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thedrifter
07-07-05, 04:01 AM
Growing reluctance to sign up for war is about honesty
By Karin Ronnow, Chronicle columnist

A couple of weeks ago yet another military recruiter called for my daughter.

She's not here, I told him politely. But she's not interested anyway.

"Why?" he asked, pressing me.

"Look," I said, "I know you're just doing your job. But she's a pacifist. And she's going to college. Please stop calling."

And after that, the recruiters finally did stop calling and mailing her. But the question lingered in my mind: how did they get her name, age and stage in life and phone number in the first place?

The recruitment efforts started almost as soon as she entered high school. I figured it was a sign of the times. She was a freshman in September 2001. Shortly thereafter U.S. troops headed to Afghanistan. And a year later, the Bush administration launched the war on Iraq.

The war has been an expensive endeavor: nearly 1,750 Americans have been killed and more than 13,000 wounded; at least 12,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed; and more than $200 billion has been spent.

Now, with no end in sight, our all-volunteer military needs more soldiers. And it's not getting them fast enough.

"Today's conditions represent the most challenging conditions we have seen in recruiting in my 33 years in this uniform," Maj. Gen. Michael Rochelle of the U.S. Army Recruiting Command told MSNBC.

But the Pentagon is, it turns out, getting a little help from the No Child Left Behind Act, which requires public school districts give military recruiters the same kind of information they give colleges - students' names, addresses, phone numbers. If they don't, they lose federal funding. Parents can "opt out" with a written request to keep their children's information private, but most of them are unaware of this.

I didn't know about this requirement - or the privacy option - until recently. And I learned about it not through her school, but through newspaper stories documenting the growing number of parents who are angry that military recruiters are in the schools, enticing kids with everything from T-shirts to high-dollar signing bonuses.

I have no qualms about saying my daughter won't fight, nor does she. The Bush administration justified the war with rhetoric about weapons of mass destruction that didn't make sense at the time and has since been proven exaggerated, if not outright bogus.

And I'm not the only parent who feels this way. A Department of Defense survey in November found only 25 percent of parents would recommend military service to their children, down from 42 percent in August 2003.

"As the Army and Marines struggle to fill their ranks, parents have become boulders of opposition that recruiters cannot move," the New York Times reported in June. "Mothers and fathers around the country said they were terrified that their children would have to be killed - or kill - in a war that many see as unnecessary and without end."

But the kids, too, are less inclined.

"With the war in Iraq going badly and allegations of abuse by military personnel widespread, young men and women are increasingly deciding that there's no upside to a career choice in which the most important skills might be ducking bullets and dodging roadside bombs," Times columnist Bob Herbert wrote.

As a result, the military has lowered its standards and started recruiting kids with minor criminal records, high school dropouts and lower-scoring applicants, the Times reported.

There's a sense of desperation in the air.

In the end, some kids and young adults will go and some will not.

But the growing reluctance to sign up for this war isn't about patriotism. It's about honesty.

It's about the military targeting students with propaganda at a vulnerable time in their lives. It's about schools not being forthright in telling parents that they are giving military recruiters access to their children's personal information. And it's about a White House that hasn't told the truth about why we're in Iraq to begin with.

Remember that old saying, "What if they gave a war and nobody came?"

Ellie