[Peace-discuss] *Poverty Draft*

[Jan & Durl Kruse]

> While researching information regarding the *Poverty Draft* for a 
> friend I found this article scheduled for the June 2007 issue of 
> Sojourners Magazine.
> Besides containing interesting information I also thought it worth 
> noting the quote below (I placed it in italics) by our friend Martin 
> Smith!
> From Counterpunch to a quote in Sojourners......... Good Job Martin!
> Jan Kruse
>
> The Poverty Draft
>
> Do military recruiters disproportionately target communities of color 
> and the poor?
> by Jorge Mariscal
>
> Recently I stumbled upon an online exchange about why young people 
> join the military. One participant who claimed to be "on the Left" 
> made the following assertion: "Disenfranchisement is the reason why 
> kids join the military and they know going in that it gives them the 
> opportunity to legally and with the blessing of our government kill, 
> torture, and hate other people in order to give an outlet to their 
> hostilities toward society."
>
> Among the many youth I have met over the years as an educator and 
> counter-recruitment activist, I have never met anyone who enlisted so 
> that he or she could "kill, torture, and hate." While 
> "disenfranchisement" may be an accurate word for why some youth 
> enlist, the claim that working-class youth sign up so that they can 
> "legally kill and torture other people" at the very least betrays a 
> profound misunderstanding of why young people join the "all-volunteer 
> military" and at worst reveals biases that separate Americans due to 
> differences of class and race.
>
> On the opposite end of the political spectrum, the conservative claim 
> that most youth enlist due to patriotism and the desire to "serve 
> one's country" is equally misleading. The Pentagon's own surveys show 
> that something vague and abstract called "duty to country" motivates 
> only a portion of enlistees. But the vast majority of young people 
> wind up in the military for different reasons, ranging from economic 
> pressure to the desire to escape a dead-end situation at home to the 
> promise of citizenship.
>
> WHEN MANDATORY MILITARY service ended in 1973, the volunteer military 
> was born. By the early 1980s, the term "poverty draft" had gained 
> currency to connote the belief that the enlisted ranks of the military 
> were made up of young people with limited economic opportunities.
>
> Today, military recruiters react angrily to the term "poverty draft." 
> They parse terms in order to argue that "the poor" are not good 
> recruiting material because they lack the necessary education. Any 
> inference that those currently serving do so because they have few 
> other options is met with a sharp rebuke, as Sen. John Kerry learned 
> last November when he seemed to tell a group of college students they 
> could either work hard in school or "get stuck in Iraq."
>
> President Bush led the bipartisan charge against Kerry: "The men and 
> women who serve in our all-volunteer armed forces are plenty smart and 
> are serving because they are patriots—and Sen. Kerry owes them an 
> apology."
>
> In reality, Kerry's "botched joke"—Kerry said he was talking about 
> President Bush and not the troops—contained a kernel of truth. It is 
> not so much that one either studies hard or winds up in Iraq but 
> rather that many U.S. troops enlist because access to higher education 
> is closed off to them. Although they may be "plenty smart," financial 
> hardship drives many to view the military's promise of money for 
> college as their only hope to study beyond high school.
>
> Recruiters may not explicitly target "the poor," but there is mounting 
> evidence that they target those whose career options are severely 
> limited. According to a 2007 Associated Press analysis, "nearly 
> three-fourths of [U.S. troops] killed in Iraq came from towns where 
> the per capita income was below the national average. More than half 
> came from towns where the percentage of people living in poverty 
> topped the national average."
>
> It perhaps should come as no surprise that the Army GED Plus 
> Enlistment Program, in which applicants without high school diplomas 
> are allowed to enlist while they complete a high school equivalency 
> certificate, is focused on inner-city areas.
>
> When working-class youth make it to their local community college, 
> they often encounter military recruiters working hard to discourage 
> them. "You're not going anywhere here," recruiters say. "This place is 
> a dead end. I can offer you more." Pentagon-sponsored studies—such as 
> the RAND Corporation's "Recruiting Youth in the College Market: 
> Current Practices and Future Policy Options"—speak openly about 
> college as the recruiter's number one competitor for the youth market.
>
> Add in race as a supplemental factor for how class determines the 
> propensity to enlist and you begin to understand why communities of 
> color believe military recruiters disproportionately target their 
> children. Recruiters swear they don't target by race. But the millions 
> of Pentagon dollars spent on special recruiting campaigns for Latino 
> and African-American youth contradicts their claim.
>
> According to an Army Web site, the goal of the "Hispanic H2 Tour" was 
> to "Build confidence, trust, and preference of the Army within the 
> Hispanic community." The "Takin' it to the Streets Tour" was designed 
> to accelerate recruitment in the African-American community where 
> recruiters are particularly hard-pressed and faced with declining 
> interest in the military as a career. In short, the nexus between 
> class, race, and the "volunteer armed forces" is an unavoidable fact.
>
> NOT ALL RECRUITS, of course, are driven by financial need. In working- 
> class communities of every color, there are often long-standing 
> traditions of military service and links between service and 
> privileged forms of masculinity. For communities often marked as 
> "foreign," such as Latinos and Asians, there is pressure to serve in 
> order to prove that one is "American." For recent immigrants, there is 
