Army of You

The pursuit of young, warm-blooded Americans.

By Mary Yajko, Ithaca College

Walking into the lobby of the Army Recruitment Office on North Triphammer Road in Ithaca, NY, I am greeted by five smiling faces. They are all in uniform and they are all made of cardboard. These flat-happy soldiers and I are the only people in the room, so I try to ignore a feeling of fear and confusion as I proceed down the hallway, looking for signs of life.

I follow a trail of three more cardboard people that leads me into an office with four soldiers inside, three of them stiff cut-outs, one of them real flesh and blood. The real one doesn’t reflect the glare of the fluorescent lights on the ceiling instead, his sand-blasted camouflage uniform makes him blend in surprisingly well with the rest of the office.

Before we start talking, he excuses himself and goes into the next room. When he comes back, he smells of cologne.

“You must be Sergeant Philip J. McIlroy,” I say, “U.S. Army recruiter.”

McIlroy’s job is to go into local high schools and tell kids about what they can accomplish by joining the military after school. And if all goes well, they can set up an appointment with him and enlist.

Sergeant McIlroy is responsible for Newfield, Lansing, Candor and Newark Valley high schools. He goes into the schools about once a month to talk to the guidance counselors, set up tables and give out information to the students during lunch, and sometimes give presentations to social studies or government classes. Once in a while the Sergeant will attend a high school sporting event; he likes to go to these because his little brother is in high school.

When I ask him if his brother is thinking about joining the military, he just laughs.

“He’s fifteen,” says Sergeant McIlroy.

I suppose that’s too young.

Maybe a lot of high school students aren’t yet thinking about the military as an option, but that’s why the military thinks it is necessary for recruiters to spread the word to young people through the schools.

“The big thing is,” the Sergeant says, “a lot of people just don’t know.”

The claim that teenagers aren’t aware of the military as an option is hard to believe. It’s a billion-dollar industry that markets itself to young people through advertisements in newspapers and magazines, billboards, television, the internet and an army of on-the-ground recruiters.

Paul Ibrahim, chairman of the Cornell College Republicans, said he thinks that both students and the military can benefit from exposure to the valuable opportunities a career in the armed forces can offer.

“It makes it easier for the military to maintain a constant and reliable flow of strong recruits into its ranks,” said Ibrahim.

While in the recruitment office, I look over to a fish swimming around in a tank next to me. The filter gargles. Flow is essential; it’s that stream of new water that’s keeping the fish alive.

Federal legislation ensures this “constant flow” of young, able-bodied recruits. According to the 1996 Solomon Amendment, which the Supreme Court recently upheld, federal funding can be cut from schools that deny or inhibit recruiters’ access to their campuses. Also, in a little-known clause of the No Child Left Behind Act, schools are required to give the recruiters the names, addresses and telephone numbers of their students, so that when the bus leaves for boot camp, no child is left behind.

Most parents don’t know that they can prevent schools from giving out their children’s information by signing an opt-out form. Sergeant McIlroy tells me that the high schools that he visits send opt-out forms to all the students’ homes.

If a student shows interest in enlistment, says McIlroy, they can come to him and take the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB), a test that measures students’ general intelligence and skills for various military jobs.

This exam is supposed to be optional, but many students and parents are unaware of that. In some schools, the recruiters can get away with administering it to entire junior and senior classes. According to the U.S. Army Recruiting Command’s School Recruiting Program Handbook, the ASVAB gives the recruiter access to “concrete and personal information about the student,” which they can then use to get in touch with the teenager.

In a September 2005 article in The Nation, writer Karen Houppert described a situation at Fremont High in South Central Los Angeles where nine students refused to take the ASVAB. All of the students were suspended until the administrators realized that the students were acting in accordance with the law.

The military seems to be spreading their recruitment tactics to a younger and younger crowd. The Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC) is a program that involves many kids in the military through all four years of their high school career. In some southern and urban high schools with an overwhelming population of students that cannot all be fit into normal gym classes, JROTC is offered as a substitute.

Students in the JROTC learn military-style skills and discipline. According to Houppert, 45 percent of JROTC participants usually enlist in the Army once they are old enough.

Houppert also described some pre-JROTC programs in elementary and middle schools, which offer ROTC style training to children as young as 11 years old.

“The city’s youngsters drill with wooden rifles and chant time-honored marching cadences,” wrote Houppert.

Army cadences range in topic from killing baby seals, sexism, and homophobic remarks, to the violent murder of children. I couldn’t find the lyrics of any of the specific songs these students are learning, I did find some others while hunting around on the Internet. “Load another magazine/ In my trusty M16/ Cus’ all I ever want to see/ Is bodies bodies bodies/ Throw some candy on the ground/ Watch the children gather round/ Cus’ all I ever want to see/ Is little bleeding bodies.” Though it is doubtful that students are learning any of the more R-rated songs, some might wonder whether or not our nation’s children are getting the wrong message by doing practice drills with replicas of guns as big as the kids holding them. The pre-JROTC is a radical example, but the same ideas of violence are advertised by the military through their mere presence in high schools. They need teenagers to enlist because they need soldiers; they need soldiers because this administration believes in solving international problems through hard power.

The American Friends Service Committee’s Counter-recruitment and Alternatives to the Military Program (CAMP) actively works against the military’s school recruitment efforts. The Quakers founded the AFSC in 1917 to promote peace and social justice, and their CAMP program aims at teaching middle and high school kids about the drawbacks of joining the military and educates students about alternative ways to finance their education.

