Military recruiters seek gullible targets

Greenwich Time
Posted: Dec 17, 2006

The press reports the existence in Plainfield of a young National Guard trooper with a silver tongue. He has the ability to persuade his contemporaries to sign up for military duty. What with a nasty war going on and frequent removal of most Guard personnel from home and hearth, he must be a talented guy indeed.

There's plenty of other support for him now too. The Pentagon pays a $20,000 signing bonus to all new recruits, the recruiting staff itself has been expanded greatly, the Army has lowered its mental standards for admission and the No Child Left Behind Act gives those recruiters access to the personal information of all high schoolers who don't object in writing.

But now, even the nature of that written objection has become a sore point. Savvy towns like Southington, Westport and Stamford send home, along with their annual school handbook, a plain-English letter that parents may simply sign and return. But towns that are somewhat more pro-military, like Bethel, bury that opt-out information in dense legalese, deep in the handbook itself. No letter at all. Norwalk, under local pressure, has just chosen a middle ground. It switched from the secretive Bethel model to sending a separate letter home, but still written in dense lingo. You can't simply sign and return.

Needless to say, it isn't the Westports and the Southingtons to which the recruiters swarm, anyway. If kids in those towns talk of enlisting, they're likely to get disowned. No, despite the contumely heaped upon John Kerry for his recent remarks, he was right. Recruiters wisely focus on those schools with the best prospects. These often contain low-achievers who are poor, troubled or non-white. Generous signing bonuses can sound pretty nifty if your family is struggling.

Don't sell the recruiters themselves short, either. They are usually smart, attractive, engaging and persuasive young people. At our Oyster Festival recently, they ran a push-up contest that drew more young men and young women than any other attraction in the place. Plus they have an obvious personal incentive to perform. Any day that they're consorting with high schoolers back home, they're not dodging rocket-propelled grenades you-know-where.

And yes, there are a few informative items that somehow don't make it into their pitch. One is the very air that soldiers get to breathe at their toxic foreign work sites. Both Iraq and Afghanistan are terribly dusty, worse since the war, with all the long-term damage that dust does to lungs. Then in Iraq, there is all that depleted uranium, largely unadmitted by the Pentagon, that hastens all manner of physical disorders, including cancer and genetic disruption.

Likewise getting short shrift from the press and the military is news about suicide. The army alone had 83 last year, but how often have you read a media report listing that as the cause of death for one of our young heroes? In fact, all aspects of mental health are hush-hushed in the military. Its prevalence is downplayed, and its treatment is down-budgeted.

All these suppressed items eventually sap many recruiters emotionally. A survey last year found that over half were dissatisfied with their jobs, despite the fact that they do that job very well.

The lucky part for the president is that the target market for enlistees is young, inexperienced and patriotic kids, who don't even know what questions to ask. Many parents do know, but lots of other kids aren't lucky enough to have engaged parents. Thus does the cannon fodder continue to roll in, body bags continue to slip home under cover of censorship and veterans continue to suffer lifelong affliction in muted obscurity.

Syndicated columnist William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of Norwalk. The piece was distributed by www.minutemanmedia.org.