General, a man is quite expendable.
He can fly and he can kill.
But he has one defect:
He can think.
—Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956), playwright and poet1
Mike Hoffman would not be the guy his buddies would expect to see leading a protest movement. The son of a steelworker and a high school janitor from Allentown, Pennsylvania, he enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1999 as an artilleryman to “blow things up.” His transformation into an activist came the hard way—on the streets of Baghdad.
When Hoffman arrived in Kuwait in February 2003, his unit’s highest-ranking enlisted man laid out the mission in stark terms. “You’re not going to make Iraq safe for democracy,” the sergeant said. “You are going for one reason alone: oil. But you’re still going to go, because you signed a contract. And you’re going to go to bring your friends home.” Hoffman, who had his own doubts about the war, was relieved—he’d never expected to hear such a candid assessment from a superior. But it was only when he had been in Iraq for several months that the full meaning of the sergeant’s words began to sink in.
“The reasons for war were wrong,” he said. “They were lies. There were no WMDs. Al Qaeda was not there. And it was evident we couldn’t force democracy on people by force of arms.”
When he returned home and got his honorable discharge in August 2003, Hoffman said, he knew what he had to do next. “After being in Iraq and seeing what this war is, I realized that the only way to support our troops is to demand the withdrawal of all occupying forces in Iraq.” He cofounded a group called Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) and soon found himself emerging as one of the most visible members of a growing movement of soldiers who openly oppose the war in Iraq.
Dissent about Iraq within the military is not new. Senior officers were questioning the optimistic projections of the Pentagon’s civilian leaders from early on, and some retired generals strongly criticized the war. Retired Gen. Anthony Zinni, the head of Central Command before Gen. Tommy Franks and once President George W. Bush’s special Middle East envoy, told 60 Minutes in May 2004: “To think that we are going to ‘stay the course’—the course is headed over Niagara Falls. . . . It’s been a failure.”
In what has become a familiar ritual, neoconservatives questioned Zinni’s patriotism, and the conservative National Review slammed him as an “anti-Semite” for criticizing the war. He fired back at the critics, insisting that speaking out as a soldier “is part of your duty.” He scoffed at “the idea that when the troops are in combat, everybody has to shut up. Imagine if we put troops in combat with a faulty rifle, and that rifle was malfunctioning, and troops were dying as a result. I [don’t] think anyone would allow that to happen, that would not speak up.”
Soldiers and their families are now speaking out in growing numbers. Hoffman founded Iraq Veterans Against the War in July 2004 with eight members; within two years, its membership had grown to over 300. Another organization, Military Families Speak Out, began with two families in 2002; four years later, its membership included over 2,400 military families. And soldier-advocacy groups are reporting a rising number of calls from military personnel who are considering refusing to fight. Rather than go to Iraq, numerous soldiers have fled to Canada.
Most troops now question the official rationale for occupying Iraq. In a first-ever survey of American troops in Iraq conducted in February 2006 by Zogby and LeMoyne College, an overwhelming 72 percent of them thought the United States should leave the country within the next year; one in four advocated an immediate withdrawal.2 In a 2005 poll by Military Times, a bare majority (54 percent) of soldiers approved of President Bush’s Iraq policy.3 In a poll in Pennsylvania in 2003, 54 percent of households with a member in the military said the war was the “wrong thing to do.” Doubts about the war have contributed to the decline of troop morale—nearly three-fourths of soldiers described morale as “bad” in 20044—and may, some experts say, be a factor in why Army suicide rates in Iraq have risen up to 40 percent since the start of the war.
“That’s the most basic tool a soldier needs on the battlefield—a reason to be there,” said Paul Rieckhoff, a platoon leader in the New York National Guard and former JPMorgan banker who served in Iraq. Rieckhoff has founded a group called Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, which provides a freewheeling forum for soldiers’ views on the war.5 “When you can’t articulate that in one sentence, it starts to affect morale. You had an initial rationale for war that was a moving target. [But] it was a shell game from the beginning, and you can only bullshit people for so long.”
With his baggy pants, red goatee, and moussed hair, Mike Hoffman looks more like a guy taking some time off after college than a 25-year-old combat veteran. But the urgency in his voice belies his relaxed appearance; he speaks rapidly, consumed with the desire to get his point across. Talking in a coffee shop in Vermont after one of his many speaking engagements, he conceded, “A lot of what I’m doing is basically survivor’s guilt. It’s hard: I’m home. I’m fine. I came back in one piece. But there are a lot of people who haven’t.”
