Home > "The Military," He Said, "Is A Bunch Of Lies."
"The Military," He Said, "Is A Bunch Of Lies."
by Open-Publishing - Wednesday 16 March 20051 comment
AWOL and desertion are chronic problems; all any Army can
hope for is to keep them at manageable levels, not to lose soldiers needlessly. The Army admits that youth, lack of a high-school diploma, coming from "broken homes," and having early scrapes with the law make a soldier only "relatively more likely" to go AWOL or to desert. In fact, the Army is careful to note, "the vast majority of soldiers who fit this profile are not going to desert."
Yet the Army used that very same profile to try to identify
potential deserters and give them extra attention-and the desertion rate, mysteriously, rose.
It doesn’t take a huge leap of the imagination to suppose
that high-school dropouts and juvenile delinquents might have joined the military for a fresh start, a chance to succeed at something, and when they were instead tagged as potential failures and trouble-makers, they took off.
None of the Army data comes close to capturing the hearts
and minds of soldiers.
What is any given person looking for when he or she joins
the Army? Direction in life? A chance to belong to something? Father
figures? An adventure with buddies or a test of manhood? Their parents’
approval?
And when they entered the military, what did they find?
That they’d been given false promises by the recruiter? That the people they
turned to for help threatened them or made idiotic speeches about
Bible-carrying Iraqis? No help for depression?
Or a lack of armor and ammunition on the battlefield?
According to the Army’s own study, before soldiers went AWOL,
more than half of them sought help within the military-they spoke to their COs,
to military chaplains, military shrinks. Apparently, to little avail.
The Army has examined the soldier, but not itself.
It is tantamount to trying to understand the problem of
teenage runaways without ever asking about their home life.
Failure to adapt, issues with chain of command there’s no
sense that the military culture and environment, the commanders, themselves,
also play a part in driving soldiers out and away.
The Georgia Marine who thought he would be stationed in
Kentucky made it all the way to his MOS training at Fort Leonard Wood,
Missouri, before he took off. There, Jarred tried to get a foot injury treated
and was told to take Tylenol.
His pay was less than the recruiter had promised him, and he even seemed to be missing money from what he was paid. When he complained to his CO, he was told to shut up and mind his
own business. Then he learned that his company was going to be deployed to
Fallujah. "I ain’t goin’ to war," he told his sister flatly.
His sister kept telling Jarred to go talk to somebody.
"Aint anybody to talk to," Jarred told her. "Ain’t nobody here
interested."
When he went home to Georgia on leave last March, he
didn’t return to his base. He made his mother and sister take down from the
walls all their Marine paraphernalia, stripped the bumper stickers from their
trucks, and refused to watch any movies or TV shows that featured the
military.
"The military," he said, "is a bunch of lies."
1mar2005 By KATHY DOBIE / Harper’s Magazine v.310, n.1858. [Excerpt]
Kathy Dobie is the author of The Only Girl in the Car, which originated as a memoir in this magazine. She lives in Brooklyn.
http://www.militaryproject.org/arti...
Forum posts
17 March 2005, 03:01
What is the matter with these people? How is it that they can’t figure out that volunteering to go kill "sand-niggers" or "camel-jockeys" in foreign lands will just bring about guilt, misery, and bad karma in their own lives? How is it that their families do not try to keep them from going there to do terrible things for a corrupt government controlled by the oil companies and the weapons manufacturers? Maybe the kid(s) are too immature to know better, but it is criminal that their families would stand by and let them make these mistakes that will ruin their lives forever.