September 29, 2005

All You Can Be; In Other Words Raped

Some shocking news here: Survey: 6 in 10 Military Women Harassed

WASHINGTON (AP) - Six in 10 women who have served in the National Guard and Reserves say they were sexually harassed or assaulted, but less than one-quarter reported it and many who did were encouraged to drop their complaints, a government survey says.

The survey by the Veterans Affairs Department found that nearly half of the women who responded said the incidents occurred while they were on duty.

One in 10 said she was raped, nearly 60 percent said they were verbally harassed, and the rest of the reports were for other types of incidents, according to the survey, which was released by Democratic members of Congress.

In addition, more than 27 percent of male Guard and Reserve veterans said they experienced some type of sexual harassment or assault - most often by other men.

One in ten reported being raped. If this is how the American women in the military are treated, imagine what we do to Iraqis. (Well, perhaps we'll have to imagine a bit less since the judge responding to ACLU's FOIA request ruled that the Pentagon should release more of the Abu Ghraib pictures. Expect more appeals, delays, red tape and obstruction. The Pentagon argues that releasing the pictures will incite more violence. Hmmm, is the Defense Department arguing that these terrorists react to our policies -- instead of being out to get us no matter what? Seems so.)

Posted by zeynep at 07:43 PM | Comments (1)

June 16, 2005

How to Recruit: Go For the Football Team Captain, the Homecoming Queen. And the Boy Scouts.

So, what's next, sponsoring the Teletubbies or Sesame Street? Here's excerpts from a recruiting handbook, from Bob Herbert's column today:

Recruiters trying to sign up high school students are urged to schmooze, schmooze, schmooze.

"The football team usually starts practicing in August," the handbook says. "Contact the coach and volunteer to assist in leading calisthenics or calling cadence during team runs."

"Homecoming normally happens in October," the handbook says. "Coordinate with the homecoming committee to get involved with the parade."

Recruiters are urged to deliver doughnuts and coffee to the faculty once a month, and to eat lunch in the school cafeteria several times a month. And the book recommends that they assiduously cultivate the students that other students admire: "Some influential students such as the student president or the captain of the football team may not enlist; however, they can and will provide you with referrals who will enlist."

...

"If you wait until they're seniors, it's probably too late," the book says. It also says, "Don't forget the administrative staff. ... Have something to give them (pen, calendar, cup, donuts, etc.) and always remember secretary's week, with a card or flowers."

The sense of desperation is palpable: "Get involved with local Boy Scout troops. Scoutmasters are typically happy to get any assistance you can offer. Many scouts are [high school] students and potential enlistees or student influencers."

So the law recognizes that you may be too young to make responsible decisions about consuming alcohol in your teen years, but we see nothing wrong with subjecting 17 an 18 year olds to this kind of pressure and, frankly, manipulation. It's grossly unfair to those kids, and it's deadly to the people who are facing the muzzle of the guns that will be held by them.

Posted by zeynep at 09:03 PM | Comments (0)

May 03, 2005

Be All the Forger You Can Be

A reader comments about the claims about Lynndie England's mental capacities and wonders "If she has severe learning disabilities and mental health problems, why was she allowed to wear a uniform and represent the U.S. in a combat theatre?"

Maybe this is how:

So how far will army recruiters go to get those numbers up?

One Colorado high school honors student wanted to find out. 17-year-old David McSwane says he told a recruiting officer he was a high-school drop out. No problem! He says he was told to print out a fake-diploma. Then he told them he had a problem with marijuana. McSwane says the recruiter suggested he purchase a detox kit.

Or like this:

It was late September when the 21-year-old man, fresh from a three-week commitment in a psychiatric ward, showed up at an Army recruiting station in southern Ohio. The two recruiters there wasted no time signing him up, and even after the man's parents told them he had bipolar disorder - a diagnosis that would disqualify him - he was all set to be shipped to boot camp, and perhaps Iraq after that, before senior officers found out and canceled the enlistment. Despite an Army investigation, the recruiters were not punished and were still working in the area late last month.

