8 Reasons NOT To Join The Military, Tiem to argue Rating Options

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Military recruiters tour the country selling a dangerous product with glamorous ads, just like tobacco companies or drug pushers. The ads promise opportunity and adventure -- but don't believe the hype.

1. Joining the military is hazardous to your education.

The military isn't a generous financial aid institution, and it isn't concerned with helping you pay for school. Two-thirds of all recruits never get any college funding from the military. Only 15% graduated with a four-year degree.

What about going to school while you're in? Many GIs report that military life leaves them too busy and exhausted -- and doesn't really make time for them to go to class.

2. Joining the military is hazardous to your future.

Joining the military is a dead end. After you've spent a few years in the military, you're 2 to 5 times more likely to be homeless than your friends who never joined. And, according to the VA, you'll probably earn less too. The skills you learn in the military will be geared to military jobs, not civilian careers; when you come out, many employers will tell you to go back to school and get some real training. As former Secretary of Defense Cheney declared, "The reason to have a military is to be prepared to fight and win wars...it's not a jobs program."

3. Joining the military is hazardous to people of color.

During the Gulf War, over 50 percent of front-line troops were people of color. Overall, over 30 percent of enlisted personnel but only 12 percent of officers are people of color, who are then disciplined and discharged under other than honorable conditions at a much higher rate than whites. When recent studies showed a slight dip in young African-Americans' (disproportionately high) interest in the military, the Pentagon reacted with a new ad campaign. They're targeting Latino youth with special Spanish-language ads. The recruiters' lethal result: tracking high achieving young people in communities of color into a dead-end, deadly occupation.

4. Joining the military is hazardous to women.

Sexual harassment and assault are a daily reality for the overwhelming majority of women in the armed forces. The VA's own figures show 90 percent of recent women veterans reporting harassment - a third of whom were raped. Despite the glossy brochures that advertise "opportunities for women," the military's inherent sexism is evident from sergeants shouting "girl!" at trainees who don't "measure up," to the intimidation of women who speak out about harassment and discrimination - not to mention military men's sexual abuse of civilian women in base communities.

5. Joining the military is hazardous to your civil rights.

If you aren't willing to give up your rights, the military isn't for you. Once you enlist, you become military property: you lose your right to come and go freely, you're ordered around 24 hours a day, and you can be punished by your command without trial or jury. Free speech rights are severely limited in the military. You can be punished for being honest about being lesbian, gay or bisexual. Worst of all even if you hate your job, you can't quit.

6. Joining the military is hazardous to your health.

The military can't guarantee you'll be alive at the end of your eight-year commitment: they can't even promise you won't be desperately ill from "mystery illnesses" like those of the Vietnam and Persian Gulf wars. Whether it's atomic testing in the 1950s, Agent Orange during the war against Vietnam, or experimental vaccines and toxic weapons in the Persian Gulf, the military shamelessly destroys the health of its personnel -- and then does its best to downplay and ignore their suffering.

7. Joining the military is hazardous to the environment.

The US military is the single largest and worst polluter in the world, from toxins at bases to nuclear-tipped missiles to the destruction of ecosystems from South Vietnam to the Persian Gulf. And in today's military, the tanks and weapons are coated with depleted uranium from toxic nuclear waste!

8. Joining the military is hazardous to our lives.

The "adventure" in the commercials is code for war, the "discipline" code for violence. The military trains recruits to employ deadly force, yet recruiters rarely discuss the dehumanizing process of basic training, the psychological costs of killing, or the horrors of war.

The ads lie because the product is lethal -- not just to you, but to all of us.

For more information contact or write:

Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors:

630 20th Street #302,
Oakland, CA 94612
510-465-1617
Fax 510 465-2459

or

1515 Cherry Street,
Philadelphia, PA 19102
215-563-8787
Fax 215-567-2096

Argue.... I mean, debate.

[Mental-Wanderer]

My son is considering joining the Marines, and this topic has been on my mind a lot lately. This is a thoughtful post, and I think it is an idea that deserves further treatment. My son is an adult now and can decide for himself, but I have strong mixed feelings about his interest. I have never been in the military myself, but my brother was a career officer and my dad served in WWII.

