Recruitment 

Recently, I was offered a choice between a National Guard T-shirt or a National Guard water bottle.   I chose the T-shirt.  

For the past several years, I've been attending Jazzercise© in the local Armory, and in all that time, no one had thought to give out free military merchandise to our class until now.   But lately it's become obvious that our armed forces are having a little problem with recruitment.   For the past several months, my instructor has been doing grapevines and kick-ball-changes in front of an enormous National Guard recruiting banner where the Jazzercise© logo used to be.  

The U.S. military is starting to reek of desperation.

And it's no wonder: these days, who in their right mind would fall for the time-honored recruiting ploys--the lure of dream jobs (which turn out to be bait and switch); the ad campaign that promises an education: "COLLEGE FIRST is for YOU!" screams the National Guard website.  

It's hard to imagine studying for finals while dodging mortar fire in Baghdad.  

For most of the 1980s, I taught military students overseas and heard a lot of stories of how they had come to enlist.   The most common explanation was that the guy (or, less frequently, girl) had been walking down the main street of his crappy, blink-and-you-miss-it town, drunk with a bunch of buddies, and had signed up on a dare.   When he sobered up, he discovered that all his hair had been shaved off and that he was crawling through mud with a bunch of strangers.

In a lot of these cases, though it sounds awful, it seemed to me that the military had been the best thing that could have happened to the poor kid.   I heard wrenching stories about the dying towns of America, of people who had grown up on farms that were now unable to make ends meet, family businesses that had failed, teenage romances that had soured, hair-raising child abuse, and even, occasionally, of murders.   I once had a military policeman write a great Process Analysis essay on how to commit a mugging, and it was obvious why he knew so much about it--but enlistment had allowed him to reinvent himself.

This, of course, was under Reagan, whom the troops loved because all his saber-rattling had such a salubrious impact on the military.   During my three years in Okinawa, which not coincidentally were the first three years of Reagan's term in office, the base I taught on acquired numerous amenities, including a Mexican restaurant.   America was in love with Rambo and other martial icons, yet we were not even at war!   (Unless you counted our stand-off with the Evil Empire.)   It was a perfect storm for the military: a huge build-up of resources, but no actual fighting.

Though a lot of my students had desk jobs, they seemed to me to be courageous people--and one had to have a bit of stamina to get through basic training, especially in the Marines--yet they showed a curious distaste for battle.   Many of my students told me that if anything untoward were to happen, they'd be out of there in a heartbeat.   I had students who were planning to leave the military upon graduation from college, and they referred to that as "getting out of the war."   But we all knew there was no war.

Of course, I had students who were devoted the military way of life.   During the days after we bombed Libya, one girl showed up in my class carrying an M-16.   In response to my request that she not bring the gun into class, she informed me that she was required to keep it with her at all times, and in the end, I was only able to persuade her not to point it directly at me.   This girl, I later found out, had been repeatedly abandoned throughout her childhood by parents who left her and her brother home alone for weeks at a time.   She told me that once during dinner, her mother had stabbed her brother in the leg with a fork.  

It was no wonder that she was inclined to carry a gun.   She also wore a holographic image of Jesus around her neck.

Maybe you can tell that much to my surprise--like many of us who grew up in the Vietnam era, I always had an aversion to anything military--I loved these students.   The majority of them were nice, well-meaning people, with good ethics.   They didn't plagiarize, they didn't make excuses for not having their homework, and if you asked them to drop and give you twenty irregular verbs, they'd do it.   The military, and living overseas, had opened up whole new worlds for them in which they had embraced other cultures, lifestyles, races--I remember a southern white guy and a northern black guy in my English 100 class laughing together about their memories of waking up in a panic during Basic Training because someone of another race was sleeping beside them.  

And they were interesting.   A Master Sergeant who baked great Irish soda bread.   A shy guy from an Indian reservation.   A big guy from Samoa.   Cute guys who wore earrings when they were off-duty.   A girl from Iowa who was one of twelve children and whose bedroom was a landing on the stairs.   A Wiccan woman, an aircraft mechanic, who told me that the Wiccan population of the armed forces was huge.   The military had gotten them out of whatever personal hell they'd been destined for and allowed them to blossom--sort of like the Peace Corps, but not.

Today, however, the armed forces no longer serve as a great jobs program for disadvantaged youth.   Recruiters are begging people to join, but their usual promises--lies, really--are not working.   I doubt that their gift idea (which taxpayers are financing) is having much effect; my free T-shirt didn't make me want to sign up--it just made me sad.   As I Jazzercised, I couldn't help thinking of all the people who had joined the National Guard thinking they were going to be, um, guarding their nation, but had ended up in a foreign war that they now can't escape: the "stop-loss" policy, a Bushesque euphemism for being cashiered, has been in effect since the war began to run into difficulties, and troops are being forced to remain in Iraq even when they are showing signs of mental illness.

And so I grapevine back and forth, staring at the huge blue recruitment banner and wondering who on earth would allow themselves to be recruited into this psychotic war, into an army whose commander-in-chief is himself showing signs of mental illness, if his threats to nuke Iran are any indication.   Who would be a soldier in this war-that-will-never-end, where we've imprisoned people without trial, tortured people, killed countless civilians, and basically destroyed the country we were ostensibly protecting?

Then it occurs to me that until we somehow remove Bush and his henchpeople from office and put an end to our nation's assault on the rest of the world, when you get right down to it, we are all recruits in it.

< http://www.1800goguard.com/home.html >

I vowed to leave the country if he won, and I did.

< http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A36979-2003Dec28?language=printer >

< http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060514/ap_on_re_us/military_suicides;
_ylt=AlNMfLRairxqM4SsSmVdomCs0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTA2Z2szazkxBHNlYwN0bQ-- >

See psychoanalyst Justin A. Frank's book, Bush on the Couch (Harper Collins, 2004).  

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