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Michael Massing | The Volunteer Army: Who Fights and Why? •
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Military Kin Struggle With Loss and a Windfall
By Lisa W. Foderaro
The New York Times
Saturday 22 March 2008
For some relatives of service members killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, the money
feels, at first, like an affront, as if the government were putting a price
tag on a loved one's life. Others are thrown off balance by the sudden
infusion of $500,000, spending with abandon to assuage grief or finding themselves
besieged by hard-up friends and relatives. And the newfound wealth often strains
relations among in-laws.
Three years ago, advocates for military families succeeded in winning a significant
expansion in survivor benefits, which include life insurance, a death gratuity,
medical care and housing and education assistance. But the increases have left
some widows and next of kin clearly rattled by the collision of mourning and
money.
"It's like winning the lottery, and your relatives all look at
you like you're a cash cow," said Kathleen B. Moakler, director
of government relations for the National Military Family Association, a nonprofit
advocacy organization. "Money makes people do strange things."
The parents of Sgt. Eli Parker of the Marines, killed by a roadside bomb in
Iraq, used the $500,000 to finance their retirement, remodel their house near
Syracuse and travel to Washington for the Marine Corps Marathon. After Sgt.
Dominic J. Sacco of the Army was killed three years ago by an insurgent attack
on his tank, his widow, Brandy, fielded requests for cash from family members
she had not talked to for years - as well as from her husband's
ex-wife and a woman in prison who claimed that Sergeant Sacco had fathered her
son.
Kayla Avery, whose husband was killed seven months after their West Point wedding,
invested most of the payout, but not before buying new bedroom furniture, a
Louis Vuitton wallet and a purple Coach bag to match her funeral clothes.
"I thought, 'Well, this is my husband's last Christmas gift
to me,' " said Ms. Avery, 25, a graduate student in psychology who
lives in Tennessee, near Fort Campbell, where her husband, First Lt. Garrison
C. Avery, was an Army platoon leader.
It is impossible to know how many survivors of the service members killed in
Iraq and Afghanistan have struggled with managing the benefits, and in interviews
with dozens of military families, only a handful were willing to talk specifically
about how they spent the money. Many families use the money to secure children's
futures, pay off mortgages, or otherwise make up for a long-term loss of income.
But experts on military families say that they are seeing a growing number of
problems, and that young widows - often naïve about finance and easily
seduced by the glamorous accouterments of pop culture - seem to be especially
vulnerable, trying to somehow fill emotional gaps with material things and ending
up in debt instead.
"When you face sudden death, and the death of someone your own age, you
think, 'I could die, too,' " said Joanne M. Steen, co-author
of "Military Widow: A Survival Guide" (U.S. Naval Institute Press,
2006). "All of a sudden you get hundreds of thousands of dollars, and
there's a perception that it's going to last forever, but it doesn't.
You're dealing with some really tumultuous emotions and unclear thinking."
In 2005, the so-called death gratuity - the sum given to survivors for
an active-duty death - jumped to $100,000 from $12,420, and the military's
group life insurance maximum rose to $400,000 from $250,000. Both are retroactive
to October 2001, covering the nearly 4,500 service members who have been killed
in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars since.
There are myriad other survivor benefits, too, many determined by specific
circumstances. Joyce Wessel Raezer, chief operating officer of the National
Military Family Association, said that a hypothetical widow of an Army corporal
based at Fort Drum, in upstate New York, with three years of service and two
young children would likely receive payments totaling $5,335 a month for the
first year. In addition, a spouse would get free medical care for three years
- the children into adulthood - and all would receive education
assistance.
Through private companies, the Department of Veterans Affairs provides insurance
beneficiaries the service of a professional financial planner for a year, but
a spokesman said that only one in 10 families uses it.
Bill Saunders, director of client services for the Armed Forces Services Corporation,
a private firm based in Arlington, Va., that offers military families advice
on such issues, said that survivors are often overwhelmed by grief when they
learn of the availability of financial advice, and that the military would do
well to remind them after a few months.