Two hundred miles away, in northern Ohio, another recruiter said the incident hardly surprised him. He has been bending or breaking enlistment rules for months, he said, hiding police records and medical histories of potential recruits. His commanders have encouraged such deception, he said, because they know there is no other way to meet the Army's stiff recruitment quotas.

And, consider this:

The recruiter, who has fought in several conflicts including the current war in Iraq, said one in every three people he had enlisted had a problem that needed concealing, or a waiver. "The only people who want to join the Army now have issues," he said. "They're troubled, with health, police or drug problems."

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February 27, 2005

So, Is Killing Afghans Fun?

That was the question posed by Major Randy Zeegers, "who functions as a liaison between the Army and the designers," to the Time magazine reporter who was trying out some of the newest video games the Armed Forces is developing as a recruiting tool:

After I took part in a heated session on a combat simulator, dodging RPGs and blasting away at street fighters in a nameless desert city, Major Zeegers asked me, "So, is killing Afghans fun?" It was hard to tell whether he was joking.

These games are serious business as far as recruiting goes. The game "America's Army" is where many of America's young learn about the Armed Forces:

Since it was released on July 4, 2002, America's Army has signed up 4.6 million registered players, and it adds 100,000 new ones every month. According to an Army study, 30% of Americans ages 16 to 24 say that some of what they know about the Army comes from the game.

But don't you worry. These games teach you about the real life. It's not like you can die and just start over immediately. You have to wait until the whole game starts over.

Colonel Wardynski is quick to point out that in games generally, when you die, you magically come back to life right away. Not in America's Army, he says. "In our game, there are penalties. In our game, if you're wounded or killed, you're out till the game starts over. The level of casualties your team incurs or inflicts on noncombatants--all those things come home as bad things to do. We don't want them to think it's Rambo."

That should teach those kids what real war is like. Plus, you get points deducted for killing civilians.

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February 04, 2005

Pesky General Tells the Truth and a Church Steps Up

Here's what General Hagee said, to explain comments made by Lt. Gen. James Mattis of the Marine Corps. "Lt. Gen. Mattis often speaks with a great deal of candor. I have counseled him concerning his remarks and he agrees he should have chosen his words more carefully. While I understand that some people may take issue with the comments made by him, I also know he intended to reflect the unfortunate and harsh realities of war."

So, what was that "unfortunate reality of war" that Gen. Mattis admitted in a moment of candor? Simple. He enjoys killing people. It's "hell of a hoot," in fact:

"Actually, it's a lot of fun to fight. You know, it's a hell of a hoot. ... It's fun to shoot some people. I'll be right upfront with you, I like brawling."

Better news, yet. This general is now in charge of developing ways to better train and equip the Marines. And preparing for him the future recruits who find killing to be "hell of a hoot" is the Trinity Church of Nazarene:

It's Sunday morning at Trinity Church of the Nazarene and staff member Mark "Gunny" Hestand is on his belly behind a tree, an imitation M-16 in his hands, showing six teen-age boys in fatigues how to ambush an enemy.

Hestand, 43, and a teen-age squad leader have been barking at the "soldiers" who are cranking out pushups and line sprints beside the church.

...

Thirty minutes later, the teens march into the church cafeteria in two single-file lines to the cadent commands of Smith. They gather around a table with Hestand and Bible study leader Tom Gilbert.

...

The teens are part of "Boot Camp," a youth group that mixes Marine Corps values and combat techniques with Bible study. The concept is the brainchild of Hestand, who started the group in 2001 to encourage youth involvement in the church. As far as he knows, Boot Camp is unique in the Christian world.

While some may find the juxtaposition of military and the church to be unusual, or even alarming, Hestand said he believes the two share key principles.

