Posted on: Monday, November 15, 2004
ISLAND VOICES
Recruiting for military needs re-evaluation
By Lindsay Oishi
A few months ago, I wrote to The Honolulu Advertiser to express my support for sending American troops — including Hawai'i's own — to Iraq ("Hawai'i's GIs have chance to act justly," July 26).
Casualties are part of the endeavor I endorsed, but that does not lessen my sorrow at reading the stories of fallen soldiers ("Loss of 10 Marines mourned at service on Kane'ohe base," Nov. 9).
In particular, some of Iraq's victims were so tragically young that I believe we must honestly evaluate the recruitment strategies of our military.
Offering your life for your country is a difficult, and deeply ethical, decision. While I admire the courage of our young service men and women, I also worry that some of their willingness to face danger comes from inexperience and immaturity.
It is wrong to capitalize on the irrationality of teenagers to convince them to go to war. The problem is that there is no obvious point at which children become adults with mature reasoning capacities.
We should carefully reconsider Section 9528 of the No Child Left Behind Act, which requires schools to provide the names, addresses and phone numbers of secondary school students to military recruiters upon request.
Do we really want recruiters to have the same privileged access to young people that is afforded to colleges and universities? Allowing such aggressive recruiting tactics erodes our children's privacy and undermines our professed commitment to excellence in education.
Furthermore, I fear that young people are not equipped with the best information when they consider joining the all-volunteer force. From "Be All You Can Be" to "An Army of One," we see marketing campaigns that glamorize life in the armed forces, highlighting intangible and peripheral benefits such as becoming tough or earning money for college.
Of course, these benefits are worth mentioning. But they must be presented as part of an accurate and complete picture of life as a soldier.
In medical ethics, informed consent is the gold standard of patient care. In the military, life-and-death decisions are equally relevant, and the individual's right to understand the consequences of free choice is just as legitimate. Unfortunately, advertisers and recruiters do not just inform kids about military service. They sell it. I cannot imagine a doctor selling a treatment.
This issue affects me deeply, in part because I am young myself. I know that some of the best things in my life are yet to come. But Lance Cpl. Jeremy D. Bow, who was only 20 years old when a suicide car bomber ended his life, will not get a chance to find that out.
I hope that we did everything we could to ensure that his and others' choice to join the military — and its consequent, ultimate sacrifice — was a free, mature and informed decision.
Lindsay Oishi of Kane'ohe is a graduate student at Brasenose College, Oxford University, in England.