"The money all shows up in their accounts within days or weeks, where
there might have been $500 in there - ever," Mr. Saunders said,
referring to the lump sum of $500,000. "Many of these surviving spouses
are young, which means they've never done any kind of money management
or investing. So it's completely foreign to them. It's like saying,
'Hey, would you like me to teach you Russian tomorrow? Come down to my
office.' And they don't show."
Ms. Avery, the widow who bought furniture and a purse - but not the BMW
she coveted - credited her financial adviser with pushing long-term investment,
but said she knows some widows who are now destitute.
"I do know that there have been widows who used all the money by paying
cash for a house and paying cash for a car," she said. "If they
pay cash for a McMansion, they may not think about all the incidentals like
heat and water and phone and cable and taxes and furniture."
One widowed acquaintance, whom Ms. Avery declined to identify to protect her
privacy, ended up applying to the Army for an emergency relief loan after blowing
through the $500,000. "You have to have nothing - like the electricity
has to be getting turned off" to qualify for such a loan, Ms. Avery said.
"In grief, you're in such a state of shock that you don't
take into account that you won't have your husband's salary in six
months."
Mr. Saunders said that a widow called his office in January wondering if there
were any more monthly benefits she was entitled to (there were not). She had
apparently spent the initial lump sum without buying a house or making investments.
"I said, 'In that case, there's not much more your government
can do for you,' " recalled Mr. Saunders.
As they decide what to do with the money, survivors are often surrounded by
people with their hands out.
"It wasn't even two weeks after I had buried Nick, and I had people
asking me for money," recalled Mrs. Sacco, a 26-year-old nursing student
who now lives in Topeka, Kan., with her two children. "There were quote-unquote
friends whom I hadn't seen in a long time who wanted to come and support
me, but what they really wanted was money. It was pathetic."
Though Sergeant Sacco's ex-wife's attempt to get benefits was unsuccessful,
many survivors find themselves fighting over the military's money with
other family members, and rifts often develop between the late service member's
spouse and parents.
Rachelle Arroyave, 32, who lives in northern California, learned after the
2004 death of her husband, Staff Sgt. Jimmy Javier Arroyave of the Marines,
that his mother was the life insurance beneficiary, even though the couple had
two children and a baby on the way. Sergeant Arroyave's mother got $400,000,
while his wife received $100,000 from the death gratuity.
"I never thought to ask, and I take responsibility for not making sure,"
said Mrs. Arroyave, whose children are now 10, 6 and 3. "But it was my
husband. Why wouldn't he take care of his wife and children? We had our
whole lives planned out as to where we were going to retire and grow old together."
Research databases did not turn up a current home telephone number for Sergeant
Arroyave's mother, and efforts to reach her through relatives were unsuccessful.Because
of such situations, in 2005 the military began notifying spouses when service
members choose someone other than a spouse or a child as their insurance beneficiaries
or if the member declines the maximum coverage. This summer, as the law changes
to allow service members to designate the entire death gratuity to whomever
they wish, the military will require a similar spousal notification (now, half
the $100,000 gratuity must go to the next of kin).
But the hurt and awkwardness can cut both ways. Debra vonRonn, whose son, Sgt.
Kenneth G. vonRonn of the Army, died in a bomb explosion in Iraq in 2005, said
she felt the military heaped a disproportionate amount of attention on her daughter-in-law,
who received the official notification of death and was provided a car and driver
for the funeral.
"They were married for one year, but I had him for 20 years," Mrs.
vonRonn said. "I understand that the spouse comes first, but they really
need to pay a little more attention to the families. What about the parents?
What about the sisters?"
Regardless of who gets the money or how it is spent, the initial reaction to
the death gratuity can be viscerally negative. As Ms. Steen, a Navy widow herself,
wrote in her survivor's guide: "Some feel like they were paid off
for their husband's life."