"We take the basic principles that are Christian and basic principles of warfare and we merge them," he said. "Our enemy is Satan. Our weapon is not an M-16, it's the Bible. We're trying to get them to be warriors for God."

Hestand lists the Marine values of honor, courage and commitment as analogous to Christianity.

"One of the reasons I chose the Marine style over other military branches is that almost anything they say you could replace the word 'Marine' with 'Christian,'" Hestand said.

Got that? "Marine" and "Christian" are interchangeable. If you are wondering how to get there, wrap your bible in a camouflage colors and paint your walls army green:

Framed marine posters hang on walls Hestand painted army green. He sits behind his desk on a weekday dressed in fatigues and boots. A G.I. Joe doll is displayed on a table. A Bible wrapped in a camouflage book cover rests next to his computer.

"My office looks more like a ROTC recruitment center than a radio station office," he said, laughing.

Morris and Hestand are well aware that Boot Camp is "way out of the box" of normal church programs, but the only complaint thus far has been from the occasional parent concerned about the marine-style
yelling of drill instructors, they say.

Occasionally a parent will be uncomfortable with the use of toy guns. But Morris says it's in boys' nature to play with weapons and if it wasn't guns it would be sticks.

This aggressive and combative nature is at the heart of Boot Camp. Hestand and company say that men - particularly Christian men - have become domesticated, boring and divided from their natural instincts of adventure and drive to tackle challenges. The end result is a docile and unhappy man.

The idea that Christian men must be reshaped is straight from Eldridge's "Wild at Heart," which argues that man's wild heart is a mirror of God's and that man's three natural and worthy desires are to: fight a battle, live an adventure and rescue a beauty.

"Wild at Heart" has sold over a million copies since its 2001 release. It has sparked debate, but is used as a manual by many churches and is prominently displayed in Christian bookstores.

Isn't great to have a Church where the offices look like ROTC recruitment centers? They do need the help. The Marines have missed their recruiting goals for the first time in a decade. It turns out that parents have been more actively fighting the recruiters.

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November 25, 2004

Wounded? Congrats, Here's a Purple Heart. Now Please Hand Over the Signing Bonus.

In the middle of a short piece about wounded soldiers, Newsweek mentions that the army tried to make Lt. Tyson Johnson pay back his signing bonus because he didn't complete his tour of duty ... due to the serious injuries he received, for which he got a Purple Heart.

Insult upon injury, [Tyson Johnson] got a bonus for joining, and they wanted to take the signing bonus back because he didn't fulfill his contract because he was wounded ... [Editor’s note: The Army has since abandoned its efforts to collect Tyson Johnson's signing bonus.]

How gracious of them to have stopped their collection efforts. The amount, if you are curious, was $2999. Giving up on that must have blown a big hole in Pentagon's $400 billion budget. Maybe Lt. Johnson should do the right thing and return the money anyway -- perhaps by putting up that Purple Heart for sale on Ebay. If a grilled cheese sandwich with the "image" of "Virgin Mary," who apparently has nothing better to do than help people increase their gambling winnings, can sell for $28,000...

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August 26, 2004

My husband did not take the news well

Grieving father torches Marine vehicle

A Hollywood father devastated by the death of his son in Iraq lashed out Wednesday by setting fire to the government van that brought U.S. Marines to deliver the news, severely burning himself in the process.

Carlos Arredondo ran toward the van with a lit propane torch and can of gasoline, smashed windows, doused the inside and set it afire as the stunned three-Marine team yelled at him to stop, just minutes after they had delivered the message that 20-year-old Lance Cpl. Alexander Arredondo was killed in combat.

Carlos Arredondo was thrown from the van when it exploded, and Marines rolled him on the ground to smother the fire at 2:14 p.m., witnesses said.

Arredondo, of 5430 Tyler St., was rushed to Memorial Regional Hospital in Hollywood, where he was reported in serious condition. He was later transferred to the burn unit at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami.

