Elle Thomas, a Denver peace advocate, has run into identical roadblocks: "Military recruiters are on campus all the time, and they don't have to ask. Some teachers even include them as a regular part of classes. But we have to network with teachers and students who might be able to invite us. Nobody's calling and saying, 'Hey, can you send someone down?'"
Even as activists fight for easier entree to schools, they're trying to rein in military recruiters. DeAnne Butterfield, a Boulder parent and former legislative director for Governor Richard Lamm's administration, says fellow members of a co-op dubbed Sign Up for Peace were disturbed by the way recruiters at Boulder High School "were creating a festival atmosphere -- using open areas outside the cafeteria to conduct chin-up contests and hand out T-shirts." They voiced their complaints to the school's administrators, and now recruiters are restricted to Boulder High's counseling office. Sign Up envoys also griped about an extravaganza featuring a flight simulator that took place at Monarch High School last May. In a subsequent meeting with Boulder Valley officials, they asked that consistent rules governing military recruiters be instituted, and accountability emphasized. "Any recruiter, whether they're with the military, a business or a college, ought to have standards when it comes to promises they make to students," Butterfield believes.
Matt Collins
Mark Manger
They offer the basics: Sergeant Rodney Shivers at
the Westminster recruiting office.
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Efforts like these aren't limited to Colorado. In May, the parents-teachers-students association at Garfield High School near Seattle voted to ban recruiters entirely, only to be reminded by school-district representatives that doing so would violate No Child Left Behind. But on September 7, the Seattle School Board ruled that recruiters, military or otherwise, who give inaccurate or misleading information to students can be kicked out of schools for the rest of the semester.
Brodeur feels his recruiters would do well under this policy, since luring in recruits under false pretenses is counterproductive to the mission. Approximately 9 percent of recruits wash out by the end of basic training, "and experience tells us that anyone who's not fully committed to the Army and doesn't understand what it's really all about will be one of those 9 percent -- a statistic who doesn't ship," he says. "And if those boots aren't in fighting formation, it does nobody any good."
Then again, there's no sense in accentuating the negative. When parents ask Brodeur if recruits are guaranteed a one-way ticket to Baghdad, "I remind them that at the beginning of this month, the Army was deployed to 120 different countries, and of those 120 nations, only two are sustained combat areas of operation," he says. "The other 118 are stability and support operations, or we're training other armies."
As for Mower, he's great at rattling off the main selling points today's Army shares with prospective recruits -- as much as $20,000 in bonus pay for enlisting, complete health-care coverage, more than 150 different jobs to choose from, and up to $70,000 for college -- but tends to keep any wartime tales to himself. When someone asks him what it was like in Iraq, he doesn't show off the black bracelet with the names of his dead comrades. Instead, he says, "I tell them it was an experience I'll never forget."
During a brief stop to check on the Pomona recruiting presentation, Captain Elliott asks, "Did the ninth-graders take all your keychains?"
"Yeah," Mower says, grinning.
Indeed, there's not much to pack up at the end of the soldiers' two-hour-plus stay at Pomona. Yet the students most willing to do push-ups for doodads were typically years away from Army eligibility. "Those freshmen, they get all glassy-eyed, looking at you like you're a new piece of candy," Shivers allows. "They've seen military on TV and the movies, and because they don't see a lot of military people when they're in the lower levels of education, they flock to anybody in a uniform."
The hordes have dissipated now. The last lunch hour is over, and with students back in class, even the bake-sale teens have folded their tent. Shivers follows suit, putting away his table and closing the clasp on his suddenly lighter attaché. As he walks with Mower and Bradley toward the exit, he can't be certain that anyone he met will ultimately decide to become a soldier. He can only hope he planted a seed that will lead one day to a rich harvest benefiting the individual himself, not to mention the United States of America.
"When I first started doing this, I thought it was a waste of time," Shivers says. "But even when the ninth-graders are all around you, you'll see seniors standing back, with their arms folded. And those are the ones I'm looking for. He or she may come up to me then, or they may come up to me toward the end of the year, but they'll come. That one needle in the haystack."