When Karie Darga's husband of 12 years, Chief Petty Officer Paul J. Darga,
was killed in 2006 on his fourth tour in the Middle East, she received the first
$100,000 within the first few days.
"My casualty assistance officer handed me the check and I wanted to tear
it up and throw it right back at him," recalled Mrs. Darga, who lives
in Norfolk, Va. "It was almost like accepting the money meant truly acknowledging
that the death had happened."
But Donna and Renny Parker, the upstate New York couple who remodeled their
house, among other things, with the survivor benefits after their son was killed,
said it has "been a positive thing."
"I don't think it's blood money," Ms. Parker said.
"I just wish Eli was here to enjoy it."
Go to Original
The Volunteer Army: Who Fights and Why?
By Michael Massing
The New York Review of Books
03 April 2008 Issue
1.
In 2003, Colby Buzzell, then twenty-six, was living in a small room in a renovated
Victorian house in the Richmond district of San Francisco, doing data entry
for financial companies. Raised in the suburbs of the Bay Area, Buzzell had
hated high school and, deciding against college, ended up in a series of low-paying
jobs - flower deliverer, valet parker, bike messenger, busboy, carpet cutter,
car washer. Data entry paid somewhat better - about $12 an hour - but
even so he was barely able to get by. At one point, he ran into an old friend
who had joined the Marines, and, in his telling, military life sounded like
one big frat party, but with weapons and paychecks. After nearly a year of feeling
stuck, Buzzell decided to visit an Army recruiter. He describes his state of
mind in My War: Killing Time in Iraq,(1) an uproarious account of his life in
the military:
I was sick of living my life in oblivion where every fucking day was the same
fucking thing as the day before, and the same fucking routine day in and day
out. Eat, shit, work, sleep, repeat.
At the time, I saw no escape from this. I was in my mid-twenties and I still
had no fucking idea what the hell I wanted to do with myself....
I figured if I joined the military it might be a quick-fix solution to my problems,
it would add some excitement to my life, and at the same time give me the sense
that I had finally done something with myself. And who knows? A trip to the
Middle East could be one hell of an adventure.
Buzzell had a long rap sheet and a history of drug use, but, with his recruiter's
help, he made it through the application process, and before long he was off
to boot camp.
Many of the other recent books written by soldiers about their experiences in
Iraq offer similarly frank accounts of their paths into the military. In Love
My Rifle More Than You: Young and Female in the US Army,(2) Kayla Williams,
who joined the punk scene when she was thirteen and loved to drop acid, writes
that she joined in part to get away from one boyfriend who turned out to have
been married and to prove wrong another who had taunted her about her lack of
toughness. The promise of a regular paycheck did not hurt. "There are many
reasons to join the Army," she writes. "But without a doubt it's a
great way - leaving aside the whole prospect of getting maimed or killed - to
better your career prospects."
Joshua Key, in The Deserter's Tale: The Story of an Ordinary Soldier Who Walked
Away from the War in Iraq,(3) describes growing up in rural Oklahoma in a two-bedroom
trailer with his mother and alcoholic stepfather and working at a series of
minimum-wage jobs. At eighteen he got married and quickly had two sons but few
prospects of providing for them. "I had no money, I had dreams of getting
formal training as a welder, I needed to get my teeth fixed, and I wanted to
have my kidney stone removed," he writes. In the recruiting office, the
posters suggested that if he joined the military,
I would be on easy street. The armed forces were offering money for college
tuition, health insurance, and even a cash bonus for signing up. To top it all
off, military service would give me a chance to travel and discover a new way
of life.
In these books, the idea of joining the military to defend America or uphold
its values is largely absent. Rather, these soldiers signed up to escape dead-end
jobs, failed relationships, broken families, bills, toothaches, and boredom.
The armed forces offered a haven from the struggles and strains of life in modern-day
America, a place to gain security and skills, discipline and self-esteem.
