronic in older soldiers: the older brain is not able to follow the rules of engagement as easily and is more questioning, which makes it more susceptible to traumas. It wasn’t just battlefield problems either. The older recruits were at much greater risk of dying from the host of ailments associated with mat
ure years. “Military service is a young person’s profession. The physical in the first six months of service can be particularly stressful for older people,” said David Segal, director of the Center for Research on Military Organization.106 But the military refused to kick people out who couldn’t hack it. One older soldier to pay the ultimate price was Staff Sergeant William Chaney, another veteran of the Vietnam War. He died of a blood clot aged fifty-nine, after surgery for a medical condition and appendix problem that had necessitated his evacuation from Iraq. He had signed up thinking that Iraq would help him get over the bitterness he still felt over Vietnam and the military’s failure to take care of him. “When he came back [from Vietnam], he had trouble joining the [Veterans of Foreign Wars] because they said he hadn’t fought in a real war,” his wife Carol Chaney said. “He wanted to be an air traffic controller, what he was trained to do in Vietnam, but he was told that training was not transferable back at home. That left him a little bitter.”107 The military rubbed salt in the wounds when he died by not even informing his wife of what had happened. She discovered his passing when she called to check on him in hospital. “It is the most horrendous experience,” she said. “I hope no other family has to go through this.”

  A Family Affair

  From 2000 to 2006, the number of new soldiers over thirty soared by 92 percent nationally.108 It turned the American military experience into a family affair, as parents joined up with their kids and were shipped off to the Middle East together. Margie Black, a forty-one-year-old grandmother from West Columbia, Texas, signed up with her twenty-one-year-old daughter. Russell Dilling, forty-two, of San Antonio, graduated with his nineteen-year-old son, Robert. Dilling said he had arrived at Fort Jackson at 11 p.m.—one hour before his forty-second birthday—the army’s cut-off. “It’s been tough physically, but my company has been pretty supportive,” he said.109 Older recruits joined up for a variety of reasons, from desperation to patriotism to boredom. “I was comfortable in civilian life and did that 9-to-5 thing all the time for a long time. I was just in a rut,” said thirty-nine-year-old Private First Class Randy Covington. “When they changed the age, it seemed like the opportunity came back for me.”110 “When I’d see a soldier walk down the street when I was a small child, they’d look so disciplined, so sure,” said Private Aletha North-Williams, a forty-one-year-old mother of two from Houston. “I wanted that for myself, and it has always stuck in my soul.”111 Politicians, however, rationalized the program by pointing to the changing demographics of the nation. “In part, this decision is an indication of how difficult the recruiting environment is right now,” admitted Representative Vic Snyder (D-AR), the ranking member on the Subcommittee on Military Personnel of the House Armed Services Committee. “But [it] is also part of a changing society, a healthier and longer-living society, and Army standards ought to reflect that.” He had a point. A federal report in 2008 found life expectancy for Americans continued to increase and older Americans were in better health than previous generations. As the baby-boom generation entered middle and old age it was changing American demographics. In 2006, an estimated 37 million people in the US—12 percent of the population—were sixty-five and older, and this was forecast to reach 20 percent by 2030.112 “We’re finding there’s a lot of people out there that wanted to join, and age was their only disqualifier,” said Leslie Ann Sully, a spokeswoman for the army’s local recruiting battalion near Fort Jackson.113