From Draft NOtices, April - June 2006
— Mernie Aste
Whales and other sea mammals are the “collateral damage” of the U.S. Navy’s use of low-frequency active sonar.
The struggle to keep the Navy from wreaking havoc on ocean mammals continues. As recently as January 30, 2006, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has written a formal comment in response to the Navy’s draft environmental statement proposing a 500-square nautical mile range to be used for sonar testing about 40 miles east of North Carolina. The missive warns that the Navy significantly underestimated the danger posed to whales and other marine mammals and used flawed science to reach its conclusions in a report on the use of the site for training sailors to detect foreign submarines that come near U.S. shores. In its own statement, even the Navy concluded that the species most likely to be found in this site off North Carolina include fin, humpback and right whales, all of which are endangered, as well as sperm, pygmy and beaked whales, according to PilotOnline.com.
Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft (COMD)
From Draft NOtices, April - June 2006
— Susan Massey
A teacher’s response to the military in her school.
At the end of the last semester, the principal of the small rural high school where I teach Spanish and ELD announced that there would be a change in the exam schedule. (ELD — English Language Development — is what used to be English as a Second Language.) The semester usually ends by giving exams on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. We go back the following Monday to start the new semester. However, this year the principal had run into someone from the Navy SEALs who had offered to help us celebrate the end of the semester by bringing a flight simulator to our campus. The only day they could come was on Thursday. Easy solution. Finals were to be moved up to Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, and on Thursday the day would revolve around getting all the students onto the simulator, 20 at a time. Friday — well, Friday was just up in the air.
I was horrified. Our school has mostly low-income students and we are constantly visited by military recruiters. Last year we had a special program by the Blue Angels, who have their winter home 15 miles down the freeway from us. The idea that our school was welcoming recruiters so that they could bring in a fighter plane and teach our students that going to war was like going to Disneyland was outrageous. I railed on this topic to my colleagues, but only one shared my feelings. The principal was so excited about the arrangements she had made that I decided objecting would be futile.
From Draft NOtices, April - June 2006
— Michelle Gutiérrez
I recently viewed British director Sam Mendes’s 2005 film, Jarhead. Based on former Marine Anthony Swofford’s Gulf War memoir, the film depicts the experiences of United States soldiers. The film’s subject matter has a limited scope, but among post-Vietnam war movies (such as The Three Kings in 1999 and Black Hawk Down in 2001), Jarhead presents the most stinging critique of the effects of U.S. military culture on soldiers. By exposing the disillusionment of military life, soldiers’ lack of agency, and rampant homophobia and misogyny, Jarhead is the first film to lay bare the destructiveness of military culture since Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket in 1987. However, the filmmakers’ stance on the Gulf War and many problematic aspects of military training are portrayed ambiguously.
Mendes centers the film primarily on soldiers’ psychological wellbeing. The film begins and ends on this theme with a voiceover from Swofford stating, “A man fires a rifle for many years and he goes to war, and afterward he turns in the rifle to the armory and he believes he is finished with the rifle. But no matter what else he might do with his hands -- love a woman, build a house, change his son’s diaper -- his hands remember the rifle.” By encapsulating the film with this statement, Mendes communicates not only the long-lasting impact military training and war have on soldiers’ lives, but also the fact that soldiers are “regular” men who have jobs, wives, and children. Clearly, the constant harassment, teasing, and abuse by sergeants has a much more striking effect with this backdrop.
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:
