She raised her morale by springing into action:

“Ten days ago my family went to a Harkin Theater in Moreno Valley, CA. March Air Reserve Base is a big part of the economy of this small town in Riverside County. I was outraged when I saw a video game from goarmy.com in the arcade. Our four person, three generation chapter wrote letters to Harkin’s corporate office. I received a call within hours, but wanted a written answer to why our tax dollars were being used for a recruiting tool in a private establishment. Long story short, the game has been replaced with “Police Trainer.” Personally objectionable? Yes! Better than a recruiting tool for the Army? Absolutely!”

Corla adds: “This is a message for all those tiny PINK chapters who are frustrated with a lack of participants which hinders our ability to make a big splash. Sometimes we become discouraged because we feel we are not making a dent in the BIG picture.” True of many small groups of dedicated folks working to defend young people’s freedom from the recruitment hard sell now permeating U.S. culture.

With school about to start up again in most parts of the country, it’s the season of a million small dents. Who knows whether the student a counter-recruiter talks to or shares some literature with will enlist? Education is an open ended endeavor with few immediate results. One conversation or phone call or letter often has a ripple effect. Who knows — a student may enlist anyway, and then become like “Skippy” and “Robert,” effective resisters from within the military.

At a high school graduation in May ’08, an Army National Guard recruiter delivered a five minute stump speech for the “war on terror” (a phrase he used twice) while at the podium to present awards to two graduates. This was an unprecedented use of that forum to deliver a political message, and the wording of his remarks matched that of the “award” presented to the students. He described in detail how one recruit’s “eyes lit up” when shown a Humvee mounted with an gun.

Protests to the school administrator resulted in a letter to the recruiter’s commanding officer. It warned that school events were not be used as a venue for political speeches, and asked for advance copies of any remarks to be made at graduation events. Recruiters for other branches of the military similarly put on notice. No repeat occurred at graduation ’09.

Media tools can be super useful for communicating to high school students that killing people is not a good career path.

Arlington West is a project that remembers fallen soldiers with an interactive installation on beaches around the nation. The documentary film of the same name was created by Sally Marr and Peter Dudar. In June they took the “Arlington West Film” presentation to Verdugo Hills High School in Tujunga, California where teachers report “recruiters are all over the school, like sharks circling for chum.” Two students struggled for months to get a screening of the film for approximately 200 students. In each of the three showings, discussions revealed at least one student who had lost a family member or friend in Iraq or Afghanistan, and several who had first-hand knowledge of the effects of PTSD on returning vets and their families. “Arlington West” in DVD format and study materials for the classroom are available by request from the Arlington West website.

Dents, dents and more dents in the “war is glamorous” propaganda blitz by recruiters.

But the big picture is a lot more ominous. There still seems to be plenty of money to invite public educators to a thrill ride hosted by the Army in an area with traditionally low enlistment numbers despite a chronically low-income population.

California is among several states effecting draconian cuts to the public education budget. Online discussions exhaust the subject of tax cuts vs. tax increases without acknowledging the 54% for war federal budget elephant dominating the room. Class sizes will soar, faculty positions will be cut or left vacant, and programs will wither away. What is likely to rush in to fill the void?

Military themed schools! Arne Duncan championed these quite successfully in Chicago as superintendent of schools, and now he is Obama’s Secretary of Education. Read an account of his tenure in Chicago and the prospects for public education with Duncan at the helm here. Schools like this make JROTC programs look tame by comparison. More on those next week in NOBODY’S RECRUITS.

Kelly Dougherty of Iraq Veterans Against the War testifies in “Before You Enlist” (view the film online here): “When you’re a woman, specifically in a combat zone, not only do you have to be afraid of the supposed insurgents and the enemies and the Iraqis, but then you also come back to the base and then there you have to be fearful of your fellow soldiers.”

Several friends of hers were raped in the military. One brought charges and was subjected to a pre-trial hearing — aimed at discrediting her! Another was told by her officer that the charges “would be too hard to prove” and was advised to drop it.

The parents of 19 year-old LaVena Johnson were told their daughter committed suicide by gunshot to the head while on active duty in Iraq. They don’t buy it. They think she was raped and then shot by another soldier, and that the military officers in charge of investigating covered up the crime.

Another nugget from Kelly Dougherty to share with teen girls who hope a uniform and a paycheck will earn them some respect — at least, more respect than they’re getting growing up poor in America: “When you’re a woman in the military you’re either a bitch, a slut or a lesbian.”

There’s an implicit understanding that women are in the military to be sexually available to the men after hours. Not much different from growing up in a home or neighborhood with that culture in place.

But factors like strong female role models and the growth of athletic programs for girls that are comparable to those for boys have helped empower American girls to believe they deserve better. Advertising for the military floods youth-oriented programming like MTV with messages that a “job” in the military puts women in a strong position. The truth of life on a military base can be an effective counter to this myth. Note also that women face 2 to 3 times higher risk of domestic violence if their spouse is a combat veteran who suffers from PTSD.