More than a year after his return from Iraq, Hoffman was still battling depression, panic attacks, and nightmares. “I don’t know what I did,” he said, noting that errors and faulty targeting were common in the artillery. “I came home and read that six children were killed in an artillery strike near where I was. I don’t really know if that was my unit or a British unit. But I feel responsible for everything that happened when I was there.”
When he first came home, Hoffman says, he tried to talk to friends and family about his experience. It was not a story most wanted to hear. “One of the hardest things when I came back was people who were slapping me on the back saying ‘Great job,’ ” he recalled. “Everyone wants this to be a good war so they can sleep at night. But guys like me know it’s not a good war. There’s no such thing as a good war.”
Hoffman finally found some kindred spirits in fall 2003 when he discovered Veterans for Peace, the antiwar group founded in 1985. Older veterans encouraged him to speak at rallies, and steadily, he began to connect with other disillusioned Iraq vets. In July 2004, at the Veterans for Peace annual meeting in Boston, Hoffman announced the creation of Iraq Veterans Against the War. The audience of silver-haired vets from wars in Vietnam, Korea, and World War II burst into applause. Hoffman smiled wryly. “They tell us we’re the rock stars of the antiwar movement.”
A number of Hoffman’s Marine Corps buddies have now joined Iraq Veterans Against the War, and the stream of phone calls and e-mails from other soldiers is constant. Not long ago, he said, a soldier home on leave from Iraq told him, “Just keep doing what you’re doing, because you’ve got more support than you can imagine over there.”
Members of IVAW led the protest march that greeted the 2004 Republican convention in New York, and their ranks swelled that week. But the protest’s most poignant moment came after the march, as veterans from wars past and present retreated to Summit Rock in Central Park. Joe Bangert, a founding member of Vietnam Veterans of America, addressed the group. “One of the most painful things when we returned from Vietnam was that the veterans from past wars weren’t there for us,” he said. “They didn’t support us in our questioning and our opposition to war. And I
just want to say,” he added, peering intently at the younger veterans, “we are here for you. We have your back.”
Soldiers of Conscience
There was no Iraq veterans’ group for Brandon Hughey to turn to in December 2003. Alone and terrified, sitting in his barracks at Fort Hood, Texas, the 18-year-old private considered his options. He could remain with his Army unit, which was about to ship out to Iraq to fight a war that Hughey was convinced was pointless and immoral. Or he could end his dilemma—by taking his own life.
Desperate, Hughey trolled the Internet. He e-mailed a peace activist and Vietnam veteran in Indianapolis, Carl Rising-Moore, who made him an offer: If he was serious about his opposition to the war, Rising-Moore said, he would help him flee to Canada.
The next day, an officer knocked on Hughey’s door: His deployment date had been moved up, and his unit was leaving within twenty-four hours. Hughey packed his belongings in a military duffel, jumped in his car, and drove north. He met up with Rising-Moore in Indianapolis, and the two headed north together. As they approached the Rainbow Bridge border post at Niagara Falls, Hughey was nervous and somber. “I had the sense that once I crossed that border, I might never be able to go back,” he recalled. “It made me sad.”
Months after fleeing Fort Hood, the baby-faced 19-year-old still sported a military-style buzz cut. Sitting at the kitchen table of the Quaker family that was sheltering him in St. Catharines, Ontario, Hughey talked about growing up in San Angelo, Texas, where he was raised by his father. In high school he played trumpet and loved to soup up cars. But when his father lost his job as a computer programmer, he was forced to use up his son’s college fund. So at 17, Hughey enlisted in the Army, with a $5,000 signing bonus to sweeten the deal.
