[Dryerase] Brooklyn Students Buck Military Recruiting

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Bushwick students buck military 
By John Tarleton 

Luis Reyes is a senior at Bushwick Outreach Center in
Brooklyn who wants to study journalism in college. He
recently discovered that military recruiters had the
inside scoop on him. 

"They know my interests and everything," says Reyes,
19. "I’m already getting all kinds of letters and
phone calls and whatnot." 

The military’s individually targeted appeal to Reyes
hasn’t worked to date. He still hopes to start college
next fall at Hofstra University. However, the high
pressure recruiting experienced by Reyes and many of
his friends suggests what lies ahead for students as
the military aggressively makes use of a little-known
provision in the 670-page No Child Left Behind Act of
2002. 

The provision in the much-touted education bill
requires high schools to military recruiters access to
facilities as well as contact information for every
student — or lose their federal aid. 

"The military would choose to be in every school in
every classroom in every community if they could,
because overkill is their way of doing things," says
Rick Jahnkow, Director of Project YANO (Youth And
Non-military Opportunities), a San Diego-based group
founded in 1984. 

The military currently enlists 350,000 people a year.
Its recruitment efforts have become increasingly
sophisticated, and relentless, since it switched from
the draft to an all-volunteer force in 1973 at the end
of the Vietnam War. 

It spends hundreds of millions of dollars to advertise
on television, radio, web sites, outdoor ads, and in
youth publications. It also operates Junior Reserve
Officer Training Corps (JROTC) programs in 
3,500 schools, holds summer camp programs on military
bases for disadvantaged youth, and provides guidance
counseling, after-school tutoring and dropout recovery
programs in some troubled inner city schools. Mobile
recruiting stations also appear in shopping malls, at
sporting events and inside theaters at showings of
popular pro-military movies. 

In Bushwick, getting the message out also means
calling prospective recruits as early as 6 a.m. and
showing up at their workplaces and outside of their
churches, according to Reyes and Jesus Gonzalez, 
17, a junior at Bushwick Outreach. 

Under the No Child Left Behind Act, students or their
parents can sign an opt-out form to prevent
information from being released. In late September,
the city’s Department of Education mailed the forms to
parents of over a quarter million high school
students, giving them an 
Oct. 15 reply deadline. Reyes says most Bushwick
Outreach students were unaware of the forms and were
barraged by recruiter appeals soon after the deadline
passed. 

The students’ frustration at their loss of privacy
boiled over on Oct. 23 when about 60 of them held a
protest in front of nearby Bushwick High School. They
demanded a reversal of the opt-out form, which would
allow their information to be released only with their
permission. 

"It’s for us to decide if we want to give them
information," says Gonzalez, who along with Reyes is
also an organizer for the Youth Power project of Make
the Road by Walking, a Bushwick-based community
organization. "If we want to sign up, we can walk down
to the recruiting station on Myrtle Avenue." 

Commander Edward Gehrke, head of Navy recruiting in
New 
York, poured more fuel on the fire by responding to
the protest in a letter to the New York Daily News,
stating that most Bushwick students were plagued by
police and drug problems and wouldn’t be eligible to
enlist if they tried. 

"It’s clear what the high people in the Navy and the
military think about people of color in poor
neighborhoods," Gonzalez says. Captain John Caldwell,
public affairs officer for the Marine Corps 1st
Recruiting District, which encompasses New York City,
says the military is simply trying to offer students
another opportunity. "They get tons of information
from colleges when they are looking at going to
school," he says. "We’re also providing information
that could help them get an education and a job." 

Yet these promises of education and training are
misleading, critics say. The present-day GI Bill is
fraught with loopholes and stringent conditions that
cause many soldiers to lose their educational
benefits. Most soldiers train on equipment that is
obsolete or has no civilian counterpart, or they
perform specific functions on one or two machines,
leaving them with few real world skills. 

"Somebody who was a cook at McDonald’s who learns how
to pick up a tray of prepared food, put in a heater,
heat it up and wrap it, couldn’t walk in the door of a
regular restaurant and say I want to be a chef," says
John Judge, a longtime anti-recruitment activist based
out of 
Washington, D.C. 

The Bushwick action has since inspired other youth
activists in the city. Youth Bloc, a citywide network
of high school-age activists, has decided to launch a
campaign against No Child Left Behind as well as
JROTC, which is currently active in about 100 high
schools across the city. The Youth Bloc activists plan
to visit a high school a week in each borough except
Staten Island, giving presentations or leafleting
outside. 

"It’s our generation that’s going to be the cannon
fodder," says Mike Gould-Wartoffky, a Youth Bloc
member and senior at Hunter College High School. 

"We want our generation to be in the front lines of
the anti-war movement, not the war." 

The Bushwick students look to hold more
anti-recruitment actions, but say their first priority
is having more options in life than Army, Navy Air
Force or Marines. "Bring college recruiters, not
military recruiters," 
Reyes says. "F— the military. These kids want to go to college."

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