Do You Feel a Draft?

-- Chris Lombardi, CCCO Communications Coordinator

In the past few months, the Pentagon public relations machine has sounded the alarm about its terrible trouble recruiting and retaining personnel. All four services missed their recruiting quotas last year, despite lavish budgets, ready access to their target markets in schools and communities, and a huge full-time sales force that routinely practices deceit.

Ask any recent veteran whether recruiters lie. Or check reports in the Boston Globe, the Albany Times-Union, and the Los Angeles Times. Recruiters have a sales quota, called a "mission," and the collateral damage ranges from forged diplomas to concealment of disabling medical conditions. Small wonder, then, that between 35 and 40 percent of those who do enlist don't complete their first term - discharged on medical or psychological grounds, failing physical training or drug tests, or seeking conscientious objector status once the reality of military life becomes clear to them.
Military leaders call this a "crisis." Some conservative members of Congress (such as Rep. Steve Buyer) have responded by calling for a resumption of universal conscription.

At CCCO we take any call for conscription seriously - that's our job. Until the end of conscription in 1975, we helped hundreds of thousands of young men sort out their options in the face of a draft, especially during the genocidal Vietnam War. Since 1975, we've been confronting the "poverty draft," telling young people what recruiters won't, and helping answer the inter-organizational GI Rights Hotline (800 394-9544) for those who fall for the recruiter's pitch and live to regret it.

Now young people targeted by the poverty draft are saying "no" in record numbers.
You can hardly blame them. Instead of a "crisis," call it a triumph of the free market. Offered a four-year contract for indentured service, including the loss of many civil rights and a license to abuse granted their employer, more and more young people are choosing civilian education and employment.

But what about "serving your country?" the draft proponents ask. What about making a difference in the world?

The young people who call the GI Rights Hotline want to make a difference in the world, as much as they want to get an education. Most are young and vulnerable when a military recruiter suddenly becomes their best friend, telling them what they want to hear.

What the recruiters don't mention is the drill sergeant at Fort Benning running all-night fire drills and ignoring calls for medical help. Recruiters don't mention the regimentation and exhaustion of training, the slowness and difficulty of obtaining education benefits. They don't reveal the severe limitations on First Amendment rights, including the right to seek redress of grievances, or the "justice" system in which all avenues of complaint lead to the commander, where abusers are protected, especially when the abuser is of higher rank. Certainly the recruiters never say anything about the conscious dehumanization that teaches troops to kill on command, the shouts of "Blood makes the grass grow!"

The Hotline is flooded with calls from survivors who learned the hard way these truths about military life - and want out now.

Some survivors were harassed or abused, then ignored or retaliated against when they called for help. Others watched buddies in basic training attempt suicide because drill sergeants ordered them beaten up by fellow recruits. Still others, ordered to submit to an anthrax vaccine manufactured by an EPA-disapproved company, are asking how their commands can force them to risk "not just my health but the health of my family. My wife won't stand for it."

Young people's refusal to enlist, their "failure to adapt" as GI's, may be an instinctive response illuminating a deeper awareness: this method of training killers, like the post-Cold War military budget itself, is an anachronism - one that has little if anything to do with making the world a better place.

Since the Cold War, the military's done its best to insinuate itself where it doesn't belong: humanitarian relief, drug interdiction, "peacekeeping" - all tasks better left to professionals who understand the complexities of these problems. Now the Army and Marines are plotting "wars of the future," with $43 million spent by the Marines alone on "urban warfare exercises" while troops are sent as heavily armed cops to Kosovo or as enforcers of turf to Iraq.

Is it any wonder that today's young people are choosing to opt out of this equation?

Proponents of the draft call conscription an "emergency response" and claim they're trying to call attention to the "problem." Perhaps the problem is that the military's still recruiting at Cold War levels, training for yesterday's failed wars, and abusing the personnel it does manage to enlist. Perhaps our young people understand better than our politicians that the new millennium demands new ways of intervening abroad, and better opportunities for national and international service.

(This opinion editorial, in various versions, has run over Knight-Ridder Wire Service, the Fredericksburg Lance-Star, the San Francisco Chronicle and Los Angeles Times. Still the puff pieces about "recruitment problems" continue, most recently by Steven Lee Myers of the New York Times. Feel free to tweak this piece and submit it to your local paper!)