Your first two points are an example of using statistics to lie -- or, more accurately, to over-simplify to support a point that is not directly supported by the numbers. If you enter the military and are careful in your choices, you will get education benefits -- but you have to be smart about it from the start and make the right choices. Also, if you are already of above-average intelligence, you can get training that will be quite valuable outside the military. Once, again, you have to make careful choices right from the start of your military service, and you have to already have "some smarts" to begin with. In truth, a great many of the ex-military folks who end up on the wrong side of your statistics would be there whether or not they'd done time in the military. Frankly, the military is a refuge for people who really have few other options open to them -- and there are a lot more people in this category that we like to admit.

Your third point deserves a huge post of it's own. Recruiters are carefully trained to "make the sale" and they will make any promise, play on any fear, and use any psychological tactic they can to make their quotas. If they can use racial issues to lure in people of color, they will not hesitate to do it.

Your fourth point is real hot-button issue. You shouldn't say this if you can't back it up with cold, hard statistical studies. Unquestionably, the military has been a relatively "bad place" for women in the past, but it certainly doesn't have a corner on the market for chauvinism, harassment, and sexual misconduct. A lot of lip-service has been paid recently to making things better for women in the military, but just how much better it really is should be carefully studied.

Your fifth point should be revisited. Yes, you certainly give up options when entering into the military contract, but only a complete moron would sign on the line without realizing this. The question is: do you give up your Constitutional Rights by signing? That is a much more interesting question.

Your sixth point should also be revisited. Once again, only an idiot would sign on without fully appreciating the dangers of the job. Is it unnecessarily dangerous? That is, could more be done to reduce accidents and risks? Yes, it could. During WWII, accidental (and preventable) deaths were appallingly high; thousands of men were killed in exercises and on military construction projects. Chemical weapons and tools like Agent Orange represent some of the dumbest military thinking in history. But, things are slowly improving. Is it safer than civilian life? That depends on where you are -- in both cases. Of course, the purpose of the military is to make war, and war is the most dangerous thing in human experience. But, is there anyone out there who doesn't know that the job of the military is to make war?

Your seventh reason is just emotional baiting on your part. Yes, the military has a lot of "bad practices" but it is not even close to being the worst threat the environment faces. In some instances, the military is responsible for bringing noteworthy improvements in remote areas of the world and significantly reducing pollution. I work with a guy who was in Afghanistan where a new Army water treatment facility helped clean up a river that the locals had been dumping raw waste into for generations.

Your last reason is a very good one and deserves its own treatment. Yes, the military is all about transforming young men and women into killers -- especially the Marine Corp. The psychological basis for recruitment and basic training is morally and ethically questionable in every way. I think, however, the greater good needs to be considered. Does it contribute to violent crime in the whole of society? Does it contribute to increases in mental illness in the greater world? I don't think you can make a case for that. Many ex-military people hate it and regret ever joining, but many more are happy that they did it. The overwhelming attitude seems to be: "I wouldn't trade the experience for a million dollars, but I wouldn't do it again for a million dollars."

I would now like to suggest a ninth reason: "Serving in the military is NOT necessarily an act of service to your country in the most literal sense of the word." When you join the Army and deploy to Iraq, for example, you are serving George W. Bush. Period. He made the unilateral decision to invade, and he makes the daily decision to remain there. No one can prove that "America is safer" because of this, but no one can make him stop and no one can make him change course. The US military is -- literally -- his giant plaything to do with as he wishes. The congress simply signs the check and looks the other way. The supreme court long ago legitimized this way of doing business.

Like it or not, there has been no life-or-death threat to American sovereignty since WWII. That means that every use of the military since then has been a purely political act that was solely the idea of -- and responsibility of -- the sitting president. There was no declaration of war in Korea, Lebanon, Vietnam, Panama, Grenada, Kuwait, Bosnia, Mozambique, Afghanistan, Iraq, or anywhere else our soldiers have been deployed. That means that America's soldiers were simply carrying out their commander-in-chief's orders, but whether or not they were actually "protecting American freedom and democracy" was, and is, completely irrelevant.