Quiet and unassuming, Hughey grew intense when the conversation turned to Iraq. “I would fight in an act of defense, if my home and family were in danger,” he said. “But Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. They barely had an army left, and Kofi Annan actually said [attacking Iraq was] a violation of the UN charter. It’s nothing more than an act of aggression.” As for his duty to his fellow soldiers, he insisted, “You can’t go along with a criminal activity just because others are doing it.” By early 2006, an estimated 200 U.S. soldiers had fled to Canada rather than fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, and about 25 of them had applied for refugee status.6
There are growing signs of resistance in the military to fighting Bush’s wars. The Pentagon estimates that as of late 2005, more than 8,000 members of the U.S. military had deserted since the start of the Iraq War7 (military personnel are classified as having deserted after not reporting for duty for more than a month), and many observers believe the actual number may be even higher. The Army has acknowledged that it is not aggressively hunting down soldiers who don’t show up—although in a bizarre twist, the military has lately been hunting down and arresting Vietnam-era deserters to send a message to current soldiers that desertion is a lifelong stigma. In 2004, the overstretched Army called up 4,000 former soldiers and ordered them back to duty; half of them have resisted the orders.8 The GI Rights Hotline, a counseling operation run by a national network of antiwar groups, reports that it now receives between 3,000 and 4,000 calls per month from soldiers seeking a way out of the military; before the war, it received about 1,000 calls per year. Some of the callers simply never thought they would see combat, said J. E. McNeil, director of the Center on Conscience and War. But others are turning against the war because of what they saw while serving in Iraq, and they don’t want to be sent back there. “It’s people learning what war really is,” she said. “A lot of people are naïve—and for a while, the military was portraying itself as being a peace mission.”
Unlike Vietnam, when young men facing the draft could convincingly claim that they opposed all war, enlistees in a volunteer military have a tough time qualifying as conscientious objectors. In 2004, about 110 applied for conscientious objector (CO) status, four times the number who applied in 2000.9 Roughly half of the applications were denied. “The Army does understand people can have a change of heart,” noted spokeswoman Martha Rudd. “But you can’t ask for a conscientious objector discharge based on moral or religious opposition to a particular war.”
With the military turning down so many CO applications, war resisters are now landing in jail. The first Iraq War soldier sent to prison for refusing to fight was 28-year-old Sgt. Camilo Mejia, a Nicaraguan-born member of the Florida National Guard who fought in Iraq for six months. Upon returning to the United States in October 2003 for a two-week leave, he refused to go back to Iraq. He went into hiding for five months before turning himself in and applying to be a conscientious objector. Mejia claims to have witnessed and participated in prisoner abuse and the killing of civilians. Former attorney general Ramsey Clark, who was part of Mejia’s defense team, spoke of the “incredible irony that we’re prosecuting soldiers in Iraq for violations of international law and we’re prosecuting a soldier here because he refused to do the same things.”
On May 21, 2004, Camilo Mejia was convicted of deserting his unit. In June 2004, Amnesty International declared Mejia a prisoner of conscience and called for his immediate and unconditional release. He served a year-long sentence in the brig at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and was released in February 2005.
Mejia spoke on Democracy Now! shortly after his release. As he sat absorbed in thought in the studio waiting for the interview to begin, he suddenly broke into a smile. A familiar song was playing during the break, “Quincho Barrilete,” the anthem of the Sandinista revolution that overthrew the U.S.-backed Somoza dictatorship in 1979. The singer was his father, Carlos Mejia Godoy, a noted Nicaraguan musician and later an ambassador in the Sandinista government.
Mejia, a hint of his jarhead haircut still evident beneath a flock of brown curls, explained what drove the son of a rebel leader to join the U.S. military. “I guess the pressure to be like your parents and to be like your father, who is such a public figure, and who has contributed so much to the Sandinista revolution—I guess I just turned my back on it, because I wanted to find my own way.”
The Iraq War veteran talked about why he went to Iraq in the first place: “Politically, I was very much in disagreement with the war, but I didn’t really want to make a stand, because I was terrified, because I didn’t want to go through a court-martial, because I didn’t want to go to jail, because I was a squad leader in an infantry unit, and I didn’t want my friends to think I was a coward or a traitor.”
His feelings changed when he was stationed at a former Iraqi air force base. Mejia described how unidentified “spooks” would decide which of the Iraqi prisoners were “enemy combatants.” “No one knows who [the spooks] are or where they come from. They wear no unit patch or anything.” Prisoners deemed “enemy combatants” were hooded and singled out for abuse. Mejia was told to deprive these prisoners of sleep for days. Soldiers from another unit explained how to keep someone awake: “Yell at them, tell them to get up and get down,” he recounted. “Let them sleep for five seconds, so they will get disoriented. Bang a sledgehammer on a wall to make it sound like an explosion. Scare them. And if all of that fails, then, you know, cock a nine-millimeter gun next to their ear, so as to make them believe that they’re going to be executed. And then they will do anything that you want them to do. In that manner, keep them up for periods of 48 to 72 hours in order to soften them up for interrogation.”