Reading these accounts, I wondered how representative they were. Had the all-volunteer
force become a giant holding tank for slackers and misfits, for working stiffs
and small-town Charlies who felt stifled and stymied? What about the surge in
patriotism that had occurred after September 11? Did today's soldiers tend more
to resemble Pat Tillman, the NFL star who gave up a lucrative career to fight
terrorists, or Lynndie England, the Appalachian hellraiser who helped bring
us Abu Ghraib? In Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore showed military recruiters
prowling the boarded-up streets of Flint, Michigan, urging hard-up African-Americans
to enlist. Yet as recruitment figures show, the numbers of blacks joining the
Army has declined sharply, from 23.5 percent of all enlistees in 2000 to just
13 percent in 2006 - a result of the deep unpopularity of the Iraq war
in the black community.
As to why people join, I learned that every year the military conducts an annual
survey o new recruits which asks, among other things, their reasons for enlisting.
Dr. Curtis Gilroy the head of personnel policy at the Pentagon, said that in
the last several years one particula reason has risen in prominence: service
to country. The number citing this as their mai motivation went from 27.5 percent
of all responses in 2002 to 38.1 percent in 2006. (It was followed by skills
acquisition, cited by 20.2 percent, then by adventure, mentioned by 16. percent,
then by money for education, benefits, travel, and pay.) But Beth Asch of the
RAN Corporation, who does research for the Pentagon, says that such figures
should be handled wit care, since new recruits, when asked, often like to give
their decision an idealistic cast Furthermore, while patriotism has surged as
an announced motive, it is also the case that th Army fell 8 percent short of
its recruiting target of 80,000 in 2005 - its largest shortfall sinc 1979.
Since then, the Army has managed to meet its targets, but only by adding more
than thousand new recruiters and increasing the size of enlistment bonuses.
Clearly, the patrioti sheen of September 11 has been dimmed by the ongoing bloodshed
in Iraq
Amid these conflicting signals, it seemed a good idea to talk with some actual
soldiers. David Segal of the University of Maryland suggested I visit Fort Drum,
New York, home to the Army's 10th Mountain Division. Few units in the entire
military have been more frequently deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan than this
one. Also, the base is located in Watertown, in an economically depressed region
near the Canadian border where the young people would seem particularly ripe
targets for recruiters. And so in January I headed northward, intent on learning
more about who joins the US military, and why.
2.
In the early twentieth century, Watertown (population 27,000) had by some accounts
more millionaires per capita than any other town in America. Its wealth derived
from its many paper mills, perched on the banks of the Black River, which rushes
through town en route to Lake Ontario ten miles to the west. Some traces of
that former prosperity remain, in the stately houses that line Watertown's streets,
in the impressive stone churches that stand on its street corners, in the lovely
park designed by Frederick Law Olmsted that overlooks the town. Most of the
mills have long since closed, however, their owners having left for the south
and beyond, and at night the downtown is dark and largely deserted.
Commercial activity is now centered on Arsenal Street, a four-lane thoroughfare
connecting the town center to Interstate 81 two miles to the west. Here are
a Home Depot, Target, Best Buy, TJ Maxx, Staples, Starbucks, TGI Friday's, Denny's,
Bed Bath & Beyond, and many other totems of strip-mall America. Most of
these establishments have opened in the last ten years, a direct outgrowth of
the expansion of Fort Drum - today the town's main lifeline.
Drum's main gate sits seven miles northeast of Watertown, amid the silos, barns,
and dairy farms of New York's North Country, as this part of the state is known.
The base covers 107,000 acres, and, taken on an unofficial tour, I was struck
not only by its vastness but also its air of comfort. There are more than four
thousand units of housing here, grouped into tidy neighborhoods that look like
suburban subdivisions. Enlisted personnel with families live in large, modern,
two-family houses; officers get spacious single-family houses. There's a medical
clinic, a commissary, a post office, a library, an education center, a fire
department, a Girl Scouts post, a Burger King, and a hotel for visiting dignitaries.