Women make up about 15% of active duty military now, and recent Boston Globe article cited Veteran’s Administration statistics that female veterans are especially at risk of becoming homeless. The VA is being called upon to provide services for a completely new generation of vets with special needs: single mothers. Ironically, a key strategy for recruiting teen girls is presenting enlistment as a chance to serve their families by accessing a steady income and “job training” in the military.

The National Coalition for Homeless Veterans made this statement in testimony before a Senate subcommittee on March 4, 2009:  “Women veterans report serious trauma histories and episodes of physical harassment and/or sexual assault while in the military. The VA and homeless veteran service providers are also seeing increased numbers of female and male veterans with children seeking their assistance.”

Get the word out to young women being preyed upon by recruiters: military service is an unsafe option.

Military planners must have hoped that distancing the killers from the killed would help soldiers overcome the natural disinclination humans have for killing one another. Research after WWII indicated that, when the time came to pull the trigger, an astonishing number of soldiers just couldn’t bring themselves to do it. So much for “don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes.”

However, it now emerges that technicians operating remote drones suffer from PTSD, too, because the video imagery of their human targets is high resolution, and they can clearly see the people they are bombing. Another problem is that the highly trained pilots who are assigned to the job saw themselves as potential “Top Guns” who would be swooping around in real aircraft enjoying the thrill that comes with that. Sitting hunched over a screen wasn’t what the recruiter promised them when they were enlisting.

And recruiters are suffering from work related stress of their own. The Army investigated a rash of suicides among recruiters, and the investigation led to a stand-down day where recruiters were ordered to take a break from their regular duties and attend training on stress reduction. The study showed a major factor was pressure on recruiters, many of them vets of Iraq and Afghanistan, to lie and cheat in order to meet their quotas.

Solution? Computer technology to the rescue again! The Army Experience Center (AEC) is a multi-million dollar video game arcade located in Franklin Mills Mall in Philadelphia, an area with plenty of low-income youth to recruit. According to its website the AEC offers “SIMULATORS: Volunteer for a mission and become part of the action…take part in an authentic battle scenario with equipment modeled after genuine Army vehicles, aircraft and weapons.” (Black Hawk, HMMWV & Apache are the models shown.) In addition, the gaming arena houses “79 gaming stations, including 19 brand new Xbox 360 consoles…or just enjoy an afternoon as a virtual Soldier.”

Gamers can capture a photo of their simulator experience, then retrieve the photo from the AEC website later, if they are at least age 13 and register with the AEC. Community groups can reserve the Tactical Operations Center for their meetings in order to utilize its high tech presentation and communication software. A community group of CODEPINK members and others shut down the AEC earlier this year and continues to work for its closure on the grounds that recruiting that targets children is wrong.

The Army says the AEC was designed to “…shatter outdated stereotypes and start new career conversations.” It also appears to be designed to capitalize on video game addicted American teenagers, many of whom have trouble earning high school diplomas. The AEC can help with that, too. Phase 4 Learning, billed as “a non- traditional approach to earning a high school diploma and preparing for the future,” shows teenagers in front of — guess what — computer monitors. Other photos of the center show teens milling around, with captions explaining that they are waiting to use the simulators.

Using computers to recruit is a way around problems identified by vet Danny White of Martinez, CA: “As a former Army recruiter, I can say that most servicepeople would prefer not to go to schools but are compelled to comply by their chain of command. Most recruiters would not be in recruiting at all if they had a choice. The majority are selected to serve and have no practical way to avoid the duty.”

International law forbids the recruitment of those under the age of 15, while the 1989 UN Child Convention defines a minor as under 18.

Into that gap fall a million advertisements delivered by mass media. Plus several thousand pencils, posters and textbook covers provided “free” of charge at school. Now add a high pressure salesman who has a teen’s cell number — because he bought her the phone.

A Marine recruiter in California was arrested in May on charges he used a 14 year-old girl to entice teenage male recruits.

Citizens in that state took it upon themselves last winter to impose controls at the municipal level. The towns of Arcata and Eureka passed ordinances limiting the ability of military recruiters to contact residents under age 18. But in December the U.S. Justice Deptarment took the towns to court, claiming illegal interference in the fed’s ability to hook kids into helping keep the world safe for democracy. No ruling as yet.

Citizens with elected school boards could impose similar controls, if they got riled up. “You will find that establishing trust and credibility with students, even seventh- and eighth-graders, can positively impact your high school and post-secondary school recruiting effort,” says the handbook for Army recruiters.

School board directors who argue that a weeks long Army National Guard program delivered during the school day by Guardsmen in combat fatigues is “not recruiting” obviously haven’t read the manual. They just love the “free” program, which was actually paid for twice: once as part of the $2+ billion annual military recruiting budget, and again as part of the school day, half funded by local property taxes, with a price tag of around $40,000. That’s the cost in a small rural school district in Maine i.e. one with a strong poverty draft pulling kids in already.

“I wonder what branch I’ll get sucked into.” That’s a younger brother talking.