Raleigh N&O: Recruiters fight long odds

[Pool Hall Ace]

Maybe someone should post this at freeperville. I'm sure there are many qualified young men over their willing to give their lives for their fuehrer.

Most telling paragraph: "Sometimes, Ariton said, it seems as if every kid in the county is smoking dope. About a dozen have flatly told him that it's not worth giving up the drugs, that they'd rather continue living at home, smoking up and working for fast-food restaurants."

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Call it 'Operation Frustration' -- In time of war, hundreds of calls yield few recruits

By JAY PRICE, Staff Writer

SMITHFIELD -- It was just 10 a.m., but already the young people of Johnston County had disappointed Staff Sgt. Marinica Ariton nearly 50 times.

Dozens hadn't answered the Marine recruiter's telephone call; others feigned interest with flat voices. One whom he approached on the street waved him off.

"They hear 'military,' and their minds just close," Ariton said.

In this era of war, repeated deployments and almost daily casualties, recruiting is hunting. It's door-to-door sales. Counseling. Coaching. Telemarketing. Mainly, though, it's an exercise in frustration management.

The frustration begins in the Pentagon and rolls downhill. This winter, the Army and Marines which provide most of the troops in Iraq and suffer nearly all the casualties began missing their monthly recruiting goals for the first time in years.

see the rest here: http://www.newsobserver.com/news/story/2299576p-8678651c.html

Here is one recruiter skulking around WalMart in search of recruits!

[Joey Liberal]

1. Join the Army or Marines and Die for Oil!

I'm glad that young people aren't enlisting. Resident Bush went AWOL rather than go to Vietnam, so why should young people want to go to Iraq?

[gratuitous]

2. And the oh-so-obvious conclusion is . . . ?

No one, not even the youngstupidfearlessbrave, feels this is worth the risk of dying. Iraq is NOT a threat to us, and never was. The military is NOT defending us from a foreign invader. Yeah, there are some young kids who are layabouts and on drugs. Oddly enough, there have been young people like that since time immemorial.

But young people don't want to die for the greater profitability of Halliburton, they don't want to become torturers, they don't want to sign up for indefinite, open-ended commitments that may never end except with their death or dismemberment. Maybe the recruiters are stupid enough to think that's a good deal, but the pool of young stupids has been pretty much exhausted by this point. The ones who are left have an all too clear picture of what enlisting means.

[Pool Hall Ace]

3. Sure, and I don't blame those kids one bit. At one time,

parents probably encouraged their undisplined, unmotivated teens to enlist. By now, I'm sure most parents have discussed this pointless war with their kids. I know if I had an aimless teen, I would find some other way to work with him on finding some goals, even if he delivered pizzas or flipped burgers for a while. And I would make darn sure he were informed about this war and this president.

I wonder how recruiters have been taught to respond to kids who say, "Why should I go over to Iraq just to line the pockets of President Bush and his buddies? I could be killed, or suffer a debilitating brain injury, or lose a limb, then come back and not even have adequate VA benefits."