Across from Hayes Hall, the command headquarters, is a monument plaza dedicated
to World War II and current soldiers from the division.
As a light-infantry unit, the 10th Mountain Division is prepared to deploy
rapidly by air, sea, or land anywhere in the world, and the base seems in a
state of perpetual preparation. It has a 10,000-foot runway, multiple airplane
and helicopter hangars, simulated-war centers, and fifteen miles of ranges where
soldiers can practice artillery and small-arms fire, among other exercises.
The mess hall would have been an ideal place to meet soldiers, but, unable
to gain access t it, I had to seek them off base. They were not hard to find.
There are some 17,000 soldier based at Drum (four thousand of whom are currently
deployed in Iraq), and they overwhel Watertown. I met them in bars, restaurants,
and one of the area's three Wal-Marts. I als interviewed them in Bradley's,
a military-supply store located near Drum's main gate. Housed i a compact cinderblock
warehouse, Bradley's offers everything the modern-day GI could want from decals
and patches to uniforms and boots. There's a barber shop, a sewing center to
attac nametags and insignia, and a TV always tuned to CNN. I introduced myself
to the owner and with his blessing, began buttonholing customers. While a few
politely declined to talk, most were more than willing (though some asked that
their names be withheld).
Among the first I approached was Jason Thomas Adams, a slender young man dressed
in a cook's white uniform. A twenty-five-year-old private from Brooklyn, Adams
had joined the Army only nine months earlier. He had never really expected to,
he told me - he'd wanted to be a police officer. After graduating from high
school, he had enrolled in the John Jay School of Criminal Justice. To help
pay the tuition, he worked at two jobs - Paragon Sports and a restaurant
on Second Avenue - but quickly went into debt.
Meanwhile, he got married, his wife got pregnant, and he had no health care.
From a brother in the military, he had learned of the Army's many benefits,
and, visiting a recruiter, he heard about Tricare, the military's generous health
plan. He also learned that the Army would repay his education loans. And so
he signed up. When I asked about September 11 and service to the country, he
said flatly that it had had nothing to do with his decision.
I heard similar accounts from several GIs I met that first afternoon in Bradley's.
There was the forty-year-old black woman from rural Georgia - the last
of thirteen children - who had joined because there were few jobs in her
area and she didn't have the money to attend college. She had also wanted to
travel and the military "was the only institution that gave that opportunity."
There was the twenty-six-year-old college graduate from Maine who, after graduating,
had gone to work as a teaching assistant at a local high school but quickly
realized that he "didn't want to do that for the next forty years";
rather, he wanted "to do something exciting and that could matter."
Fighting terrorism, he said, had not entered into his decision.
It had for Justin Klock. Raised in a small town near Madison, Wisconsin, the
son of a truck driver and a nail-salon worker, Klock told me that he had wanted
to join the Army since he was in kindergarten (his dad had been in the service).
As he got older, he said, "I wanted to do something good, to serve my country."
Not long out of high school, he said he was eager to go to Iraq so that he could
use the skill he had learned - dynamiting doors on house raids. "I
don't know where else you can get paid to blow things up," he said.
That initial group of interviews at Bradley's would mirror those I had throughout
my stay. I all, I would speak with about thirty soldiers, and roughly one of
every four would tell m that he had joined the military mainly for idealistic
reasons, for some larger cause. Often, i describing those reasons, these soldiers
would sound vague - "I've wanted to be a soldier since was young,"
they would say, or "my family has always served in the Army." (A family
history i the military features strongly in the decision of many enlistees.
From two or three, I heard something more considered. One night, on a visit
to Buffalo Wild Wings, a cavernous bar/restaurant on Arsenal Street, I approached
a table of young men who were drinking beer and munching on chicken wings. It
was an early Sunday evening and a playoff game between the Pittsburgh Steelers
and the Jacksonville Jaguars was blaring from the forty or so flat-screen TVs
that ringed the place. When I explained that I had come to Watertown to interview
soldiers about why they had joined the military, one looked at me defiantly
and said, "Nine eleven."