Hollywood Police Capt. Tony Rode said Arredondo, who turned 44 on Wednesday, suffered second-degree burns on his arms and legs, over 30 percent to 50 percent of his body. None of the Marines was injured. Marine Maj. Scott Mack said Arredondo is expected to live.

The Marines were at the house for about 20 or 30 minutes before Arredondo started the fire, Mack said.

''It doesn't appear he was trying to hurt himself,'' Marine Capt. Patrick Kerr, medical officer for Marine Forces Reserve in New Orleans, said in a telephone interview. ``He was trying to destroy the vehicle.''

''This gentleman was determined to exercise some of his grief on the only government entity he saw,'' Mack said. ``This is just a tragedy on top of a tragedy.''

Police said it's too early to determine whether Arredondo would face charges for destroying the Chevrolet van.

...

Melida Arredondo, the Marine's stepmother, said her husband could see the Marines through a window when they pulled up.

''My husband knew that his firstborn son had been killed, and my husband did not take the news well,'' she said.

She said Carlos Arredondo, a Costa Rica native, was proud of his son's service but wished it could have been during a more peaceful time.

But the dead Marine's grandmother, Luz Marina Arredondo Piedra, took a harsher view toward the American invasion of Iraq.

''They should stop this now,'' she said. ``They send them like guinea pigs over there.''

...

Foley said her son had been about 250 yards away from the Muslim shrine in Najaf where three weeks of fighting have raged between U.S.-led forces and the Mahdi Army militia of rebel cleric Muqtada al Sadr.

Arredondo had been stationed at Camp Pendleton, Calif., with the First Marine Division. Seeking a challenge, he joined the Marines about one month before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when he was in high school, his mother said. He joined because he didn't want to be financial burden to his family, his stepmother Melida Arredondo, said.

What was that in the middle? Too early to determine if Carlos Arredondo would face charges for destroying the van???

I wish someone would interview the recruiter who signed up Alexander Arredondo. What was the conversation? What were the promises, what were the expectations?

Posted by zeynep at 01:41 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

August 22, 2004

Recruiting Games

There have been a number of articles lately on the tools the military uses to recruit. Military recruiting is a combination of aiming for the kids with limited opportunities in the job market, and creating a military “brand” that is appealing to that demographic. The latest article in the NY Times Magazine continues to explore how computer games have been used quite successfully to create a positive image of the military, to grab the attention of kids who at that age are very much into gaming, and also to provide a simulated, interesting environment that is implicitly promised to the recruit if he or she were to join.

I have also just finished reading “Jarhead” by Anthony Swofford, the memoir of a Marine who was stationed in Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War. The first thing that strikes the reader is how incredibly misleading army’s current recruiting slogan, “An Army of One,” really is. Swofford’s describes being treated like a cog in a machine, in spite of the fact that he is chosen to be part of an elite unit of snipers, which allows for a lot more utilization of individual skill. It’s just that when there is so much firepower on your side, and so little on theirs, all there is to do is to blow up the enemy from a distance while they rush to surrender. It’s all made very clear in one situation where his skills as a sniper could actually be used, Iraqi officers visible in a distant air command tower seemingly arguing about whether to surrender or not. But, Swofford’s superiors don’t give him permission to fire simply because the question isn’t whether the Americans will win or not, but who will get more combat lines in their service record. In that light, sniping isn’t efficient, Swofford explains:

I can’t help but assume that certain commanders, at the company level, don’t want to use us because they know that two snipers with two of the finest rifles in the world and a few hundred rounds between them will in a short time inflict severe and debilitating havoc on the enemy, causing the entire airfield to surrender. The captains want war, and they must know that the possibilities are dwindling. The captains want war just as badly as we do. And also, the same as us, the captains want no war, but here it is, and when you’re a captain with a company to command and two snipers want to take a dozen easy shots and try to call it a day, of course you tell them no, because you are the captain and you have a company of infantry and what you need is some war ink spilled on your Service Record Book.

