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Criminal Facilitation: Helping the Military Recruit Our Students

By Ben Chitty

As teachers and staff in colleges and high schools, we are required to make our students available to military recruiters. This is the law.

Soldiers say that IRAQ has come to mean "I Really Am Quitting." As the armed forces scramble to replenish their ranks depleted by the occupation of Iraq, the law is invoked more and more often—likewise, criticism and resistance. At the City University of New York, a third student of which was killed in Iraq this January, students who picketed and protested National Guard recruiters on the City College campus this March were detained, and then charged with felony assault and summarily suspended from school.

But our colleges are not exactly swarming with eager employers. Many students need more financial help than we can give them. Some could perhaps profit from a little practice in discipline to get the maximum benefit from their college educations. Many would argue that military service is a career open to merit, an honorable profession, even a patriotic duty. So what's wrong with letting them onto college campuses and into high schools to recruit our students?

Plenty.

It's not just that the work is dangerous—every combat video game and combat comic book makes that clear. It's that the dangers aren't limited to hostile fire. Meningitis breaks out in boot camps; anthrax inoculations cause debilitating reactions; weapons and equipment turn toxic. Already one out of every three veterans of the first Gulf War is rated disabled, mostly from "friendly fire" or exposure to some combination of experimental vaccines, carelessly dispersed chemical agents, and particulate residues of depleted-uranium armaments.

It's not just that the military life is hard—though combat does change you, and not always for the better. It's that so many military hardships have little relation to combat. One out of every three female veterans reports having been harassed, abused or raped by fellow soldiers. Domestic violence is twice as common in military families. Most military commands condone contempt for homosexuals as a contribution to "unit cohesion," at the cost of the careers—and sometimes the lives—of soldiers rumored to be lesbian or gay.

It's not just that injury can be severe—though soldiers now survive multiple amputations, and head and spine injuries that used to be invariably fatal. It's that so many injuries could have been avoided or eased. Our government sends our soldiers into combat without proper equipment, then reneges on its obligation to care for them when they come home. Post-traumatic stress can be a lifelong condition, and can also afflict the soldier's family and friends. As very severely disabled veterans begin to crowd VA facilities, the government moves to limit (and in effect reduce) public funding of the VA, while charging elderly veterans more for their prescription drugs.

It's not just that war and killing are bad—though combat is certainly cruel, and the occupation of hostile territory indoctrinates soldiers in casual brutality. It's that the people who design the policies of brutality leave it to the soldiers on the ground to reap the consequences of remorse or revenge. The same officials who excuse abuse and torture in the misbegotten expectation of intelligence and vengeance let the lower ranks be scapegoated if and when such crimes come to light.

Even if we could fix everything that's wrong with the military, make our government treat our soldiers with respect, and honor our obligations to those sent on our behalf into harm's way, we still might not want our colleges and high schools to sponsor the military recruitment of our students. Whatever we call military manpower policy, the fact is that our military depends on economic conscription to fill its ranks. Our students already fit the target profile: as we raise tuition and reduce or defer financial aid, we move our students right onto the bull's-eye.

It's not just that young people sometimes seem to hear only what they want to hear about military life. It's that military recruiters really are in sales. In their zeal to complete the mission, sometimes they fail to make completely certain that their recruits thoroughly understand how easily college benefits can be lost, what kinds of training and duty assignments are likely, and how few rights they will have. Sometimes they lie.

Of course our students have the right to explore any career options. And if they take and then quit jobs at Burger King or the Bank of New York, they might lose some pay. But when they try to quit the military, they go to prison.

Military recruiters are easy enough to find, but under these conditions, "questionable" hardly begins to describe school sponsorship of military recruitment. "Criminal facilitation" would be closer to the mark.