They invited me to sit down, and after I did, this soldier, who wore a Steelers
jersey and Pirates cap, elaborated:
I was sixteen at the time. I had always wanted to join the Army, but that moment - it
influenced me here, in my heart. I had job offers, but I wanted to fight for
my country - for the red, white, and blue. And to make my family proud.
It takes a select kind of person to join the military and risk his life for
his country.
Of all the soldiers I met in Watertown, no other spoke with more conviction.
Yet as we talked, he acknowledged that there was another reason for his decision:
he hoped to make a career in law enforcement, and joining the Army would, he
felt, help. So, even in this case, where patriotic concerns loomed large, considerations
of self-improvement played a part as well. Among most of the other soldiers
I spoke with, such considerations overwhelmed everything else. Over and over,
I heard soldiers talk about being hard-pressed to pay the rent, of having a
child and being without health care, of yearning to escape a depressing town
or oppressive family, of wanting to get out and see the world.
"I didn't want to work a minimum wage job, from paycheck to paycheck,"
went a sample comment from Shawn Miesowitz, a twenty-nine-year-old specialist
from Merced, California, with a wife and four-year-old daughter. "And I
wanted to get us out of Merced. There was only one thing there - to get
into trouble."
"I joined the Army because I couldn't afford to go to college," said
a twenty-four-year-old Haitian immigrant. "I was working as a garage inspector
at the Miami airport for $9.25 an hour. I want to be an electrical engineer.
I'm trying to save all I can."
"I thought it would look good on my résumé," said Joel
Malin, a twenty-two-year-old assistant chaplain. After graduating from college,
he told me, he had hoped to join a music ministry, but the churches he had approached
felt that he was too young. So he joined the military. Having recently married,
Malin found the health plan an added boon. "The military," he told
me, "is a very good landing pad for people who don't know what they want
to do."
had met Malin at the Parkside Bible Church, an evangelical congregation in
Watertow whose members include many soldiers and their families. If I were to
find GIs strongl committed to country, I felt, it would be here, among those
strongly devoted to God. Yet m interviews here were no different from anywhere
else. After the service, an hour-long mix o light music and uplifting sermons,
I retired to the Circle of Joy, a common room just off th main foyer, and there
I fell into conversation with a soft-spoken thirty-four-year-old secon lieutenant.
After graduating from college, he told me, he had planned to go into the busines
world, but, examining retirement packages, he'd concluded that the one offered
by the militar was far better than anything available in the private sector.
More generally, he said, he'd fel that a military lifestyle would suit him.
And it had. "You never have to guess what you're goin to do the next day,"
he said. "It's set for you.
He went on: "People who say they've joined the Army to serve their country
and don't care about anything else - I don't know where they are."
Benefits, he said, "are always talked about. They're sold by recruiters.
The cards they hand out - half of it is filled with the benefits you can
get. The pay chart used to stop at thirty years - now it goes beyond that."
After September 11, he observed, the number of people joining for patriotic
reasons went up. Since then, however, enlistment bonuses had risen steadily - a
measure of the difficulty recruiters faced. "Some of the money is just
ridiculous," he said.
Last July, after a two-month slump in recruiting, the Army introduced a $20,000
"quick-ship" bonus for enlistees willing to report to training camp
within thirty days. In just three weeks, more than 3,800 recruits - 92 percent
of the total - accepted it. With the addition of other enticements based
on job skills and education, new enlistees can earn up to $40,000 in signing
bonuses. Overall, the average bonus paid to Army enlistees jumped from $11,100
in 2005 to $16,500 in 2007. This is one of the main reasons why the Army has
been able to meet its recruiting goals in spite of the ongoing specter of serving
in Iraq.
