10 Excellent Reasons Not to Join the Military

By Elizabeth Weill-greenberg

So you're walking out of school and parked at the gate is a new, bright red Ford Mustang with a hulk of a man in the front seat. He's sporting a razor cut and wraparound shades. Before you can pass he's out of the car and blocking your path. "Mind if I take a minute"—he has you by the arm now—"to tell you about the great life in today's Army and why you should seriously think about signing up?"

The armed forces are having a tough time attracting new recruits lately, in no small part due to the mess in Iraq. Young people are getting wise to the many excellent reasons not to join the U.S. Military, and this handy book brings them all together, combining accessible writing with hard facts and devastating personal testimony. Contributors with firsthand experience point out the dangers facing soldiers, describe the tricks used by recruiters, and emphasize that there really are other options, even in a sluggish economy. It's essential reading for anyone thinking of signing up.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The New Press
• Release date: Apr 18, 2006
• ISBN: 9781595586759

Book preview

Introduction

Cindy Sheehan

I always taught my four children from the time they were toddlers to use their words to solve conflicts.

I would tell them over and over that hitting, kicking, pinching, biting, scratching, hair pulling, and so forth were no way to solve problems. Starting when they were small, if my kids didn’t know the right words to say to forestall violence, they would come to me and we would strategize about what to say and what to do, whether the conflicts were with siblings, classmates, teachers, or bosses.

Why can’t countries learn to do this? Why, when the United States has a State Department devoted to diplomacy, are violence and killing so very often the first solution to problems real or imagined (as in the case of most wars)? Why, in a so-called civilized society, is the War Department—as the Department of Defense used to be called—the most highly funded and influential arm of our government?

Our family has always been very peaceful and nonviolent. The children rarely got spanked. We avoided all violence early in their lives. I firmly believe that one cannot teach peace by being violent. Imagine our family’s surprise when our oldest child, Casey, came home and announced that he had enlisted in the Army. We were devastated.

Casey was in his third year of college when an Army recruiter lied to him, promising the sun and moon in order to get him to sign the enlistment contract. But the recruiter delivered none of his promises—only an early grave. We didn’t know then that enlistment contracts are only binding on the recruit and not the government.

That is why this book is so important. What our family didn’t know before Casey enlisted could fill a bookshelf. If we had known then what we know now, Casey never would have done what he thought was his duty as an American: to serve his country in a brave and noble way. We would have found other ways for him to serve his community.

In his seminal and very important work, War is a Racket, originally published in 1935, General Smedley D. Butler wrote: War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

Casey was killed in action in Iraq on April 4, 2004. His recruiter had promised him that even if there were a war, Casey would never see combat. The one thing that our family didn’t reckon on was that there would be a war. But, there had to be a war. War is inevitable in our society. Every decade or two, America has to be at war with someone.

Until the Vietnam conflict, we had always waged war against a clearly defined enemy with clearly defined leaders, uniforms, and boundaries. Until the Korean conflict, Congress had always declared war, as is their constitutional duty. Since then, not a single war has been formally declared by Congress.

In the 1950s, the war machine, with its vast opportunities for profits and power, chose the Communists to be our enemy and this led to our involvement in the Vietnam conflict. In the 1980s, Communism crumbled and the war machine needed a new enemy: terrorism.

The current invasion and occupation of Iraq is based on phony information. Our leaders are keeping our country terminally and falsely afraid of terrorism to foster its meddling in the Middle East.

We need to force our government to bring our troops home from Iraq now before the reckless and greedy leaders choose to invade Iran or Syria. We need to ensure that true peace and diplomacy are used in the future, and that we look back in history on immoral and illegal wars as horrors of an inhumane era.

We the people, especially the moms, of America need to wake up and realize that wars are seldom fought to preserve our freedom and democracy, but rather to make rich people richer and powerful people even more powerful.

We need to stop allowing the war machine to eat our children and spit out money.

We need to realize that violence and killing are rarely, if ever, solutions to any problems. We need to demand that our leaders use their words to solve problems. We need to demand that other nations use their words, too.

We need to wake up and realize that our world is growing smaller every day, that we are all part of the human race, and that we don’t have to run it to win.

We need to run to our humanity and away from war.

Let this book be the beginning of the end of the military industrial complex. Our very survival on this planet demands it.

Enjoy the book and pass it on to all your friends.

Peace now,

Cindy Sheehan

Co-founder of Gold Star Families for Peace

Mother of four amazing children

WHAT HAPPENS DURING DEPLOYMENT?

Deployment is when an Active

Duty or Army Reserve unit is

sent to a specific area of

operations, usually on foreign

soil—most recently in

Afghanistan, Kuwait, and Iraq.

Yet a common misperception

is that a deployed unit is

automatically sent to a war zone.

Oftentimes, units are deployed

to non-combat regions, including

Hawaii, Italy, Germany, and

South Korea. Or they are utilized

for humanitarian efforts, such as

helping civilians rebuild their

lives after a natural disaster. ...

—From the For Parents section of the Go Army Web site, http://www.goarmy.com/for_parents/deployment.jsp

1

You may be killed

Cindy Sheehan

Cindy Sheehan’s son, Casey, was killed in Iraq on April 4, 2004. Since his death Cindy has traveled the country speaking out against the war and the Bush administration. She co-founded Gold Star Families for Peace, an organization of antiwar military family members whose loved ones were killed in Iraq.

In August 2005 she gained international attention when she set up Camp Casey outside George Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, and demanded to meet with him and know for what noble cause her son was murdered. At the time of this writing, she is still waiting for an answer.

You’re looking at the newest recruit in the U.S. Army, Casey proudly announced to his dad and me on that warm May evening in the year 2000.

His dad and I were devastated. We had no idea he was going down to the MEPS (Military Entrance Processing Station) to enlist that day. He was gone for hours and hours. I tried to call him on his cell phone all day, but I got no response.

Seeing that I was so upset by his news that he thought was good, Casey tried to reassure me by saying: Don’t worry mom, Sergeant ‘So and So’ told me to tell you not to worry. He said that I scored so high on the ASVAB [Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, the military assessment test] that even if there was a war, I would never see combat. I will only be going in a support role.

Well, long story short, Casey, a Humvee mechanic, was