Because of CAMP, the Los Angeles Unified School District has adopted a policy that limits and regulates the access of military recruiters on their campuses. The Campus Anti-War Network (CAN), a national organization that connects college anti-war groups across the country, provides a stable network of students who oppose the war in Iraq and recruiters on school campuses. the first chapter of CAN to reverse the No Child Left Behind Act’s opt-out policy into an “opt-in” policy in one Rochester area high school.

“We’ve set a precedent in the nation,” said Kenneth Love, a member of the coordinating committee of RIT Anti-war.

“Because of the counter-recruitment movement, students of our generation are realizing that they have the power to fight back against what seems to be an almost impossible enemy, our own government,” Love said in an address at the CAN National Conference last October.

There are no guarantees as to the amount of money the military pays recruits and the jobs that they get placed in.

“It depends on the job, depends on the length of enlistment, depends on their aptitude scores,” says Sergeant McIlroy. “It is something that I won’t know until they actually choose their job.”

Aside from economic issues, there are other reasons that make it hard for kids to say no to recruiters. The mere presence of a stern-looking soldier in uniform intimidates some kids.

“It’s kind of hard sometimes when you’re taught for many, many years that you’re supposed to respect adults and also supposed to respect people in uniform and along comes a person in uniform that’s promising $10,000 in college [aid] and all these opportunities,” said Jahnkow.“[The recruiter] may be stretching the truth, but it’s hard to see that.”

Of course, successful recruiters are not necessarily intimidating, some students report that recruiters will act like a best friend to a student they are trying to enlist. In fact, the handbook encourages officers to become extremely friendly with the students and staff of high schools. The handbook tells recruiters to offer to coach sports, attend homecoming dances, and even give cards and flowers to clerical workers on “Secretary Appreciation Day.”

According to a New York Times article from May 2005, the Army reports that the number of cases of inappropriate actions on the part of recruiters has increased by more than 60 percent since 1999. The article cites reports that recruiters have helped high school students make fake diplomas and cheat drug tests, and have threatened students with arrest if they did not show up at the recruitment station.

At the CAN Conference, Dugan also spoke about how his boy-hood dreams of becoming “a man” nudged him towards the Marines.

“Ever since I was a kid I wanted to be a Marine,” said Dugan. “I thought, you know, this is what it means to be a man: honor, courage, commitment.”

To the left of Sergeant McIlroy’s desk, slumped down on a shelf, is a tired-looking GI Joe doll. He bears a striking resemblance to the Sergeant, and is surrounded by miniature weapons of all sorts.

Of course, GI Joe is the ultimate tough, white, heterosexual military icon. Times are changing, though. And, according to the 2003 census, 80.5 percent of the population is white, yet only 62.5 percent of military recruits in 2004 were white, but only 1/7 of the military personnel in Iraq are female.

I ask Sergeant McIlroy if the military is a welcoming environment for women and minorities. He responds with an emphatic “yes.”

“My boss is a woman,” he says, “and I’ve met people in the military from all walks of life, from all over the country: Belize, Alaska…”

Rather than reminding him that Belize is not part of our country, I ask him if he knows any gays or lesbians in the military and he blushes again.

“What they do in their personal lives is just that, their personal lives,” he says, “And by ‘them’ I mean anyone but me.”

Some students in high school do not realize that by enlisting in the military, they are agreeing to a time-honored code of trust in which it is difficult to differ from their superiors. In joining they sign away many of their civilian rights, such as being openly gay.

I once again glance over at the gleeful grins of the cardboard cut-out soldiers in the recruitment office, all standing in formation, and something that Kenneth Love said at the CAN conference becomes sadly amusing: “Apparently being in the Corps of Cadets and being human does not mix well.”

I don’t think that the Army mentions this to any of their recruits, especially since, according Houppert, the army was more than 16,000 recruits short of its 2005 goal. To respond to this problem, the Army brass added 1,000 new recruiters to seek out young blood.

On the other hand, 1,000 new recruiters are not going to defeat the shortage of soldiers if the problem is more severe than “getting the information out there,” if, in fact, the problem is a bit more substantial. It seems that a growing number of U.S. citizens oppose the war in Iraq and are skeptical of the occupation.

If the constant “flow” of high school recruits like the filter in the fish tank, is what is keeping this war going, then the increased reluctance of students to enlist must mean one thing: we don’t want to keep this fish alive.

“Without soldiers, the war is over,” said Dugan. “We, along with the soldiers, can stop all wars for profit and that is why I will always be a counter-recruiter and never again a recruiter.”

But ending the war is not the only goal of counter-recruitment organizations; for many, their interest is the well being of America’s youth.

“The larger objective I think is to work towards a demilitarized society,” said Jahnkow. “[One] where there are enough jobs, there are enough education opportunities, and people don’t feel like the only way that they can live productive, useful lives is to put on a uniform and to become a soldier.”

Mary Yajko is a sophomore sociology major at Ithaca College who likes to sauté fish in a honey mustard glaze after she finishes killing them. E-mail her at myajko1@ithaca.edu.

A version of this article originally ran in Buzzsaw Haircut, a Campus Progress sponsored publication.

Illustration: Matt Bors

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