He also described what he did when he went on house-to-house raids: “You go in there at two or three in the morning, put everybody from the household in one room and then take the owner of the house, who is usually a man, all through the house into every room. Open every closet and everything and look for weapons and look for literature against the coalition. And then get your detainees and move out.” Mejia and his mates could not, of course, understand the Arabic literature they were sent to find. And the intelligence his unit had was often vague or meaningless. “Sometimes they would tell us, you are looking for a man who’s 5'7", dark skin, has a beard—which is like about 90 percent of men in Iraq.”
For many immigrants, joining the military is a fast track to gaining American citizenship. Some 41,000 “permanent resident aliens” are in the United States armed forces. By mid-2005, sixty-three immigrants had been killed fighting in Iraq.10
Seeing the Iraq War close-up, including prisoner abuse, awoke something in Camilo Mejia that has “just been dormant for a long time. I guess that family background has finally kicked in and given me a new conscience.”
Following his release from jail, Mejia wrote this advice to other soldiers: “Peace does not come easily, so I tell all members of the military that whenever faced with an order, and everything in their mind and soul, and each and every cell in their bodies screams at them to refuse and resist, then by God do so. Jail will mean nothing when breaking the law became their duty to humanity.”11
Antiwar Refugees
Jeffry House is reliving his past. An American draft evader who fled to Canada in 1970 (he was number 16 in that year’s draft lottery), he is now fighting to persuade the Canadian government to grant refugee status to American deserters.
“In some ways, this is coming full circle for me,” said the slightly disheveled, 57-year-old Toronto lawyer. “The themes that I thought about when I was 21 years old now are reborn, particularly your obligation to the state when the state has participated in a fraud, when they’ve deceived you.” A dormant network has been revived, with Vietnam-era draft dodgers and deserters—an estimated 50,000 of them came to Canada to avoid fighting in Vietnam—quietly contributing money to support the legal defense of the newest American fugitives.
House’s strategy is bold: He is challenging the very legality of the Iraq War, based on the Nuremberg principles. Those principles, adopted by a UN commission after World War II in response to the Nazis’ crimes, hold that military personnel have a responsibility to resist unlawful orders. They also declare wars of aggression a violation of international law. House hopes that in Canada, which did not support the war in Iraq, courts might sympathize with the deserters’ claims and grant them legal refugee status.
Private Jeremy Hinzman was the first American soldier to flee to Canada and publicly protest fighting in Iraq. He settled in Toronto with his wife and their 2-year-old son, Liam. The clean, preppy-looking 25-year-old veteran of the Army’s storied 82nd Airborne Division had been spending much of his time reading history and politics, and following the news from Iraq.
For Hinzman, the way the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal was handled captures the immorality of the Iraq conflict—and the hypocrisy of how justice is meted out in wartime. “[CENTCOM Commander Ricardo] Sanchez and Rumsfeld—the higher policy-makers knew what was going on. Were the brass punished? No, they scapegoated the trailer trash. They are being punished for carrying out command decisions, instead of punishing those who formulated these command decisions.”
Hinzman applied for CO status while in Afghanistan. When it was denied by the Army, he felt he had no option but to flee. “The whole enterprise in Iraq was illegal and essentially criminal. By participating in it, I would have been participating in a criminal enterprise.”
In March 2005, the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board turned down Hinzman’s application for refugee status. The board sidestepped his argument about the illegality of the Iraq War and ruled that he would not face serious persecution if he returned to the United States. Brandon Hughey’s application was turned down six months later. Hinzman and Hughey are appealing the rulings. Hinzman, who periodically runs marathons, is now in his longest and toughest race.
