Young fodder

I think the most dis­turb­ing thing about Amer­ica for me is the fre­quency with which I hear young teens talk about their friends leav­ing for boot camp. For a lot of other people vis­it­ing the US and hanging around with adult friends, I don’t think this would be as evid­ent. The war seems like an awful, per­vas­ive event that is on tele­vi­sion screens and rep­res­en­ted by “sup­port our troops” bumper stick­ers, but this is different.

This is 15- and 17-year-old girls talk­ing about their 18-year-old friend who goes to boot camp on Monday, or, yes­ter­day, one talk­ing about her older brother, who is des­per­ate to lose just two pounds so he can go. The girls say they’ll miss the guys, and I think, they’re wor­ried that they won’t come back, but I don’t think they truly know that the person who comes back from that war zone, injured phys­ic­ally or not, will not be the friend who left. I think war seems unreal, like another video game per­haps. Or maybe it’s all too real and just too big to face. I think they feel all that honor and pride rhet­oric that I know is designed to make them want to do this – after all, 

hawk_eye

talked all the time with me about honor and duty and what it meant to him, so it’s not like I don’t under­stand that these are import­ant motivators.

Before every movie we see, in amongst the ads and the trail­ers and the remind­ers to turn off your cell phone, there’s an ad for the National Guard. It barely men­tions the war, just one little off-the-cuff line about being deployed over­seas. The rest is about the thrill of serving your coun­try, sav­ing­people during dis­asters like Hur­ricane Kat­rina, rescue mis­sions. I wish rescue and infra­struc­ture units could be sep­ar­ated from fight­ing divi­sions. I wish there was an abil­ity to say “I want to pro­tect and rescue, but not to des­troy.” Just like I wish you could tick a box on your tax form to say “I don’t want my taxes to go the the mil­it­ary. K, thx, bye.”