Military Recruitment
Get involved in the movement to stop military recruiters: wearenotyoursoldiers.org
We Are Not Your Soldiers in Philadelphia
- Category: Military Recruitment
From the report posted at wearenotyoursoldiers.org:
In each class, some students walked into class “disruptive” but when the film came on they were silent, captivated by the horror they were watching. This engagement lasted through the discussion. The youth were very shocked about what they saw in the video, especially the fact that there were children there. They called it scary, disgusting, heartless, and it elicited nervous laughter. In the afternoon one girl got teary eyed and when her friends made fun she said, “don’t laugh at me for crying this shit is sad.” One male student made a very true statement about the video, saying, “This is not a good advertisement for the military.”
Matthis’ point of being less of a man for having joined the military really resonated with students, nodding at what he was saying about losing your humanity in doing these acts. They were moved by both the video and Matthis’ further testimony to these outrages being daily occurrences and his use of the word genocide. It affected them that their government was just killing people in a neighborhood and it changed how they viewed the war. They could see the impact and they, for the most part, definitely didn’t want to be a part of it.
We Are Not Your Soldiers at a Vermont High School
- Category: Military Recruitment
Another student... took off the national guard shirt he was wearing and gave it to Matthis saying he no longer would wear it. |
By Joe Urgo, Viet Nam Veteran
Matthis Chiroux, Iraq war resister and part of the “We Are Not Your Soldiers” tour, and I met with three groups of students at a Vermont High School.
The first group of students was only about 10 in number, the second and third had about 30 students in each. In the two largest groups, 1/3 of one and 1/2 in the other had family and friends in the military. This is important to understand because everything we say can be taken as a personal attack on their family members and make it difficult for them to see the politics and policies that make up these wars for empire and the responsibility to end them.
This is Not Our War, We Are Not Your Soldiers
- Category: Military Recruitment
By Lauren Martino
“We Are Not Your Soldiers!,” a project of World Can’t Wait, is educating youth about military recruitment through bringing Iraq war veterans to speak in high schools about the reality of going to war for this country.
“After the World Can’t Wait presentation, it was apparent that my students were affected. The next day one student showed me a poem he wrote about a young boy from the ghetto enlisting in the military and dying, another asked for a World Can’t Wait T-shirt, and yet another, who had wanted to join the military, handed me a recommendation form for a vocational school. Others are still lost forever to the military but the “We Are Not Your Soldiers” tour offered the education American youth really need and that more teachers need to be more conscious of.”
Sexual Assault in the US Military: Who will become the next statistic?
- Category: Military Recruitment
Sexual Assault in the US Military: Who will become the next statistic?
By Oskar Castro
The Service Women’s Action Network recently helped to file a class action suit on the behalf of a number of women and men who say they have been sexually victimized by their peers, or their commands in the military. Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and current Secretary of Defense Robert Gates are named as the defendants whose complicit inattentiveness enabled a culture of silence and injustice to prevail. While Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) has developed into a new buzz word as a result of the U.S. wars in the Middle East, Military Sexual Trauma (MST) is not something we often hear about and some argue that we don’t because the Pentagon does not want us to. This landmark class action suit is yet another attempt to break the silence.
Killing 'Really Addictive:' Veteran's Essay Leads to Ban From Campus
- Category: Military Recruitment
"He's writing about how something changes in you in a combat situation, and it's hard to turn that off in a civilian situation" |
Emma Kaplan writes: This is pretty interesting and also outrageous - it shows the complete disconnect between what the government has been doing in the Middle East for the past 9 years and then complete surprise at the fact that there are people like this coming onto college campuses.
By Kim Carollo
In an essay for a college English class, Charles Whittington Jr. opened up about his feelings about his time in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"Killing becomes a drug, and it is really addictive. I had a really hard time with this problem when I returned to the United States, because turning this addiction off was impossible," Whittington wrote in the essay for his class at the Community College of Baltimore County in Catonsville, Md.
Demon Drones & War without Borders
- Category: Military Recruitment
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We Are Not Your Soldiers Tour: Taking Responsibility for Ending the Wars
- Category: Military Recruitment
From a UC Santa Barbara student in Global Studies 
Collateral Murder
- Category: Military Recruitment
I know that these incidents happen more often than not. This is reality, not some video effigy edited to demonize soldiers. What you see in this video and the entire occupation is illegitimate.
Atrocities like this were commonplace in 2004-2005 when I was there with the First Cavalry Division, it's was common in 2007, and innocent casualties are still piling up. The continued Insurgency in Iraq is fed by these kinds of atrocities.
Lowering the Bar: Kindergarten Recruitment
- Category: Military Recruitment
