Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft (COMD)

: Arlene Inouye; Articles Archive; 01 March 2004; Hits: 3664

Organizing to Demilitarize Schools in the Greater Los Angeles Area

From Draft NOtices, March - April, 2004

— Arlene Inouye

We gather near Martin Luther King Boulevard, at Manual Arts High School, one of the many heavily recruited inner city schools in the 750,000-student Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). A high school student reads her anti-war poetry and tells her audience she is friends with a murderer, a former JROTC drill team leader, who enlisted, went to Iraq, and killed five people. Vietnam Veteran Ron Kovic urges everyone to speak out against school militarization. A paraplegic, Kovic recounts how police clubbed and beat him and threw him from his wheelchair when he led the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Many others, such as Fernando Suarez del Solar, Rick Jahnkow, Jorge Mariscal, Blase Bonpane, and student leaders, add stories and personal experiences.

Fernando Suarez del Solar: Letters from Iraq

From Draft NOtices, January - February, 2004

— Jorge Mariscal

As he crossed the Iraqi desert during the 12-hour drive from Amman, Jordan, to Baghdad, Fernando Suarez meditated on his long journey from his youth in Mexico City to moving his young family to Tijuana and then across the border to San Diego, and now to his entering the lands of ancient Mesopotamia. As one of the more recognizable members of a fact-finding delegation organized by Global Exchange, Military Families Speak Out, and Veterans for Peace, Suarez was completing the next logical step in his role as a peace activist. He had come to the country where his son Jesús, a 20-year-old U.S. Marine, had died on March 27, 2003, after stepping on a U.S. cluster bomb.

Stepping Up Recruitment

From Draft NOtices, January - February, 2004

— Shelley Gutiérrez

Military recruitment has experienced a downturn since the mid-1980s with heightened difficulty following the 1990-1991 Gulf War. Since planning for peace is not on the current administration's agenda, the Department of Defense (DoD) must take up the issue of how to attract more combatants to carry out its current and future wars. It is absolutely vital that objectors to militarism understand the elaborate demographic analyses compiled by think tanks at the request of the DoD to prepare military recruiters for swaying youth enlistment decisions. Activists and others involved in the work of (re)educating youth on militarism must know which youth are being targeted and which selling points are being used so sufficient energy can be allocated to compiling literature, videos, and classroom presentations that effectively respond to recruiters.