When Jeremy Hinzman traveled the lonely mile across the Rainbow Bridge into Canada rather than fight in an immoral and illegal war, he unwittingly catalyzed a movement. The War Resisters Support Campaign of Canada has formed to provide financial and legal assistance and offer housing to the growing number of American soldiers arriving in Canada. The Canadians and the American soldiers hope to rekindle the spirit of former Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau, who declared in 1969: “Those who make a conscientious judgment that they must not participate in this war . . . have my complete sympathy. . . . Canada should be a refuge from militarism.”12
A Dissenting Voice
The San Diego Naval Station was abuzz with activity. It was December 6, 2004, and thousands of Marines from Camp Pendleton were boarding the USS Bonhomme Richard, an amphibious assault ship, to be transported to the Middle East for combat duty. As the Marines boarded, one sailor stood apart: Petty Officer 3rd Class Pablo Paredes sat on the pier and refused to move. There was a standoff, as Paredes informed senior officers that he was refusing to go in protest against the Iraq War. The 23-year-old weapons control technician told reporters, “I don’t want to be a part of a ship that’s taking 3,000 Marines over there, knowing a hundred or more of them won’t come back. I can’t sleep at night knowing that’s what I do for a living.”13
Paredes, a Hispanic-American, expected to be arrested for his actions. For nearly two hours, the sailor sat on the pier and spoke to reporters, explaining why he was refusing to board. Paredes told the journalists he was young and naïve when he joined the Navy and “never imagined in a million years we would go to war with somebody who had done nothing to us.”
“I really wanted to use my position to show the world a dissenting voice that is not afraid to suffer some consequences for principles,” he told Democracy Now!14 But the Navy declined to arrest him with the media present. It was only after he left the pier that day that he was classified as a “deserter and fugitive.”
Paredes had spent the previous two years in the Navy in Japan. It was there, he said, “I saw a different perspective. I got to see news from a different point of view, and it got me very interested. First as a Latino, I got very interested in the politics of Latin America and all of the interventions, the CIA operations, the coups. I got very interested in everything that’s happened in history, which up until then, I was clueless to.” Paredes says he felt he was “part of the system that allowed those things to happen, so I started to have a very serious conflict about what I was doing.”
Paredes was jarred by being surrounded by a massive military operation that was deploying in Afghanistan and Iraq, while talking to family back home who seemed oblivious. “I was seeing the disconnect that happens in the U.S. Then I wondered what makes people so apathetic. I see that the monster of the mainstream media is a big reason.”
Paredes’s application to be a conscientious objector was denied. He was court-martialed for taking an unauthorized absence from the Navy. A friend and supporter of his, an active-duty member of the elite Navy SEALS, drove him to the trial. Sitting in the courtroom to support him were a number of others who have spoken out against the war: Sgt. Camilo Mejia, Cindy Sheehan, Fernando Suarez del Solar—whose son, Marine Lance Cpl. Jesus Suarez, was one of the first to die in Iraq—and Aidan Delgado, who served as a military policeman at Abu Ghraib and subsequently succeeded in getting CO status.
Paredes stated at his court-martial: “If there’s anything I could be guilty of, it is my beliefs. I am guilty of believing this war is illegal. I’m guilty of believing war in all forms is immoral and useless, and I am guilty of believing that as a service member I have a duty to refuse to participate in this war because it is illegal.”15 To the surprise of Paredes and his attorneys, Lt. Cmdr. Bob Klant, presiding judge at the court-martial, conceded at one point, “I think the government has successfully proved that any seaman recruit has reasonable cause to believe that the wars in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq were illegal.”16
Navy prosecutors asked for Paredes to be sentenced to nine months in prison and that he be given a bad conduct discharge. “He is trying to infect the military with his own philosophy of disobedience. Sailors all over the world will want to know whether this will be tolerated,” declared prosecutor Lt. Brandon Hale.
Instead, the judge sentenced the seaman to three months of hard labor on his Navy base for refusing deployment, and demoted him from petty officer third class to seaman recruit, the lowest rank in the Navy. He was discharged “under honorable conditions.” Defense lawyer Jeremy Warren described the sentence, which pointedly did not include jail time, as “a stunning blow to the prosecution. This is an affirmation of every sailor’s and military person’s right to speak out and follow their conscience.”17
Since Paredes was released in October 2005, he has been on a mission to speak out against war. He has been to Venezuela for the World Social Forum, and to Colombia, where he went to advocate for legal recognition of CO status. The goateed young man with deep brown eyes was quick to laugh, but intensely focused when it came to discussing what he cares about.
“Counter recruitment,” said the young man who grew up in the South Bronx, “is my passion.” Paredes described how he “attended high school part-time, and worked full-time” in a family that struggled after his father was seriously injured in a workplace accident. An easy paycheck for a cash-strapped Latino kid was always waiting for him, if only he would talk to the guys in uniform who were ubiquitous around his high school.
“Here I was an average Joe, and somewhere along the line my new best friend became a guy in working whites.” He decries the militarization of schools, especially in minority communities. “It’s not just this great, witty, charming guy who comes into school. It’s a process of romanticizing everything to do with the military and uniforms and arms. Now you have grammar schools where Hummers and tanks come. In the malls, [recruiters] show up with virtual reality machines. So in the inner city, you are targeted and indoctrinated with a love of all things military.”
The Army has a $200 million advertising budget, and recruiters now travel the country with flight simulators, Hummers with state-of-the-art audio-visual systems, and a fleet of thirteen trailers, each costing $1 million, that show off the latest in high-tech military equipment and Xbox military video games. The toys are intended to dazzle and seduce young recruits. “It’s more like an Army version of ‘Pimp My Ride,’ ” said Lt. Col. Mark V. Lathem, commander of the battalion that runs the fleet.18
“It’s disgusting,” said Paredes. “On the one hand, you have high schools where the education budgets are being cut and the coaches are being cut. Then you have the recruitment manual that instructs recruiters, ‘High schools are getting their budgets cut, so if you volunteer as a coach, you will be the hero of all the students. That heroic posture will make it easier to recruit.’ You invade their school and try to become their hero. They’ve got Ronald McDonald beat.”
Paredes said that “learning all these things makes you feel like you have to work towards change to balance this. Students have no one on their side. . . . They have recruiters working for years at a time to get them into the military. So this is a passion for me. Someone has to advocate for the students.”
Filling the Ranks
The U.S. military is broken. One in four soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In 2004, 215,871 veterans received PTSD benefit payments at a cost of $4.3 billion, a 150 percent jump since 1999.19
As soldiers return from Iraq and Afghanistan and talk candidly about the horrors of war and the realities of occupying countries that do not want them, the military is struggling to fill its ranks. In the fiscal year ending September 30, 2005, the Army fell 8 percent short of its annual goal of 80,000 enlistees—the Army’s biggest shortfall since 1979. In that same time, the Army Reserve only managed to muster 84 percent of its quota, while the Army National Guard signed up just 80 percent, 12,783 recruits shy of its goal of 63,002.20
“The Army’s recruiting shortfalls have put the future of the all-volunteer armed forces in jeopardy,” wrote retired Lt. Col. Charles A. Krohn, the Army’s former deputy chief of public affairs. “We have basically committed most of the Army’s active forces (including much of the National Guard), rotating them to the point of exhaustion.”21
The military is digging deep to attract new soldiers. Recruiters have been added; the Army has doubled the maximum enlistment bonus from $20,000 to $40,000 (to stock our “all-volunteer” military); the maximum enlistment age for reservists has been raised from 34 to 39; restrictions have been relaxed on enlisting high school dropouts; and more people with substandard scores on the Army aptitude test are now signed up.22 The Washington Post reported, “To fill its ranks nationwide, the Army in fiscal 2005 accepted its least qualified pool in a decade—falling below quota in high school graduates (87 percent) and taking in more youths scoring in the lowest category of aptitude test (3.9 percent).”23
When even these efforts fail, the Bush administration just fakes the numbers. For example, despite sagging sign-ups, the Army announced it had exceeded its recruiting quotas for October 2005. An impressive feat—until you learn that the Army simply lowered its October quota by one-third, from about 7,000 recruits in October 2004 to 4,700 recruits a year later.24
Recruiters are becoming increasingly desperate to make quota. Charges of recruiting improprieties almost doubled from 2000 to 2004, with some 957 incidents reported in 2004.25 David McSwane, a 17-year-old high school journalist in Arvada, Colorado, decided “to see how far the Army would go during a war to get one more soldier.” CBS News picked up the story from there:
McSwane contacted his local Army recruiting office, in Golden, with a scenario he created.
For one thing, he told his recruiter, he was a dropout and didn’t have a high school diploma.
No problem, McSwane says the recruiter explained. He suggested that McSwane create a fake diploma from a nonexistent school.
McSwane recorded the recruiter saying on the phone: “It can be like Faith Hill Baptist School. Whatever you choose.”
So, as instructed, McSwane went to a Web site and, for $200, arranged to have a phony diploma created. It certified McSwane as a graduate of Faith Hill Baptist High School, the very name the recruiter had suggested, and came complete with a fake grade transcript.
What was McSwane’s reaction to them encouraging him to get a phony diploma? “I was shocked. I’m sitting there looking at a poster that says, ‘Integrity, honor, respect,’ and he is telling me to lie.”26
McSwane continued the ruse, telling the recruiter: “I have a problem with drugs. I can’t kick the habit. Just marijuana.” The Army does not accept people with drug problems—or so it says. The recruiter told him, “Not a problem. Just take this detox.” The recruiter even offered to pay half the cost of the treatment, and drove McSwane to a store where he could buy it.
Economic hard times have been a boon to the military. In 2004, nearly half of recruits came from lower-middle-class or poor households, and 44 percent came from rural areas. In these depressed areas, the risk of going to war is outweighed by the threat of going jobless or hungry.
As support for the Iraq War has dropped dramatically among African-Americans, the military has made recruiting Latinos a top priority. Between 2001 and 2005, the number of African-American recruits dropped from 22 percent to 15 percent, while Latino enlistment shot up 26 percent. Latinos now make up 11 percent of the military; they account for 14 percent of the population. But critics point out that Latinos are being used as cannon fodder: They comprise less than 5 percent of the officer corps.27 The Army
is spending millions on advertising in Spanish-language media. President Bush has added another sweetener: Instead of being hunted down at the border, he has promised that Latino recruits will be fast-tracked for citizenship.
Pablo Paredes shakes his head in disgust about the Latino recruitment effort, and vows to counter it. “It’s bad enough that the poor of the U.S. are targeted to fight wars of the U.S. But when the poor of another country are targeted to fight the wars of the U.S., that’s criminal.”
Lately, the military has been outsourcing its recruitment efforts. Where high school students could once easily identify recruiters by their crisp military uniforms, today the person making a pitch to join may simply be a well-dressed civilian. That’s because the military has been steadily privatizing its recruiting operation. In 2002, the Pentagon awarded a $100 million contract to Military Professional Resources, Inc. (MPRI)—which boasts of “having more generals per square foot than the Pentagon”28—to take over recruiting in five areas (Tacoma, Washington; Jackson, Mississippi; Oklahoma City; Dayton, Ohio; and the Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia region). Another firm, Resource Consultant, Inc. (now Serco), won a $72 million contract to cover recruiting in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Wilmington, North Carolina; Granite City, Illinois; Homewood, Illinois; and Salt Lake City.29 In November 2005, Serco won another contract worth up to $30 million to provide 102 recruiters to the Army in the southern United States.30
“We simply provide a product, like Coca-Cola,” said MPRI Vice President Ed Soyster, a retired army general and the former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.31 It’s a Coke that can kill.
Students in the Crosshairs
As recruiters go bottom feeding to meet quota, the Pentagon is busy creating a high-tech database to reach out and snare unsuspecting students. First there was the obscure provision of the No Child Left Behind Act that forces high schools to turn over the names and contact details of all juniors and seniors, effectively transforming President George Bush’s signature education bill into the most aggressive military recruitment tool since the draft.
Then, in June 2005, privacy advocates were shocked to learn that for two years, the Pentagon had been amassing a database of information on some 30 million students. The information dossiers on millions of young Americans were to help identify college and high school students as young as sixteen to target them for military recruiting.
The massive database includes an array of personal information including birth dates, Social Security numbers, e-mail addresses, grade point averages, ethnicities, and what subjects the students are studying. The Pentagon has hired the Massachusetts-based company BeNow to run the database. By turning to private firms to do this work, the government is circumventing laws that restrict its right to collect or hold citizen information.
The Pentagon’s Joint Advertising, Market Research and Studies Group (JAMRS) oversees this massive data mining project. The Pentagon, which is spending $243 million on JAMRS, is collecting data from commercial data brokers, state driver’s license records, and other sources.32 The JAMRS Web site describes the consolidated database located at BeNow as “arguably the largest repository of 16–25-year-old youth data in the country, containing roughly 30 million records.”33 If you’re concerned that the information might be used by other agencies, well, you should be: The Pentagon has stated that it can share the data with law enforcement, state tax authorities, other agencies making employment inquiries, and foreign authorities, among others. Students will not know if their information has been collected, and they cannot prevent it from happening.