Given the hierarchy and the rigidity common to many military environments, the whole machine is designed to crush individuality. But, of course, that doesn’t stop them from what should be called misleading branding because that’s the heart of the contradiction the military shares with the general culture: somehow, our human desire to be distinct is deftly transformed into desire to acquire homogenous products, follow mass fads, and participate in institutions that relate to us as if we were as interchangeable as a bottle of coke or “uniquely you” hair color products, also in a bottle. The army knew to move with the times and the cultural environment:

After the Army missed its quotas by over 6,000 enlistees in 1999, private-sector specialists were brought in to form the Army Marketing Brand Group. Leo Burnett, a top advertising agency that has also worked with McDonald's and Coca-Cola, developed a new Army advertising campaign that debuted in January 2001. The two-decades-old "Be All You Can Be" slogan was dropped in favor of "An Army of One," which aims to promote the dubious notion that the Army is a place where individualism can flourish.

Constructing a highly-organized, rigid, hierarchical, and very technically oriented structure is probably only way an institution could recruit from a pool that is the product of a very, very dysfunctional education system, mostly pick-up the kids that couldn’t grab a scholarship or a job, and still remain the supreme military machine in the world. There is a self-reinforcing logic there: technology allows for overwhelming firepower and both demands and allows for strict organizational control.

One thing the American public is not willing to face is casualties -- no matter how immoral the war, how disproportionate the number of victims on the other side, the argument against the war that seems to resonate with most people is that Americans will die. Now, let me be clear: this not a unique American moral weakness. This would be true for the almost all peoples of the world: that is, most people are overwhelmingly more concerned with whether or not people “on their side” will die than whether or not people on the “other side” will get killed. What is unique in the American case is the absolute imbalance between our and their ability to kill. In some sense, in previous wars even if you were mostly concerned with how many were killed on your side, your concern was intrinsically correlated with how many died on their side because those numbers moved together in some fashion.

With our increasing unilateral military might, there is an almost total disconnect between those two numbers and that’s partially what makes these wars so cruel. The number of Americans killed in the first Gulf War by enemy fire (as opposed to friendly fire) is about 148. The number of Iraqis killed is in the hundreds of thousands -- nobody knows for sure because nobody is counting although I can even find out the name and brief life story of each and every American killed by hostile action in the first and last Gulf war with a few minutes of googling.

So, naturally, the main priority of this military is force protection and minimizing casualties on this side. In other words, there is never any question whether or not the American military can win the military battle. The only questions to be decided are political: how few can we lose, and how many -and what kind- can we get away with killing? That’s what stopped them in Fallujah last April. Of course, they could have leveled the town and “won,” but killing tens of thousands of civilians wasn’t a strategically viable option at that point. They could take the town without killing that many civilians but that would require real urban combat, the kind that might cause maybe hundreds of American casualties. And that is absolutely unacceptable.

Perhaps part of the reason is that there is so much concern over military casualties is the collective guilt the American middle class must feel, knowing that they are the beneficiaries of an empire the footsoldiers of which are never their children. It’s obviously not moral squeamishness about casualties in a war, as hundreds of thousands of Iraqis weren’t much of a concern in the previous Gulf War -- although, there is a growing and welcome sensibility towards what are perceived as civilian casualties on the other side. I say perceived because who counts is a shifting definition. Neither civilians who die from indirect effects of our actions, for example from the sanctions, or the poor, barely armed conscripts on the other side who are thrown into military uniforms by dictators register as high in our consciousness as civilians killed by direct gunshots or bombs. The distaste over casualties on our side does not seem to result from a concern for the poor in this country either: after all, there is very little political will to improve their schools, their crumbling housing projects, their health-care options or their chances in life.

All of this ends up with the expected result: a trigger-happy military with overwhelming firepower. Trigger-happy because they are trained to kill, however many, in order to protect themselves as much as possible so as not to upset the folks back home watching the war on television, between commercials. And given the overwhelming firepower, they do kill many.