> the lure of gaining legal resident status or citizenship.
>
> Economic pressure, however, is an undeniable motivation—yet to assert 
> that fact in public often leads to confrontations with conservatives 
> who ask, "How dare you question our troops' patriotism?" But any 
> simplistic understanding of "patriotism" does not begin to capture the 
> myriad of subjective motivations that often coexist alongside economic 
> motives. Altruism—or as youth often put it, "I want to make a 
> difference"—is also a major reason a significant number of people 
> enlist.
>
> It is a terrible irony that contemporary American society provides 
> working-class youth with few other outlets besides the military for 
> their desire for agency, personal empowerment, and social commitment. 
> It is especially tragic whenever U.S. foreign policy turns away from 
> national defense and back toward the imperial tradition of military 
> adventurism, as it did in Vietnam and Iraq. Within a worldview of 
> pre-emptive war and wars of choice, the altruism and good intentions 
> of young people become one more sentiment to be manipulated and 
> exploited in order to further the aims of a small group of 
> policymakers.
>
> In this scenario, the desire to "make a difference," once inserted 
> into the military apparatus, means young Americans may have to kill 
> innocent people or become brutalized by the realities of combat. Take 
> the tragic example of Sgt. Paul Cortez, who graduated in 2000 from 
> Central High School in the working-class town of Barstow, Calif., 
> joined the Army, and was sent to Iraq. On March 12, 2006, he 
> participated in the gang rape of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and the 
> murder of her and her entire family.
>
> When asked about Cortez, a classmate said: "He would never do 
> something like that. He would never hurt a female. He would never hit 
> one or even raise his hand to one. Fighting for his country is one 
> thing, but not when it comes to raping and murdering. That's not him." 
> Let us accept the claim that "that's not him." Nevertheless, because 
> of a series of unspeakable and unpardonable events within the context 
> of an illegal and immoral war, "that" is what he became. On February 
> 21, 2007, Cortez pled guilty to the rape and four counts of felony 
> murder. He was convicted a few days later, sentenced to life in prison 
> and a lifetime in his own personal hell.
>
> As ex-Marine Martin Smith wrote recently in Counterpunch: "It speaks 
> volumes that in order for young working-class men and women to gain 
> self-confidence or self-worth, they seek to join an institution that 
> trains them how to destroy, maim, and kill. The desire to become a 
> Marine—as a journey to one's manhood or as a path to 
> self-improvement—is a stinging indictment of the pathology of our 
> class-ridden world." Like a large mammal insensitive to its 
> offspring's needs and whereabouts, America is rolling over on the 
> aspirations of its children and crushing them in the process.
>
> Let us return now to our "friend" who thinks young people enlist so 
> that they can legally kill and torture other human beings. According 
> to this theory, Sgt. Cortez was a rapist before he enlisted. And so 
> are others who enlist.
>
> If young people enlist because of a predisposition to "kill and 
> torture," why do so many U.S. troops crack under the pressure of 
> combat and its aftershocks? Why are at least one in eight of all Iraq 
> veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress, according to a 2004 
> Pentagon study published in the New England Journal of Medicine? Dr. 
> Matthew J. Friedman, executive director of the Department of Veterans 
> Affairs' National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, stated 
> that the study's results were far too conservative. As the war in Iraq 
> drags on, many more young veterans will experience some debilitating 
> form of PTSD.
>
> And if the majority of soldiers and Marines enjoy killing, why have so 
> many filed for conscientious objector (CO) status? Hundreds of troops 
> serving in Iraq and Afghanistan have either begun or completed the CO 
> process. According to Bill Galvin of the Center on Conscience and War: 
> "For some people, the training gets to them. From stabbing dummies, to 
> shouting 'Kill!' or 'Blood makes the grass grow!' But in the last year 
> or two, we've been hearing people talking about their experiences in 
> the war, or talking about the children they've witnessed being killed, 
> or the civilians that were murdered. Some of them are wrestling with 
> the guilt about people they may have killed or families they may have 
> ruined."
>
> Most people are not predisposed to kill, and so it should concern us 
> that our children are being increasingly militarized in their schools 
> and the culture as a whole. To take only one example: What does it 
> mean for a society to put young people from ages 8 to 18 in military 
> uniforms and call it "leadership training"? This is precisely what 
> each of the more than 300 units of the Young Marines program is doing 
> at a neighborhood school near you.
>
> From rural America to the urban cores of deindustrialized cities, a 
> military caste system is slowly taking shape. If recent history is any 
> indication, our politicians will use our military less for national 
> defense than for adventures premised on control of resources, 
> strategic advantage, and ideological fantasies. As in the final 
> decades of every declining empire, it's likely that many wars loom in 
> our future.
>
> Exactly who will have to fight and die in those wars will be 
> determined by economic class. In order to accomplish their goals, the 
> recruiters and politicians will exploit the hopes and dreams of mostly 
> well-intentioned youth from humble origins who are looking for a way 
> to contribute to a society that has lost its moral compass. As they 
> did in Vietnam and again in Iraq, young women and men will serve their 
> country. But how well will their country have served them?
>

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