The main obstacle to getting kids into the military—concerned parents—has at long last been circumvented. Private companies can now harvest data on children and provide private recruiters with the information they need to contact kids directly. If skeptical parents find out that the “Mr. Jones” calling for Johnny is offering their child a free ticket to Iraq, the military is spending millions to learn how best to persuade or bypass these negative “influencers.” One JAMRS study is focused exclusively on how to change mothers’ attitudes. In March 2004, 271 mothers from Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, Denver, Dallas, and New York City were interviewed in order to enable recruiters to “better understand ways to motivate mothers currently on the fence to be accepting of military service, [and] exert some influence on mothers who are currently against military service.”34
Now rebellious teens have a new ally in challenging their over-protective mothers—the Pentagon. And in case the prospective recruit has dropped out of school, has a criminal record, or is a single parent—each normally a bar to acceptance into the military— JAMRS is also studying “moral character waiver policies” to help recruiters sign them up anyway.
Data mining—which the Pentagon claimed it had stopped in 2003 after an earlier program, the Total Information Awareness Project, was exposed—is fraught with risk. As Mark Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), told Democracy Now!, “There is a real problem with the security of information databases in this country right now. The most recent breach was about 40 million records maintained by a credit card processing company, and this is also having a direct impact on the crime of identity theft, which according to the Federal Trade Commission cost American consumers and businesses over $50 billion in 2004.”35
In late 2005, over one hundred groups wrote to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld demanding that “because of the potential for abuse and the threat to the personal privacy rights of a generation of American youth, we request that the JAMRS project be immediately ended.”36 But the program continues.
As the military secretly gathers personal information about students and passes it around, abuse has followed close behind. In Indiana, six female high school recruits were sexually assaulted by a recruiter in 2002 and 2003. According to the Indianapolis Star, Indiana National Guard Sgt. Eric P. Vetesy “picked out teens and young women with backgrounds that made them vulnerable to authority. As a military recruiter, he had access to personal information, making the quest easier.”37 The local prosecutor noted that of the victims, young women between the ages of 17 and 21, “most were in single-parent families with no father figure. Because Vetesy assembled background information on each recruit . . . he was able to target those he most likely could coerce.”
The Star continued, “Nationwide, military recruiters reportedly have been linked to at least a half-dozen sexual assaults during the past few years, since the creation of the federal No Child Left Behind Act. This broad education law requires, among other things, that high schools give military recruiters greater access to students.”
Groups are mobilizing against the Pentagon’s massive student recruitment and data mining campaigns. Leave My Child Alone (www.leavemychildalone.org) offers online opt-out forms that students and parents can download and submit to schools to keep their names off recruiter contact lists. The group estimates that as of 2006, 37,000 students have opted out of the No Child Left Behind requirement. Students can also file another form to send to the Pentagon to have their names removed from the JAMRS database.
It’s little wonder that the Pentagon must invent new ways to find bodies for the front lines. Support for America’s foreign wars has dropped to new lows among young Americans: One study showed that just 25 percent of teens support the Iraq War.38 As more returning soldiers speak out against the war, today’s soldiers may just follow the lead of their commander in chief: Go AWOL.
Vietnam figures prominently in soldiers’ conversations about Iraq. Numerous Iraq veterans have relatives who served in the military, and they tell a similar story: When they grew cynical about the Iraq War, the Vietnam veterans in their family immediately recognized what was happening—another generation of soldiers was grappling with the realization that they were being sent to carry out a policy determined by people who cared little for the grunts on the ground.
Resistance in the military “is growing, but it’s going to take a little while,” said Mike Hoffman, whose cousins, uncle, and grandfather all did their time in uniform.
Hoffman recalled the GI Revolt, the groundswell of resistance within the military in Vietnam and the breakdown of morale that hastened the end of that war. “There was a progression of thought that happened among soldiers in Vietnam. It started with a mission: Contain communism. That mission fell apart, just like it fell apart now—there are no weapons of mass destruction. Then you are left with just a survival instinct. That, unfortunately, turned to racism. That’s happening now, too. Guys are writing me saying, ‘I don’t know why I’m here, but I hate the Iraqis.’
“Now you realize that the people to blame for this aren’t the ones you are fighting,” Hoffman continued. “It’s the people who put you in this situation in the first place. You realize you wouldn’t be in this situation if you hadn’t been lied to. Soldiers are slowly coming to that conclusion. Once that becomes widespread, the resentment of the war is going to grow even more.”