For a decade, Afghanistan vet Rory Fanning has been battling the desire to inflict pain on himself. Instead, he visits schools.
Early each New Year’s Day I head for Lake Michigan with a handful of friends. We look for a quiet stretch of what, only six months earlier, was warm Chicago beach. Then we trudge through knee-deep snow in bathing suits and boots, fighting wind gusts and hangovers. Sooner or later, we arrive where the snowpack meets the shore and boot through a thick crust of lake ice, yelling and swearing as we dive into near-freezing water.
The local Army recruiter is at my classroom door, and I wish he’d stop doing this. He needs to speak to a student in my English class at Jamaica High School.
When I explain that there are designated areas for him to speak with potential recruits, he apologizes. In fact, his etiquette is always spit-shined and gleaming, like something he’s learned at a seminar. He shows me his visitor’s pass, smoothed against a lapel, and apologizes once more. Never again, he says. It’s just that this time it’s important. Could he please have a word with Ernesto?
I like to believe I have the final say on these matters, but Ernesto is already out of his seat and calling the man “sir.” His slouch has been corrected and a hand keeps his jeans from dropping below the waist. They shake hands and a heartbreaking glow washes over his face. I shut the door while they confer in the hallway.
The Center on Conscience & War is a non-profit organization that advocates for the rights of conscience, opposes military conscription, and serves all conscientious objectors to war.
The Chicago chapter of Veterans for Peace is rolling out a billboard campaign Monday aimed at sparking a conversation about "the epidemic of militarization" in the city's schools..
The billboard campaign is also meant to "dispel the myth that militarization is about 'leadership' and 'patriotism,'" the group said in a statement.
Messages such as "Veterans Say - Military Out of CPS" and "Veterans Say - Education Not Militarization" will appear in rotating advertising displays of 38 digital billboards across Chicago neighborhoods through May, according to the Chicago VFP. The billboard messages will include the web address NoMilitary.org, which includes more information on the group's "Education Not Militarization" initiative.
According to the group, some 10,000 CPS students receive military training.
'We, the Chicago Chapter of Veterans for Peace, are pursuing a many-pronged campaign to bring Peace at Home, Peace Abroad by focusing on youth and the demilitarization of public education.'
When he got home from Iraq, Hart Viges began sorting through his boyhood toys, looking for some he could pass on to his new baby nephew. He found a stash of G.I. Joes - his old favorites - and the memories came flooding back.
For years DOD recruiting commanders have attempted to circumvent student privacy protections that are designed to shield minors from the wholesale transfer of student information from the nation's high schools to the Pentagon's Military Entrance Processing Command.
The DOD markets "career opportunities" through the schools, relying on a variety of methods, from Channel One, a 12-minute, highly commercialized, daily TV program that reaches as many as 5 million children a day, to various posters and announcements touting military service or other schemes like the Career Exploration Program. For the most part, however, these outreach efforts ultimately rely on the schools as a third party from which to extract student data. Until now, the DOD's quest for greater access to children has been somewhat stymied by pesky state and federal laws that regulate the flow of student information from the schools.
Imagine that you witnessed child sexual abuse while on the job, but your boss told you not to do anything to stop it. Now imagine that your boss was the United States government.
That’s exactly what happened to Lance Cpl. Gregory Buckley Jr.
In his last phone call, he told his father about what had been happening in Southern Afghanistan. He said he could hear Afghan police officers raping and sexually abusing boys brought to the base.
“At night we can hear them screaming, but we’re not allowed to do anything about it,” the Marine’s father, Gregory Buckley Sr., said his son told him before being shot and killed a the base.
WRI's new booklet, Countering Military Recruitment: Learning the lessons of counter-recruitment campaigns internationally, is out now. The booklet includes examples of campaigning against youth militarisation across different countries with the contribution of grassroot activists.