Not my kid

Hey, so they're sending them mental patients and junkies? Who's gonna notice?

Army Recruiters Say They Feel Pressure to Bend Rules

By DAMIEN CAVE

It was late September when the 21-year-old man, fresh from a three-week commitment in a psychiatric ward, showed up at an Army recruiting station in southern Ohio. The two recruiters there wasted no time signing him up, and even after the man's parents told them he had bipolar disorder - a diagnosis that would disqualify him - he was all set to be shipped to boot camp, and perhaps Iraq after that, before senior officers found out and canceled the enlistment.

Despite an Army investigation, the recruiters were not punished and were still working in the area late last month.

Two hundred miles away, in northern Ohio, another recruiter said the incident hardly surprised him. He has been bending or breaking enlistment rules for months, he said, hiding police records and medical histories of potential recruits. His commanders have encouraged such deception, he said, because they know there is no other way to meet the Army's stiff recruitment quotas.

"The problem is that no one wants to join," the recruiter said. "We have to play fast and loose with the rules just to get by."

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Yesterday, the issue drew national attention as CBS News reported that a high-school student outside Denver recorded two recruiters as they advised him how to cheat. The student, David McSwane, said one recruiter had told him how to create a diploma from a nonexistent school, while the other had helped him buy a product to cleanse traces of marijuana and psychedelic mushrooms from his body. The Army said the recruiters had been suspended while it investigated.

By the Army's own count, there were 320 substantiated cases of what it calls recruitment improprieties in 2004, up from 199 in 1999, the last year it missed its active-duty recruitment goal, and 213 in 2002, the year before the war in Iraq started. The offenses varied from threats and coercion to false promises that applicants would not be sent to Iraq. Many incidents involved more than one recruiter, and the number of those investigated rose to 1,118 last year, or nearly one in five of all recruiters, up from 913 in 2002, or one in eight.
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Recruiting has always been a difficult job, and some say the scandals that have periodically surfaced are inevitable. But the temptation to cut corners is particularly strong today, some experts on the military say, as deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan have created a desperate need for new soldiers, and as the Army has fallen short of its recruitment goals in recent months, including April.

"The more pressure you put on recruiters, the more likely you'll be to find people seeking ways to beat the system," said David Segal, a military sociologist at the University of Maryland.

Over the last six months, the Army has relaxed its requirements on age and education - a move that Mr. Segal says may lead recruiters to go easier on applicants, with the expectation that those who are unqualified now may be deemed eligible later on.

Recruiters, who typically work far from commanders in storefront offices, are the Army's primary gatekeepers. They are required to press applicants to disclose any police record or medical problems, from asthma to knee injuries, that could disqualify them.

But applicants can lie, or withhold damaging information. So recruiters are expected to check court, educational and criminal records to confirm details and search for others that have not been disclosed. The records are checked by senior officers and then sent to a regional processing office that arranges aptitude and medical tests; it may check into problems revealed in the files but largely depends on the digging done by recruiters.

The two cases in Ohio show just how badly the system can veer off track. In the case of the 21-year-old who had just left a psychiatric ward, it is not clear what he revealed when he approached recruiters in September. He could not be reached for comment through court-appointed lawyers and his parents, who asked that he not be identified.

But details of the young man's troubled past could have been easily found on the Web sites of local courts. County court records show that he was arrested in July and charged with assault; though the charge was dismissed after his accuser failed to appear in court, the records could have raised a red flag.

Probate court records show that in a case later last summer, a judge committed the man, finding him a danger to himself and others after he showed up at his parents' door bloodied and disoriented. He was released in late September under the guidance of a treatment program.

Recruiters are not required to check probate court records unless they are made aware of a specific case. But the man's parents said they did just that.

After hearing that he had enlisted, they said, they wanted to make sure the Army understood his condition. They said they went to the recruiting station with the probate court record, gave recruiters the court's Internet address and even showed photos of their son. The recruiters, they said, claimed they had never seen him. "They acted sympathetic," the father said.

The parents say they went back twice more after the recruiters failed to return their calls. At their urging, their congressmen in early October finally learned that the recruiters had indeed enlisted their son. Days before he was scheduled to ship out, the young man was disqualified only after the father told the commander of the regional processing station about his illness.