All of which leads to a problem for the military if it is to remain engaged in colonial missions. This kind of a military can defeat any force in the world. It can crush everything in its path. It can credibly threaten any other power with annihilation. It cannot, however, carry out an occupation that depends fundamentally on accommodation, which seems to be what the neo-imperialists were counting on. It simply cannot peacefully control an urban area, a population center, any country with the slightest resistance to their presence because their methods will turn that slight resistance into an uprising. The trainees aren’t taught to try to hold their fire when unsure, to try to befriend the locals, to try to isolate the insurgents. They are trained in very rigid operational modes where the rule is to shoot first, then duck and call-in air strikes.

Which brings me to an important consideration when evaluating the strategy the United States ended up carrying out in Iraq. I think it has to be discussed in light not just of the wishes of the planners but rather the nature of the tool, the military. (I also feel that a feeling of superiority, arrogance and strong racism towards non-Americans is and important part of this mix limiting the ability of U.S. military in running more friendly occupations, but that’s another long and complicated subject.) In other words, I don’t know if this is what they intended to do but I suspect that their choices are limited as long as the nature of the U.S. military and the U.S. public remain as they are.

In the latest New York Times article, there is a striking nugget of information which makes it obvious that the military is obviously aware of the problem:

In fact, the Army is now one of the industry's most innovative creators, hiring high-end programmers and designers from Silicon Valley and Hollywood to devise and refine its games. Some of these games are action-packed, like Full Spectrum Warrior. Others, like one that the military's Special Operations Command is currently designing to help recruits practice their Arabic, are less so. All the games, however, speak to the military's urgent need to train recruits for the new challenges of peacekeeping efforts in places like Iraq. Teaching someone to be an accurate shot is not particularly hard to do. Military trainers have learned that if you put someone through a week of intensive work with a point-and-shoot simulator (not unlike today's commercially available shoot-'em-up video games), he will be reasonably good with a rifle. Teaching judgment, however, is much harder than teaching hand-eye coordination. Today's military is in the market for games that train soldiers, in effect, how not to shoot -- how to avoid conflict whenever possible, to recognize danger and find a route around it. As a squad leader in Full Spectrum Warrior, you do not even carry a gun that fires, which makes it the first military-action video game in which the player never discharges a weapon.

Skipping over the revealing absurdity the author of the piece engages in by calling what’s going on in Iraq “peacekeeping,” it’s very striking to hear of a military-initiated game where the main player personally does not have a weapon to shoot --instead deploys people under his command to shoot and kill-- and the main environment is urban combat.

And that’s what the future holds for us if we are to remain a hyper-consumptive society in a world with decreasing resources, a world where we have to permanently occupy key resource regions of the world. That’s what Mike Davis is talking about when he refers to the Pentagon as the Global slumlord:

The battle of Fallujah, together with the conflicts unfolding in Shiia cities and Baghdad slums, are high-stakes tests, not just of U.S. policy in Iraq, but of Washington's ability to dominate what Pentagon planners consider the "key battlespace of the future" -- the Third World city.

As the NY Times article explains, that’s exactly the environment that the military tries to recreate in its virtual and real simulations: Middle Eastern cities reminiscent of Baghdad and installations set up like Iraqi villages:

In early 2003, he landed a $3.5 million, four-year contract from the Army Research, Development and Engineering Command to build a simulator geared to model warfare against insurgents in urban settings.... Forterra's designers also started erecting a Middle Eastern city reminiscent of Baghdad and before long had produced one square mile of tightly nested buildings, which Army soldiers all over the world could roam simultaneously.

Kondrat's unit, a battalion, particularly needed to practice convoy maneuvers -- piloting a large number of vehicles down a road while keeping them safe. Kondrat said that he would like to take the battalion more often to one of the Army's desert outposts in California, where installations are set up like Iraqi villages, but that those resources, too, are now in high demand.

Is this to be the new world order?

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