Another is the relaxation of admission standards. In 2007, 11 percent of all
new recruits received "moral waivers" for being in trouble with the
law - double the proportion in 2003. Over that same period, the proportion
of enlistees who had finished high school fell from 90 to 71 percent - the
lowest level in twenty-five years. Due largely to the Iraq war, the Army now
includes far more recruits from the troubled, truant, tattooed ranks of the
population.
Still, from the survey data, and from my interviews, it seems clear that the
military does not consist of society's "dregs." Rather, it consists
mainly of young men and women who, raised in working- and lower-middle-class
families, yearn to make it into the middle class. Unable to achieve this in
the hypercompetitive and expensive market economy, they have instead sought
to achieve it in the Army. With its guarantees of housing, employment, health
insurance, and educational assistance, the US military today seems the last
outpost of the welfare state in America. (These comments apply mainly to the
Army's enlisted ranks; officers tend to come from the middle class.)
For many, joining seems to have been the right choice. While a few soldiers
told me that the regretted enlisting and couldn't wait to get out, many more
seemed pleased. One ha bought a condo in North Carolina and was planning to
retire there. A few spoke proudly of th skills they had gained. Others were
happy that they had had a chance to see Europe. Soldier with families offered
special praise for the military's health plan
All these benefits, of course, come at a price. As of the time of my visit,
104 soldiers from Fort Drum had died in Iraq and fifty-five in Afghanistan.
I heard story after story about the toll that the repeated deployments had taken - about
the broken relationships, the failed marriages, the soldiers coming home on
leave to find their girlfriends in bed with another man. I met one staff sergeant
who, setting off a bomb in Iraq, had lost part of his thigh and forearm, the
tips of several fingers, and the hearing in his right ear and who, disgusted
by the poor care he had received, was fighting to get more care managers for
the wounded at Fort Drum.
I met another staff sergeant who, overwhelmed by the violence he had seen in
Iraq, was determined not to return. "I've lost too many friends over there,"
he explained. He'd also lost his wife of fourteen years. "She got tired,"
he said sadly. "I was never home." In sixty days, he was due to deploy
again to Iraq, but, as he told me, "If it's a choice of going back or walking
away after eighteen years in the Army, I'll walk."
If he does, he will join the growing exodus of officers from the Army. The
flight of captains has been especially serious. Fed up with the constant disruptions
to their private lives, these battle-experienced junior officers have been leaving
in record numbers, and the Pentagon, desperate to stop them, has begun offering
$35,000 reenlistment bonuses. So far, it hasn't helped.
The younger recruits I met, having been deployed less often, seemed less affected.
Typical was Christopher McDonald, an articulate, ebullient twenty-two-year-old
I met at Rosa Violeta's, a family-run Mexican restaurant in downtown Watertown.
Raised in the projects of New York, McDonald said he'd had no intention of joining
the Army. Instead, he wanted to attend college. But after working sixteen hours
a day just to pay the rent, he realized he would never be able to afford it,
and so, after much hesitation, he enlisted. "Now I have thirty days of
paid vacation," he beamed as he finished his fajita. "And my wife
gets full coverage for everything for ten dollars a month." He said: "I've
been to China, Korea, and the Philippines. And I have a security clearance.
Who else can say that at twenty-two they have a security clearance, visited
three countries, and worked on a forty-million-dollar aircraft?" Joining
the Army, he said, "was one of the best decisions I ever made."
In the coming years, the military is going to have to attract many more people
like McDonald. Quite apart from the needs posed by Iraq, the Army is scheduled
to grow by 65,000 members by 2010. From where will these new recruits come?
As I discovered during my time in Watertown, the military has set its sights
on an especially vulnerable population.
3.
One afternoon, I was taken on a tour of Watertown by Carl McLaughlin, the director
of the Fort Drum Regional Liaison Organization, which is devoted to improving
the area's economy. As we drove along the Black River, we passed a phalanx of
stone buildings that had once housed Watertown's papers mills; today, they're
mostly warehouses. We also passed the sparkling white plant of Air Brake, a
manufacturer of brakes for trains that is the last remaining large industrial
employer in town. Its workforce, once numbering in the thousands, is now in
the low hundreds. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Watertown received a reprieve
of sorts from the prison-building boom that swept upstate New York. Three prisons
went up within twenty miles of town, each providing a slew of good-paying jobs.
Then, as the boost from that began to fade, Fort Drum began to expand. With
so many soldiers in need of housing, construction has thrived, and anyone who
can drop a plumb line or wield a hammer is doing well. Reflecting this, Jefferson
County, in which Watertown is located, is today one of the fastest-growing counties
in the state.
McLaughlin was nonetheless glum. "We're looking for something to provide
an economic shot above and beyond Drum," he told me. While the local unemployment
rate is low, most of the jobs are in retail and food and pay poorly. A few years
ago, Watertown managed to lure a telemarketing call center, which today has
seven hundred positions, but few of them pay more than $8 an hour. "What
we don't have is a lot of good-paying jobs," McLaughlin said. As a result,
he added, "our best export is our kids. They go away to get jobs elsewhere."
To learn more about those kids, I paid a visit to the Indian River Central
High School - one o three high schools in the area. In a meeting with its
guidance counselors, I learned that o the 176 students who graduated in 2007,
only eight had decided to join the military. When I sai this seemed low, one
of the counselors, Dennis Nortz, told me that "95 percent of our student
have an idea of what they want to do when they graduate. They want to go to
college." I Watertown, as throughout the United States, a college degree
is widely seen as a passport to th middle class. Yet getting one is a challenge
for many students. The per capita household incom in Jefferson County is about
$34,000 a year. With a four-year private college costing abou $30,000 a year,
few students in the area can afford to attend one. The state-run SUNY colleges
at $4,350 a year, are far more affordable, but room and board push the annual
cost to abou $15,000 - a burden for many families
That leaves the Jefferson Community College, Watertown's one institution of
higher learning. Of the 137 students at Indian River who went to college last
year, nearly two thirds went to Jefferson. Some of those students will eventually
transfer to four-year schools, but just as many will find themselves stuck financially.
In Canada and much of Europe, higher education is heavily subsidized by the
state, and the tuition at most institutions is nominal if not free. As a result,
practically anyone who wants to attend college and is able to meet the admissions
standards and pay for room and board can do so. In America, we've elected to
put our money elsewhere. In the 1990s, for instance, New York State faced a
choice between spending on prisons and spending on higher education. It chose
the former. As a result, New York today has state-of-the-art prisons and run-down
campuses. The SUNY system in particular has been starved of funds, and Governor
Eliot Spitzer, recognizing the economic value of an educated workforce, has
made revitalizing it a top priority. Until that happens, however, getting a
college degree will remain a tough proposition for many.
In the struggle of many young men and women to pay for a college education,
however, the military sees an opportunity. As a recent Defense Department report
observed:
The most dramatic social force affecting military enlistment is the interest
in college attendance. Youth are focused on education and work, with the Military
as an afterthought. The percentage of minorities completing high school is increasing,
and college is becoming a reality for a greater proportion of the minority population.
This increase in college aspirations and college attendance should be expected
to continue.
Already, the military, under the Montgomery GI Bill, offers soldiers up to $73,836
in tuition credits; it will also repay up to $65,000 in college loans. These
sums are likely to increase as the military moves aggressively to attract college-bound
Americans.
"The competition the military faces today isn't from Wendy's or McDonald's,"
David Segal of the University of Maryland told me. "It's colleges and universities.
The people the military wants aren't choosing between the military and fast
food - they're choosing between going into the military and going to college."
In today's America, the hunger for a college degree is so great that many young
men and women are willing to kill - and risk being killed - to get one.
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Notes
(1) Putnam, 2005.
(2) Norton, 2005.
(3) Atlantic Monthly Press, 2007.
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