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He said that in the last year, he had seen recruiters falsify documents so that applicants could earn ranks they were not qualified to hold. When enlistees tested positive for marijuana, he said, recruiters coached them to drink gallons of water before visiting military doctors. Occasionally, the recruiter said, he has been ordered to conceal police records and minor medical conditions like attention deficit disorder, which usually disqualifies a candidate. When he and others resisted such orders, he said, superiors threatened to ruin their careers.

The recruiter, who has fought in several conflicts including the current war in Iraq, said one in every three people he had enlisted had a problem that needed concealing, or a waiver. "The only people who want to join the Army now have issues," he said. "They're troubled, with health, police or drug problems."

The recruiter said he believed in the Army and his job, often working 80-hour weeks. But he sometimes worries about the mental capabilities of those who are enlisted, he said, especially as they move up the ranks.

"If they are in a leadership position and they're sending 10 or 11 people all over the place because they can't focus on the job at hand," he said, "we're in trouble."

This is watching the Army self-destruct.

ADD is bad enough. Imagine ordering a complicated route march or a flanking maneuver to Private ADD and his mind is looking at a highway marker. And then, for fun, you get Pvt. Asthma, Pvt. Pothead, and Pvt. Sneakthief all walking alongside you. I mean, one out of every THREE? This is how we got to My Lai, with Project 100,000 draftees.

Ah, Project 100,000.

By 1966, President Johnson was fearful that calling up the reserves or abolishing student deferments would further inflame war protesters and signal all-out war. And so, even after McNamara began privately declaring the war was unwinnable, the defense secretary devised Project 100,000.

Under his direction, an alternative army was systematically recruited from the ranks of those who had previously been rejected for failing to meet the armed services' physical and mental requirements. Recruiters swept through urban ghettos and Southern rural back roads, even taking at least one youth with an IQ of 62. In all, 354,000 men were rolled up by Project 100,000. Touted as a Great Society program that would provide remedial education and an escape from poverty, the recruitment program offered a one-way ticket to Vietnam, where "the Moron Corps," as they were pathetically nicknamed by other soldiers, entered combat in disproportionate numbers. Although Johnson was a vociferous civil rights advocate, the program took a heavy toll on young blacks. A 1970 Defense Department study disclosed that 41 percent of Project 100,000 recruits were black, compared with 12 percent in the armed forces as a whole. What is more, 40 percent of Project 100,000 recruits were trained for combat, compared with 25 percent for the services generally.

Wow, who says history doesn't repeat itself.

The Army's major roadblock is parents, who for some reason, don't want their kids to get crippled or killed in Iraq.

What is so bad about this is that when you take the dropout/junkie set, is that they are likely to wind up in combat and there goes unit cohesion. Forget all the nonsense about gays harming unit cohesion. If that was the case, there wouldn't be a military hospital functioning. But what does kill unit cohesion? Thieves, junkies who fall asleep on watch, racists, the scum of America. A lot of people don't get that the Army, before Iraq, got the best poor and working class kids, some with a little ambition and some patriotism. The military was a way to a stable future in peacetime. But in war, it's a short trip to the VA or the Veteran's Cemetery. So people with other options, like Wal-Mart, are doing anything to avoid Iraq.

What's worse, is the haphazard, careless way veterans are treated. Demands to pay back money after grievous wounds, arguments over disability and treatment. A nightmare which makes veterans reluctant to let their kids join up, forget civilians.

We are reaching the end of the road. Drafting the losers creates real problems and both the Marines and Army have missed their recruitment goals for the third straight month.

You have a morally bankrupt Army, which on one hand, allows West Pointers to collect million dollar salaries while shirking Iraq, while sucking in kids who are likely to get their fellow soldiers killed. You cannot just recruit losers and expect them to perform. The Army tried this before and it nearly ruined the Army. When you allow people with low intelligence and criminal backgrounds into the Army, especially combat units, you are creating the conditions of disorder, fraggings, combat refusals. Why? A lack of trust. When you no longer trust the men in your unit, and every one has one Sgt. Akbar, who's not exactly stable, then it's dangerous. When you have a collection of Sgt. Akbars, that unit ceases to function. Everyone then turns to self-survival.

The clock is ticking on our stay in Iraq. Either we start drafting soldiers, and given the open hostility to recruiters, that's hardly feasible, or we leave Iraq. No foreign legion, no bribes will be enough. The Army is wasting away before our eyes.

posted by Steve @ 12:39:00 AM