Tags: army wife basic training babies veterans iraq war cadence recruiting guns kids in iraq john mccain young soldiers army mom
Published : 11 months, 2 weeks ago (Mon, 28 Jul 2008 11:09:23 PDT)
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Before you delve into my innermost thoughts I want you to close your eyes and picture yourself at 17 or 18. Think back to your senior year in high school. Beat down the self-loathing that creeps up on you as you try to remember the absurd things you wore and what a complete ass you were for taking anything you did seriously. If you’re pushing 30 like myself you likely get the shivers when you pass a group of teenagers wearing the ridiculous crap they wear thinking they look all counter-culture in a crowd of young people wearing different versions of the exact same thing. Sometimes I have to say adult things out loud (“now where on Earth did I park?) to keep myself from grabbing them by the shoulders and shaking them screaming “you’re so damned different! Just like everyone else!” I’ve read research regarding the adolescent brain’s inability to see things long-term and deter impulsivity. That explains me crying at the door of my boyfriend’s dorm room freshman year when he told me we’d grown apart. It didn’t matter that the guy on the other side of the door wore black nail polish and eyeliner, that he fancied himself a peasant even though he was a trust fund baby of the highest order. He was artistic and clever and unique and we were MEANT FOR EACHOTHER!!! So that was 11 years ago and I am what most would consider an adult. I do adult things in adult ways and, other than the weirdness and eccentricity which has been my calling card throughout my life, I am an adult. No more maxing out my credit cards on roller blades and hung-over breakfasts at Dennys. I have a saving account and life insurance people. Now that we’ve completed exercise one I want to bring you on my morning run. I live on an Army base and I’m married to a Hooah-hooah drill sergeant. It’s summer time and what does that mean? It means that the Army is experiencing an influx of kids just 17 or 18 years old who attended their prom a few months back and are now learning to use their rifles. Because it’s been so difficult to recruit your average 18-25 year old kid to risk their lives in 120 degree heat rather than hanging at the mall with their friends or getting high in their parents basement, the Army now allows high school juniors to enlist, go to basic training in the summer and then complete their senior year before doing a 12 month intensive on Iraqi culture. I run at 4 or 5am and even though they’ve been here for two months now, spending day after day in basic training I can’t help but pass them and think, “these kids are babies”. I hear them singing cadence at 5am“Everywhere I go, there’s a drill sergeant there” in voices so high it could be my high school chorus class. The girls still have those spindly adolescent legs and the boys are still without tattoos on visible flesh. They march together in the still self-conscious posture we all used anywhere but home. The boys have lost their emo hair in favor of a jar head. The girls, many of whom left home with perfectly popular side-swept bangs, pull their hair back in tight buns fitted under acu caps. Some have never done their own laundry. Some don’t have a bank account. A lot of them cry themselves to sleep or burst into tears on the pay phone, a line of soon-to-be trained killers behind them waiting to check in with their own moms. I see them between Basic and Advanced Individualized training sitting on pay-per-use computers at the Post Exchange checking their myspace pages. I read comments over their shoulders “hope you don’t get sent to the sandbox”, “kill any ragheads yet?”. They could be sitting in their room at their own computer surrounded by plates of half-eaten food and school books were it not for the fact that they sat in bulky boots and a full combat uniform staring at the computer and trying to pretend they were still part of the life displayed on the screen. I expect to get a lot of flack from people about my perception of these soldiers. “Old enough to vote” critics will say. I also get “my son wanted to serve his country and is mature enough to do it”. And some of these corn-fed Mid Western kids do. Others want to drink themselves into a stupor all over the world. Some knocked up their high school girlfriend and need a steady paycheck. I don’t know their stories, I just know that when they march with weapons in adolescent frailty they look like babies with guns. When their moms call the battalion and ask the drill sergeant to let them talk to their son or daughter because their baby wants to come home or “doesn’t sound like himself” it’s obvious that even the most proud parent knows in their heart that their baby in camo is still just that. Rewind with me a second. A guy I dated in highschool enlisted during his senior year. He’s still enlisted 11 years later and he loves his job. Sometimes those marching kids end up like that. Sometimes they end up on the casualty count, their prom date’s corsage not quite dry. 60% of new soldiers will see combat within their first six months in the Army. It’s a fact and it’s a drill sergeant’s job to tell these kids the truth and prepare them for that reality. Command just came down on my husband for being to hard on his privates during physical training. It gets hot here in the summer and some were falling out while they ran. Command suggested that the authoritarian and traditional military punishment be replaced with “logical consequences” for these privates who were “mostly intelligent people”. My husband was reprimanded for saying that, quite frankly, his job was to teach them to survive in combat where none of the consequences were logical. In an effort to meet it’s recruiting goals the Army has stepped up it’s efforts to create a “kinder gentler” basic training. This begins by convincing concerned moms that their children to enlist will result in them being molded into responsible adults rather than forced to do push ups until they throw up. Magazine adds display proud mothers looking into the eyes of taller, youthful sons on Basic training graduation day. It’s obvious by the look of pride in this mother’s eyes that her baby Brandon Jr. sat through all the classes taught by the male role models formerly referred to as drill sergeants and then passed his (written) manhood exam with flying colors. Most people, most parents, hate the idea of a drill sergeant yelling at their child. I say it’s necessary for a parent to let go and it’s necessary for the drill sergeant to yell. When your convoy has been hit with an IED and your buddy is bleeding and the roar is deafening and you’re taking fire, there isn’t much room for polite conversation. If that soldier can’t react under pressure, with someone yelling orders, swearing and screaming, that soldier is as good as dead. So maybe it seems like I’m being hard on the parents of soldiers. I should tell you that I have the greatest respect for you and especially your child who is willing to take the fall for this whole country, even if they don’t quite understand what that entails or how unappreciative most of the country is. There are two types of parents in America today: those who have children fighting in the war in Iraq and those who don’t. Frankly, if you don’t have a horse in this race there isn’t much you have to say on the subject that means anything to me, especially if you go about your daily life not giving a second thought to the kids carrying guns in Iraq. And this brings me to the second and final exercise. If you are a parent I’d like you to picture your own teenager leaving for Iraq. If you’ve raised your child to support the war I suggest you begin asking them to walk their talk and enlist in the Army or Marines. The Army has lowered its standards to such a degree that even kids with checkered pasts, minor offenses, GED’s and weight problems can serve in Iraq. And they’re always looking for kids with a college education, even if they haven’t yet completed their degree. If you aren’t comfortable with the idea of asking your own child to enlist you need to ask yourself how you can live with voting to send someone else’s child to fight for their life during the latter years of their adolescence. If that seems okay to you maybe you need to reexamine your family values. There are way too many Arm chair quarterbacks watching kids head out on buses like it’s a reality tv show and voting like there’s a factory making young dispensable kids they don’t know and love. I’m praying for a draft of your children and until there is one I’m running every morning with the sunrise to the sound of babies growing up too fast. |
