By Jo Wilding
June 17th

“If a school takes even a single dollar of Federal funding they’re obliged to hand over all of their confidential information to the State, for the military recruiters. By the time the kids leave high school they’ve had 50 to 60 phone calls at home from the recruiters, visits, cold calls from them at home, a mailbox full of glossy brochures, as well as careers advice from them.”

It’s part of a programme called ‘No Child Left Behind’. Or No Child Left Alive, if anyone was ever honest about these things. Susanne said recruiters have even been known to take kids on ski-ing trips to seduce them into the army. Veterans for Peace had a table at the talk, full of leaflets about recruitment issues. The recruiters frequently promise work-related training and money for college to kids without many opportunities in those departments.

The veterans say the training you receive in the military rarely translates into useful qualifications for civilian jobs. On average in 31 months of active duty a service person receives 1.78 moths � less than 8 weeks � of job training. 12% of male and 6% of female veterans make any use of the skills they gained in the military in their subsequent civilian jobs and more than 50,000 unemployed veterans are waiting for re-training. On average, veterans earn 85 cents per hour or $1700 a year less than non-veterans of comparable socio-economic status.

They say the money for college often depends on a series of conditions and the real funding is rarely forthcoming. Less than a third of recruits ever get any money for college and colleges can reduce their financial aid to students by the amount of the army scholarship so there’s no net gain at all. Even among those who pay a non-refundable deposit into the Montgomery G.I. Bill scheme, two thirds get no money at all, not even the amount that was deducted from their pay, and the programme made a profit of $720 million in its first 10 years, to 1995.

They say once you find out that the options you wanted aren’t going to be available to you after all, it’s too late to get out except with a dishonourable discharge which wipes out any pensions and healthcare you might have been entitled to and makes it hard to get anywhere in civilian life afterwards.

They say that pensions, benefits and healthcare are being dismantled leaving lots of them destitute. Around a third of homeless people in the US are military veterans. Two thirds of army families are living on food stamps or other public aid. It’s common for the Veterans’ Administration to refuse health claims arising out of military service, relating to depleted uranium, to Agent Orange and to radiation sickness for example.

Dick Cheney, more truthful than the military recruiters, which is a fairly damning indictment of the latter, declared that the military is “to fight and win wars… It’s not a jobs program.” Quite.

They also point out the comparative costs: the price of a blanket is roughly the same as that of a hand grenade. And it reminded me of the mourning tent in the entrance of the squatter camp at Shuala where Circus2Iraq used to go, the mourning tent for a two month old baby girl who, as Abu Ahmed put it, “died of the cold.” But there was no shortage of gunships to send to Shuala during the nation-wide uprisings in April.

Cheney, with all his shares in Halliburton, which has profited so handsomely from overcharging US taxpayers for meals it never served to soldiers and for petrol driven in from neighbouring countries, might also have said that the purpose of invading a country is “to make a lot of money for my company… It’s not a humanitarian programme.” Only he never did. In fact he said more or less the opposite.

The local Veterans for Peace group is trying to counteract some of the military influence in schools by getting vets into schools to talk about the truth of life in the army, the recruiters’ promises and war. The front row was filled with young Native American students.

Recruitment is not yet at such a stage in the UK but war video games, the economic draft, misleading TV ads and military access to schools are on the rise and need to be fought, by vets, teaching unions and all of us and by creating more alternatives, more co-ops, more training, more free education, more compelling non-party-based resistance movements that empower people to be part of something that’s ‘bigger than the individual’ but at the same time belongs to us.

Susanne, who started telling us about all this, used to teach public speaking at the University of Amsterdam to members of the International Relations course, students from 55 countries who would go home and run radio and TV. She’s married to a Dutchman who was part of the Dutch resistance during the Nazi occupation. He’d been, among other things, part of the camera group.

Water has been a continuing theme in what I’ve written from the south west. Flagstaff was no different. In a canyon we met a park ranger called Merl who was busy re-routing the trail away from the golf course, funded by the course’s operators who had got tired of things been thrown onto the course by walkers. It sucks up the water, Merl said, and by way of demonstration the sprinklers sprung into action among the cacti and the dust-dry rocks and ground.

“It sucks up the water and it’s ugly, but Conservancy tried to buy the land for $17 million and the tribal leaders said it was worth $30 million. Well, Conservancy couldn’t afford that, so the golf course people bought it.”

Past secoros, the tall cacti with upheld arms, past mobile phone masts that looked a little similar, Brenda told us about the many, many uninvestigated killings of Native Americans in the area. One was campaigning vociferously against the uranium mining in the area until he was found dead in his car with no apparent cause. Another was looking into some local corruption. He was murdered.

Brenda was looking into pollution problems from crop spraying flights and was threatened, told to stop, told to go and ask another would-be detective what would happen. He � I’ll call him A - told her he was campaigning against the crop sprayers. His neighbour was working in A’s garden and was shot dead, mistaken for A. Apparently the campaign was drawing attention to ‘Black Ops’ flights out of the air strip, flying weapons, drugs, people and so on to places the US was covertly supplying.

A local radio journalist got irate at us because it says somewhere on my website: “The media are lying to you.” A TV crew came down to the talk and did a piece from the angle that we were telling stuff you wouldn’t hear on the news, that the mainstream media in Iraq wasn’t getting out enough to tell the truth about what’s going on there.

Let me explain. The media are lying to us. They lie by printing misinformed or misleading stories or writing captions which deliberately misinterpret what a picture shows, as in a lot of the anti-capitalist protests where non-violent demonstrators have been attacked by police.

They lie by simply quoting the government and military spokespeople without investigation, as in the New York Times and many others on the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq.

They lie by trivialising or over simplifying, as with the environmental protests, especially the road protests: a real and common sense debate over the merits of road building? No, let’s just talk about lifestyles and hairstyles on a road protest camp.

They lie by filling their space with celebrity crap and neglecting to tell people that they’re being shafted by the World Trade Organisation, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Free Trade Area of the Americas, the Paris Club, the Carlisle Group and all the rest of them.

They lie by exclusion, simply not telling stories that don’t fit with their editorial line and in Bristol, where all the local newspapers, free sheets, entertainment and listings mags and commercial radio licences are owned by the same Northcliffe Group, that’s a pretty comprehensive lie.

They lie by telling us there’s nothing we can do, that things are the way they are because it’s the only way they can be and they lie because they’re all owned by the people who benefit the most from the status quo.

And Laurel, either you’re part of that and you’re lying too and you know it or else you’re not part of that, you’re part of the ‘alternative’ and you know that the rest of them are lying. If the cap fits, wear it. If not, keep fighting.