Thwarting the Recruiters
Former Oakland City Council candidate publishes an activist guidebook.
By Kathleen RichardsArticle Tools
Fight the Pentagon with poetry? It sounds far-fetched, but harnessing youth culture to spread antiwar messages is one tactic of the growing "counter-recruitment" movement, a push by students and activists to thwart military recruiters. They've stepped up efforts as the Iraq War drags on, especially at high schools where No Child Left Behind compels administrators to give the military student contact information unless a kid officially opts out.
Now activists Aimee Allison and David Solnit have weighed in with Army of None, a practical guide to counter-recruitment. The book reveals facts about recruiters (they lie) and manipulative marketing, and suggests countertactics. "Counter-recruitment addresses war and a system that trains youth to think in a military style," says Allison, who ran for Oakland City Council last year. "By nature it has to address other inequalities like class and racism and immigrant status, because those are the young people being targeted."
The new book talks about how to reach students, access school campuses, and win allies among the teachers. It contains photocopy-ready fliers, and, for the daring, instructions on how to alter billboards, stencil discreetly, and avoid arrest.
But youth culture is key. "Marching, people singing, people giving spoken word — there's also been people who have developed street theater; they make fun of the recruiter's message," Allison says. "It's really about youth speaking for themselves." Events such as poetry slams make the message more accessible, she says. The book includes numerous spoken-word pieces.
Allison is no stranger to recruitment tactics. As an ambitious Antioch teen, she was dismayed to learn her parents couldn't afford to send her to Stanford. Instead, she turned to her high-school Army recruiter who, she says, "put his arm around me and said, 'I believe in you.' And that meant a lot to me."
But boot camp repelled her. A vegetarian and animal-lover, Allison says she was taught to chant "Kill the people, burn the village." She recalls a drill sergeant physically forcing a comrade to perform an exercise where recruits take off their gas masks and inhale noxious mustard gas. "You learn you have to do what they say," she says.
Later stationed at Palo Alto's VA Hospital, she worked with paraplegics and quadriplegics. "I got a really, really hard lesson about how veterans are treated when they come back from war," she says. As her unit prepared for the first Gulf War, she got an honorable discharge as a conscientious objector. She never did get that $20,000 her recruiter promised for school — she'd have made more working at McDonald's, Allison notes. And when she talks to kids, she reminds them they always have options. "Don't lock yourself into a path," she said in a recent KPFA interview. "Work at McDonald's or Taco Bell because you can always quit. It's harder to quit the military."
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This may be a dated response, but Allison is full of crap. They don't tell you to "burn the village", they have you chant kill to get it in your head that you can't freeze up when killing is necessary so that you don’t get your fellow soldiers killed because you’re afraid to pull the trigger.
Also, mustard gas will chemically burn you very severely, if not kill you. The gas she is embellishing is tear gas, which does not kill or injure you. It is designed to incapacitate.
This is just more irresponsible journalism enabling more ignorant activism. It’s easy to be a critic of things you only understand superficially. Basic training seems like the whole world when you’re in it, but years later you realize how insignificant of an impact it has in comparison to the following growth you gain by having an important job with immense pride and responsibility. And of course service people get paid less on paper, a service member’s base pay is very low. However the things that are provided in addition to pay such as; housing, allowances for housing, galleys and cost of living allowances, the service member lives the same quality of life as some one making much more. Between my E5 base pay and my allowance for housing the bay area, I live a life equivalent to a $46,000 a year income. Ignorant criticism is the military’s worst enemy.
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