Post by Shadow on Sept 18, 2005 19:03:23 GMT -5
Mother Jones
Commentary: The planners of Operation Iraqi Freedom forgot another thing on the road to Baghdad: how veterans would affect their ability to get new boots on the ground.
Think about ya life, the choices you make. Recruiters out to get you, don't make a mistake./Is obvious, right, they target the 'hood. Take a homeboy and write, what's wrong and what's good./My words are truth, heal like medicine. Don't believe me? Man, holla at a veteran.
Rayniel, a New York City teenager, rapper, serious Catholic, had been talking to veterans for years by the time he became a senior at West Side High School, an alternative public school where the lived history of men in war has become a regular part of the conversation and curriculum. Rayniel himself never considered the military a career option, but as recruiting and counter-recruiting became all the word around inner-city high schools late last spring, he picked up a flyer from the American Friends Service Committee (a.k.a. Quakers) and added his own riff on its "Ten Points to Consider Before You Sign a Military Enlistment Agreement." Points one through three advise young people to "not make a quick decision," to "take a witness when speaking with a recruiter," and to "talk with veterans." Or, in Rayniel's translation, "Think about ya life...."
Jim Murphy wasn't thinking about much as a high school student near Rochester, New York, in the early 1960s. A kid with all the others sitting in the back row—the ones without a plan, sullen and indifferent, on whom their teachers had by then given up—he was, he says now, "really dead in the water. College, I blew it off. I was so far in the back row I had my hand up for the bathroom, the easiest fresh meat right there." He signed up for Vietnam and has been thinking about it ever since, the leeches and rashes and flamable boredom, the obsidian memory of death and horror purchased with lies.
Commentary: The planners of Operation Iraqi Freedom forgot another thing on the road to Baghdad: how veterans would affect their ability to get new boots on the ground.
Think about ya life, the choices you make. Recruiters out to get you, don't make a mistake./Is obvious, right, they target the 'hood. Take a homeboy and write, what's wrong and what's good./My words are truth, heal like medicine. Don't believe me? Man, holla at a veteran.
Rayniel, a New York City teenager, rapper, serious Catholic, had been talking to veterans for years by the time he became a senior at West Side High School, an alternative public school where the lived history of men in war has become a regular part of the conversation and curriculum. Rayniel himself never considered the military a career option, but as recruiting and counter-recruiting became all the word around inner-city high schools late last spring, he picked up a flyer from the American Friends Service Committee (a.k.a. Quakers) and added his own riff on its "Ten Points to Consider Before You Sign a Military Enlistment Agreement." Points one through three advise young people to "not make a quick decision," to "take a witness when speaking with a recruiter," and to "talk with veterans." Or, in Rayniel's translation, "Think about ya life...."
Jim Murphy wasn't thinking about much as a high school student near Rochester, New York, in the early 1960s. A kid with all the others sitting in the back row—the ones without a plan, sullen and indifferent, on whom their teachers had by then given up—he was, he says now, "really dead in the water. College, I blew it off. I was so far in the back row I had my hand up for the bathroom, the easiest fresh meat right there." He signed up for Vietnam and has been thinking about it ever since, the leeches and rashes and flamable boredom, the obsidian memory of death and horror purchased with lies.