| Questioning JROTC
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JROTC Promotes Violence
While schools work to stop violence in the wake of Columbine, many forget a source close to home. JROTC programs across the country are being rocked by scandals, ranging from military-style executions to hazing to classic military sexual assault and intimidation. JROTC's violence is promoted by the ethos and the purpose of the program itself. When war's horrors are glossed over and glorified, murder, hazing, and lesser brutality become easier to contemplate. When School Boards allow the military's JROTC program into schools despite the military's bigotry and discriminatory practices, their message condones hate-crimes.
Military training is designed to dehumanize soldiers so that they will kill on command, without questioning orders. The JROTC curriculum itself praises obedience without question.
A military recruiting program which induces half of all its graduates to enter the military, JROTC is the only program in our schools which can be expected to cause deaths and severe casualties among its graduates. JROTC is also the only program in our schools which encourages (and often even trains) students to fire guns. Some JROTC students have learned what they've been taught all too well. Some JROTC instructors practice what they preach all too well. Some examples from the last two years of known JROTC-linked hazing, murders, crime-sprees, brutality, and violence are detailed below.
- In Detroit, Michigan, a JROTC squad leader at Cooley High School reportedly formed a gang called the Fenkell Mafia Killers. The squad leader personally shot and wounded one person. Police say that on Sep. 26, 1994, she ordered "a hit" at school in which a student was shot twice in the thigh. According to the Detroit Police Officer assigned to Cooley High, the JROTC squad leader "had boys and girls that looked up to her and followed her every order."
- Members of a Long Beach, California JROTC unit formed a gang called The Ace of Spades (based on a Special Forces unit in Vietnam known for leaving cards on people they killed), went on crime sprees (including vandalizing a gay bar), then murdered Alex Giraldo, age 16, one of their members who they believed was talking with the police.
- A year later, also in Long Beach, in August of 1993, a member of the JROTC drill team, scheduled to be the commander of his unit, was arrested and charged, along with a former member of the JROTC program, with kidnapping and murdering an elementary school crossing guard.
- In Arizona, Jonathan Doody, a 17 year old ROTC enthusiast, murdered 9 residents of a Buddhist temple. He was wearing military fatigues as he committed the crime.
In Clifton New Jersey, one member of the Sea Cadets, a Navy program for high school youth, conspired with his gang to murder, execution-style, another member of the Sea Cadets. Three other youths implicated in the murder were also involved in the Sea Cadets.
- In South San Diego County, JROTC students dressed in camouflage fatigues led "war games" in which they attacked and robbed immigrants coming across the border from Mexico.
- On Feb. 22, 1994, three JROTC (Junior Reserve Officer Training Corp) cadets at Balboa High School in San Francisco, were physically assaulted by the rest of the drill team under the orders of the senior commander. One student suffered a punctured eardrum. The three have filed suit. A secret city attorney's report, leaked to a reporter, revealed a 5+ year tradition of hazing, including, "a drill team initiation in which cadets jumped their victims, stripped off their clothes and paddled them with their hands and with a wooden slab from a broken desk. The investigation also found that members of the Balboa High drill team commonly beat fellow cadets as punishment." An anonymous student in JROTC at a 2nd SF high school, Wilson, has admitted to taking part in a hazing at that school in 1991. At Lowell, a third school with JROTC in San Francisco, the student paper reported "friendly" hazing is a tradition there too.
- In Houston, Texas in May of 1993, despite similar problems in previous years, the assembled drill teams were ordered to stand in formation in the hot sun. Over 50 students were overcome with dizziness and/or fainted. Twenty-six students were hospitalized.
- In March 1998. In Brockton, Massachusetts, a JROTC instructor was arrested and charged with sexually abusing fifteen female cadets over a three-year period. Just as in the military, victims had been afraid to come forward because of his rank and influence; when a young man finally took action to expose him, the instructor threatened to kill him and his family.
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