From Draft NOtices, October-December 2006
Directed and produced by Patricia Foulkrod, distributed by Focus Features.
—Mernie Aste
I teach courses about multicultural education at a university in Southern California. My class prepares teachers to instruct children from a wide variety of backgrounds, including those whose parents are in the Marines and Navy, refugees from war-torn areas, privileged groups, and immigrants. Some of their parents are between military deployments; some are disabled or deceased as a result of war. (An estimated 1,600 U.S. children have lost a parent to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.) Some of the school-aged children themselves have memories of bombing, hacking, hiding, escaping, smuggling, and surviving. I do my best to prepare student teachers for the cultural variations and cognitive challenges that kindergarteners through twelfth-graders bring to Southern California classrooms.
Up to now my focus has been on ethnic and cultural realities, including class, disability, and LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, questioning). After screening the film “The Ground Truth,” I plan to add military culture and its impact on school-aged children and their families.
The film tracks the experiences of men and women who joined the military for a variety of reasons, including patriotism, tradition, to “be a man,” healthcare benefits, and/or lack of other employment or education opportunities. The film follows them through induction, basic training, deployment, injury, discharge and veteran status. The bait-and-switch tactics of military recruiters are emphasized. One individual in the film commented, “They don’t tell you the consequences,” citing the example of “seeing your friends killed.” While the recruiters emphasize the career opportunities of the military, one recruit says, “The purpose [of the training] is to kill. The purpose is to take life.” Another states that the military creates “a sustained state of mind to take a life when you are not enraged as a conditioned response.”
Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft (COMD)
From Draft NOtices, July-September 2006
— Callie Wight
Sara Rich wore her thick, remarkably red hair in a long braid down her back for decades. Just a few days ago she cut it all off. A luxurious twelve-inch braid will now be donated to Locks of Love. When I interviewed Sara and asked why she did it, she said, “For my daughter, Suzanne.”
Sara Rich is the mother of Suzanne Swift, a 21-year-old Army specialist who served with the 66th Military Police Company in Iraq. She had already served one tour, driving a Humvee for combat patrols in Karbala. She had returned to Fort Lewis, Washington, for what the military refers to as “stabilization time”, a period that is supposed to be 18 months long. But she didn’t make that 18 months. She went AWOL last year.
What is it that drove Suzanne Swift to refuse to return to the battle zones of Iraq for a second tour? Why did her mother, Sara Rich, feel compelled to shear herself of her remarkable hair in order to do battle for her daughter?
From Draft NOtices, July-September 2006
— Pat Elder
The pressure is on. You’ve got a lot of things you want to do in your life and all too often, you’re going to have to pass a test to get what you want.
High school students across the country are greeted with this message when they log on to the March2Success.com Web site hosted by the U.S. Army. March2Success, a popular, Web-based, 30-hour course designed by Educational Options, The Princeton Review, and Kaplan, Inc., is ostensibly a program that provides training in test-taking strategies and problem-solving skills and teaches students how to improve their math and English knowledge.
The program, however, is actually a thinly veiled military recruiting tool. Like the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) and the Junior Reserve Officer's Training Corps (JROTC), two widely prevalent programs in the nation's high schools, March2Success is about recruiting for the armed forces.
The Army freely admits there are several advantages to providing this online service to students. First, it drives traffic to the Army’s recruiting Web site, www.goarmy.com, and generates leads for recruiters to pursue. Students are prompted to indicate if they want to be contacted by a recruiter; Army graphics and propaganda are omnipresent. March2Success offers a state-of-the-art product to schools and students who rarely have access to free online instruction. The program helps to strengthen the relationship between Army recruiters and school staff. After all, school "penetration" and "ownership" are cited in military manuals as tasks for all school-based recruiters.
Ninth CIRCUIT COURT RULING: CONFRONTING MILITARISM BY USING EQUAL ACCESS TO HIGH SCHOOLS
When the military comes to your local high school, you have a legal right to give students an opposing view. This has been the position taken by federal district courts in Florida, Pennsylvania and Illinois and two federal appellate courts. The most broadly-worded decision came from a case that COMD took to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in the 1980s. Here is the background:
