Counter-recruiters

[G_j]

http://villagevoice.com/generic/show_print.php?id=69514&page=kamenetz&issue=0544&printcde=MzM5Mjk4NTE1OQ==&refpage=L255Y2xpZmUvaW5kZXgucGhwP2lzc3VlPTA1NDQmcGFnZT1rYW1lbmV0eiZpZD02OTUxNA==

Soldier for a different cause: Monique Dols
photo: Kate Englund

Coalition of the Unwilling
Counter-recruiters arm potential GI's with facts about the war in Iraq

by Anya Kamenetz
October 28th, 2005 5:41 PM

One Saturday this summer, Monique Dols, a Columbia University senior and a national leader of the Campus Antiwar Network (CAN), saw again why she has been working so hard to reach potential military recruits. "We were handing out flyers for an event with the brother of a military resister," Dols says of that day in Washington Heights. "Three 16-year-old cadets walked by in full military uniform. We started talking to them, and it turned out they were completely against the war. They had joined because it was an after-school program that provided structure and something for them to do. The priorities of a society that puts millions into military recruitment and continually cuts funding for after-school programs, that's backward, and that's the reality people are responding to."

When this column first covered counter-recruitment in January, the movement was a scattered, grassroots phenomenon, led by old-guard lefty organizations like the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors and Veterans for Peace. Since then, public opinion has turned decisively against the war in Iraq, and the active-duty army fell 8.5 percent short of its recruiting goals in the period that ended September 30, its worst year since 1979; the National Guard and army reserves did even worse. Counter-recruitment is growing into a truly broad, multigenerational, national movement that serves as a model for how diverse constituencies on the left can and should work together.

On November 17, the National Youth and Student Peace Coalition, another group formed after 9-11, will hold a National "Not Your Soldier" Youth and Student Day of Action. Another group called Not Your Soldier plans six regional weekend counter-recruitment workshops this year for teenagers. And on the weekend of October 22 and 23, the movement saw its first major national conference in Berkeley, California, co-sponsored by CAN and Military Out of Our Schools (MOOS), a Bay Area coalition.

An estimated 600 attendees from the Bay Area, the Northeast, and the Midwest, and even Katrina-affected students from the South, heard speakers and participated in workshops on how to spread the message that the military's promises can be misleading, and that kids do have other options to get jobs and pay for college. "I've been organizing in one capacity or another for over 25 years and I've never noticed something pick up and take off so quickly," says Susan Quinlan, a conference coordinator with MOOS. "The vast majority who are involved right now never did it before this past year. It's really just exploded into a lot of different communities."

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[uppityperson]

1. Go counter recruiters.

We have an active teenpeace/counter recruitment group in our small town. Many graduate highschool next yr and will carry on elsewhere. Good job young people, give other options to the suseptible.

[G_j]

2. very good to hear

that even in a small town, there is youth activism/resistance.
This is so important.

[G_j]

3. kICk