Army Recruiters Reach New Lows Due to Unpopular War
by Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Nation
The Times' Bob Herbert put it well:
“The parents of the kids being sought by recruiters to fight this
unpopular war are creating a highly vocal and potentially very
effective antiwar movement.”
The debacle in Iraq has made recruiting an impossibly difficult job and
recruiters are sinking to new lows in the face of growing pressure to
fulfill monthly quotas as well as fierce opposition from parents who don't support the [Bush]'s botched Iraq war mission.
…”The
problem is that no one wants to join,” one recruiter recently told the
Times. “We have to play fast and loose with the rules just to get by.”
The standards for those already in are also being adjusted: The Wall
Street Journal recently reported on an internal army memo which said
that battalion commanders could no longer kick out of the military
enlistees who had abused drugs and alcohol, gotten pregnant or were
unfit for duty.
If you
want to understand just how dire the situation is, you need to know
that the Army is busily exploiting a provision in the No Child Left Behind law that allows recruiters to go into public schools receiving federal funding, gain access to students' personal data
and cultivate potential recruits with a virtually unfettered hand.
According to an Army manual, savvy recruiters should eat in the school
cafeteria, befriend administrators, bring coffee and donuts for
teachers and buddy up to team captains and student body presidents to
win the hearts and minds of other students.
Activists
are holding rallies to raise awareness, urging families to tell schools
to keep their personal data private. A student-led campaign at a high
school in Montclair, New Jersey, convinced more than 80 percent of the
student body to keep their private information hidden from recruiters.
(Click here to read the complete article.)
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