10 Excellent Reasons not to Join the Military
Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg (ed)
The New Press, 2006
157 pages, $24 (pb)
Join the military, according to the recruitment ads, and you will have adventure, learn a trade, get an education and make great friends but, as John Cleese might tell the military recruiters, "whatever you do, don't mention the war".
Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg, the editor of 10 Excellent Reasons not to Join the Military, does mention the war (in Iraq and elsewhere), in fortuitous agreement with US Vice-President, Dick Cheney, who, in a fit of honesty, reportedly said "the reason we have a military is to be prepared to fight and win wars ... It's not a jobs program". Whilst Cheney thinks this is a good thing, the book's contributors don't, however, and they find many reasons why the military is bad for you.
You will be killed, probably in Iraq, like Cindy Sheehan's son, Casey, was after being lied to by the army recruiters about never being sent into a combat zone. After receiving her "Gold Star" as a bereaved military mother, "like it was some demented Girl Scout's Badge that I should be proud of", and setting up Gold Star Families for Peace and demanding of President George Bush to know "for what noble cause" her son was killed, she, like other grieving parents, will still be waiting for an answer.
You will kill and commit routine atrocities, most of which will pass "without fanfare or scandal", like Marine Sergeant Jimmy Massey did, ordered to shoot unarmed civilians at checkpoints and unarmed youth at demonstrations. You will be trained to kill without remorse because recognising the humanity of people whose country is under brutal, hair-trigger occupation makes for an ineffective killer. You will follow in the footsteps of those highly effective Nazis in inflicting "collective punishment" with weapons of indiscriminate destruction to teach recalcitrant civilians a lesson.
Your body and mind will be injured, often by your own side (from bombs tipped with radioactive depleted uranium). You will lose limbs, swathes of crisp-burnt skin, pieces of your brain, your sight and hearing, and your sanity — 16,000 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans are receiving post-traumatic stress disorder disability pensions, and the New England Journal of Medicine reports that one in six returning soldiers from Iraq experience mental-health problems. Then you will discover that, faced with life-long disability and trauma, the military doesn't care about you. There will be a long wait for care and a gruelling battle to get your health care entitlements. You are damaged stock. GI, after all, stands for Government Issue, and like other military hardware, you are disposable when your usefulness is over.
If you are female and/or gay and/or Black (or off-white) the racism, homophobia and sexual harassment of civilian society will follow you with larger footsteps. Sixty per cent of women who serve in the National Guard and Army Reserves are sexually harassed or assaulted. Only a quarter of them report it because the military brass, despite their insincere press conferences, regard the discriminatory abuse as standard procedure for breaking down your individuality, deadening your humanity and instilling unthinking obedience to authority as the highest virtue of the killing machine you are being trained to become. The point of basic training, including for white, heterosexual males, is to systematically break down the recruit emotionally, to desensitise and dehumanise, all the better to dehumanise whoever the latest designated enemy is.
You will find it really hard to get out of the military and to get out of Iraq. The Bush administration, with the recruitment disincentive of an unpopular and dangerous war in Iraq, has introduced de facto conscription through its "stop-loss policy", which allows the military to extend a soldier's discharge date indefinitely to meet a Presidentially-decreed "national emergency". One quarter of US military deaths in Iraq are National Guards and reservists, the so-called "weekend warriors" expecting to work at home on such things as disaster relief.
It is much easier to get in the military than out of it. Recruiters will lie to you — about the money, about how you will be deployed only to Hawaii, and, if you quibble about seeing combat in Iraq, about how safe it is there, reciting their flippant statistic that more US citizens meet violent deaths in a week in New York than in Iraq. Army recruiters are skilled exploiters of the desperate, targeting those who want to get out of a dead-end, low-paid job or have no job at all. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, a second flood of recruiters hit the Astrodome, preying on people who had lost everything. For those at the foot of the ladder, recruiters promise what society doesn't — a promising future, a fulfilling career, financial assistance for a college education. A third of recruits report that they enter the military to get money for college. Most never see any of it. The seductive promises evaporate at the touch of khaki.
Aimed at, written by and citing those who have been in the military or are potential food for the martial meat-grinder, this short yet valuable book argues that refusing to enlist is more than a career decision. It is a moral and political act for a safer, peaceable and more beautiful world.