I never know what to believe when blogs are involved. I treat everything I read on them with suspicion, and wait to see if the mainstream press picks up the article. In this case, the Talahassee Democrat did just that.
I do believe that in general this kind of forced recruitment, or recruitment under false pretenses, is true if the stories are recent. The recruiters failing to recruit enough new cannon fodder. That is why the U.S. government announced recently that all recruiters would not work on a certain date so that they could go to meetings discussing recruitment policies. Here is the Talahassee Democrat article:
The military's desperation is showing
By Robert C. Koehler
TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES
Suppose they gave a war and nobody came?
This flower-bedecked poster slogan from the '60s will surely be haunting the Army's "values stand-down" day today, when the service branch's 7,500 recruiters and their COs take the day off for a little ethics force-feeding.
The Army's - the whole military's - desperation is showing. None of the four branches is meeting recruitment goals as a brutal, unpopular war drags on, and the recruiters, who are all under heavy pressure to snare two warm bodies a month for this lost cause, are getting outed in the media for appallingly unethical and illegal practices.
These include advising potential (bottom of the barrel) enlistees about how to circumvent drug-screening tests and create fake high-school diplomas, how to pass the physical (one overweight young man was given laxatives and the advice, "Don't tell your parents"), along with blatant threats and even, apparently, abduction.
According to Mark Crispin Miller's News from Underground blog, concerned neighbors of Ever Jandres of Encino, Calif., recently wrote a letter to U.S. Rep. Howard Berman charging recruitment malfeasance and asking him to look into the 24-year-old learning-disabled epileptic's mysterious disappearance.
Jandres, who is Salvadoran and has a borderline low IQ, was apparently "befriended" by a local Army recruiter, who invited him to come with him to Arizona for three days to observe basic training. Five days later, his distraught mother (who speaks no English) got a phone call from her son, who told her, hysterically, that he was on a military base in South Carolina. He was in the Army, he said, and wasn't allowed to stay on the phone longer than a minute. Family members' and friends' attempts to get any information from the Army have been fruitless.
We're fighting a war the "support our troops" crowd wants no part of, personally - any more than does anyone else of sound mind and the least claim on a future - so the recruiters are battling rationality itself as they struggle to sell inner-city teenagers on the glory of serving in occupied Iraq and signing themselves over to an organization that will essentially own them, body and soul, for the duration of their hitch or longer. Small wonder the recruiters are forced to bend, break and occasionally shatter the rules to get anybody to sign up.
However much ethical restraint they'll now be temporarily forced to incorporate into their basic spiel (no laxatives!), one thing's for sure: They won't begin telling prospective recruits the truth.
"We have to understand that one of the things that happens in war is, truth dies," said Ray Parrish, a Chicago-based counselor for Vietnam Veterans Against the War, who left a well-paying job with full benefits to work with GIs returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.
And he's hearing the same expressions of disillusionment, anger and betrayal that he heard when he counseled Vietnam vets and battled the VA to get them their rights. He's seeing the same shattered psyches, the same wrecked lives, the same post-traumatic stress disorder.
Values stand-down or no values stand-down, the recruiters will not begin telling teenagers anytime soon about PTSD; high vet suicide rates (among Vietnam vets, it's triple the number of names on The Wall, and counting); or today's equivalent of Agent Orange, depleted uranium, which, when breathed in, can devastate health over the long term and, especially cruel to young couples, cause birth defects.
Supplying this information is the job of the counter-recruiters, and the fact that they're out there is one of the most important stories of the war. The vets themselves are the counter-recruiters, telling the truth to high school students.
This is the way back from PTSD - the way for shattered men and women to redeem themselves and rejoin the human race. "It's part of the healing," Parrish said. "That's what the vets are doing - making sure the recruiters don't sell at all."
Suppose they gave a war and nobody came? This is what we're witnessing, slowly, one wised-up teenager at a time.
tallahassee.com |
