Hearts and Minds: Military Recruitment and the High School Battlefield

Abstract

IN HER BOOK Purple Hearts, the documentary photographer Nina Berman presents 40 photographs--two each of 20 U.S. veterans of the American war in Iraq--plus a couple of accompanying paragraphs of commentary from each vet in his or her own words. (1) Their comments cohere around their service, their sacrifice, their suffering. Purple Heart binds them together--this award is their common experience, this distinction is what embrace and what embraces them. This is what live with. Their views on war, on their time in arms, on where hope are headed with their lives, are various; their ways of making sense about the U.S. military mission, wildly divergent. Josh Olson, 24 years old, begins: We bent over backwards for these people, ended up screwing us over, stabbing us in the back. A lot of them, mean, they're going to have to be killed.... As Americans we've taken it upon ourselves to almost cure the world's problems guess, give everybody else a chance. guess that's how we're good-hearted.... He's missing his right leg now and was presented with his Purple Heart at Walter Reed Military Hospital by President Bush himself. He feels it all--pride, anger, loss. Jermaine Lewis, 23, describes growing up in a Chicago neighborhood where has always been around. He describes training as a place where they break you down and then try to build you up. To him, the reasons for going to war were bogus, we were right to go in vets are all young, and several recall deciding to enlist when were much younger still, more innocent, more vulnerable, feeling somehow invincible. Jermaine Lewis says: I've been dealing with the military since was a sophomore in high school. They came to the school like six times a year, all military branches. They had a recruiting station like a block from our high school. It was just right Tyson Johnson III, 22, wanted to get away from the poverty and death he saw all around him. His life was going nowhere, he thought, and so he signed on: And here am, back here ... don't know where it's going to end up. Joseph Mosner enrolled when he was 19. There was nothing out there, he writes. There was no good jobs so figured this would have been a good thing. Frederick Allen thought going to war would be jumping out of planes. He joined up when recruiters came to his high school. I thought it would be fun. Adam Zaremba, 20, also enlisted while still in high school: The recruiter called the house, he was actually looking for my brother and he happened to get me. think it was because didn't want to do homework for a while, and then don't know, you get to wear a cool uniform. It just went on from there. still don't even understand a lot about the Army. Purple Heart seemed like a good thing from a distance, but then when it happens you realize that you have to do something, or something has to happen to you in order to get it. RECRUITING HIGH-SCHOOLERS Military recruiting in high schools has been a mainstay of the so-called all-volunteer armed forces from the start. High school kids are at an age when being a member of an identifiable group with a grand mission and a shared spirit--and never underestimate a distinctive uniform--is of exaggerated importance, something gang recruiters in big cities also note with interest and exploit with skill. Kathy Dobie, quoting a military historian, notes that basic training has been essentially the same in every army in every age, because it works with the same raw material that's always been there in teenage boys: a fair amount of aggression, a strong tendency to hang around in groups, and an absolute desperate desire to fit in. (2) Being cool and going along with the crowd are big things. Add the need to prove oneself to be a macho, strong, tough, capable person, combined with an unrealistic calculus of vulnerability and a constricted sense of options specifically in poor and working-class communities--all of this creates the toxic mix in a young person's head that can be a military recruiter's dream. …