Category: svhaitsma

Does the Military Really Instill Discipline?

By Susan Van Haitsma

Dissident Voice

As my military veteran colleague and I arranged our literature table near the high school cafeteria with materials about alternatives to military service, the armed police officers assigned to the school were our first customers. They glanced at our brochures, gave us a look that said, “You people mean well, but get real,” and launched the D-word argument we’ve come to expect wherever we go.

“D” is for discipline, and it has become a central talking point for us, also. Step away from the notion of discipline as enforced order and punishment, says Thomas Heikkala, a Vietnam veteran in our counter-recruitment group who is keen on exploring deeper meanings of the word. Recall the Latin roots, which derive from the verbs, discere: ‘learn’ and docere: ‘teach’. Only when the word entered the English language did it come to mean ‘maintenance of order’. The three synonyms for discipline listed in my Random House dictionary are chastisement, castigation and correction.

Discipline means paying attention, Thomas explains. Attention is energy. You know how you can feel the energy level wane if someone with whom you are talking lets their mind wander? What one pays attention to in life is a discipline, a course of study. Thomas wants young persons to understand that a healthy, functioning society depends on people developing their natural gifts in many disciplines. As he told students during a recent campus rally, his experience in Vietnam showed him that “becoming a soldier short-circuits one’s life.” The military takes away the would-be “farmers, bakers, plumbers, teachers, bus drivers, caregivers, students, and all the other nonmilitary life-sustaining skilled persons who are sorely needed everywhere.” The institution charged with protecting our way of life is actually destroying it.

Another friend, a teacher, describes the learning process this way: “The truth is already in the student, so we don’t pound anything in there, we only draw it out.” If what the military pounds into soldiers really leads to well-disciplined lives, why are military bases surrounded by pawnshops, payday lenders, strip clubs, brothels and bars? The hyper-regimentation of military life can paradoxically lead to compulsive and addictive behaviors that are major obstacles to disciplined self-control.

I have heard veterans speak about discipline enforced in the military as a form of institutionalization that creates dependency on the system and leaves them feeling stranded upon their return to the civilian world. They cite challenges with money management, job retention and family responsibilities. “I was a robot,” said one Army veteran I spoke with recently. Sometimes the truth within soldiers becomes so suppressed they lose touch with it altogether. Suicide is a very real danger among soldiers who no longer recognize themselves. When Thomas talks to students, his concern for them is palpable. He wants each of them to realize their full potential, for their own sake and for the sake of the community of which they are a crucial part.

My own community, my immediate neighborhood, provides inspiration for the well-disciplined life. My next-door neighbor is a professional musician whose daily practice I have come to appreciate not only for the music but also because of the reminder to attend to my own disciplines. When I asked my neighbor how much he practiced his instrument, he replied, “Two hours every day. if I miss, I lose ground. When I am gearing up for a performance, then I get closer to 3 hours a day. The way I see it is two hours is good to keep growing a little at a time. One hour a day and I am declining. Three hours a day and the growth is more rapid and pronounced.” He has been practicing this way for 25 years.

My other neighbor happens to be a Zen Buddhist center. I observe the walking meditations, the work retreats and daily sittings that begin before dawn. The practice of mindfulness is the essential discipline. Breathing, eating, walking, working – every experience is its own end, to be experienced fully in the present. Deep listening can lead to deep compassion. Seeking healing from the trauma of war, many combat veterans have been drawn to the Zen discipline of attending to the present moment. There’s a difference between paying attention and standing at attention.

US Representative John Lewis spoke in Austin, Texas recently to keynote a Civil Rights symposium celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Apparent in film clips and his own vivid account of the famous march he led across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama in 1965 was the dignified orderliness of those who walked, two by two, facing mounted police who wielded clubs and teargas. Lewis emphasized the discipline required in the practice of nonviolence. In striking contrast, the uniformed civil servants upholding “law and order” were the perpetrators of mayhem and destruction.

Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “The hope of a secure and livable world lies with disciplined nonconformists who are dedicated to justice, peace and brotherhood.” He knew that peace isn’t simply the absence of war, as he knew that justice is more than fairness. Peace and justice both require the daily practice of brotherly love. It’s a discipline of mindfulness, of deep listening and enlightened self-control that cannot be pounded into us. It’s a discipline that can transform our self-indulgent, short-sighted society, and each of us must determine the hours necessary to progress – rapidly, or a little at a time.

By Susan Van Haitsma

CommonDreams / DissidentVoice

The woman who sat next to me during a recent Greyhound trip was a working class widow returning to Michigan from San Antonio, Texas, where she had traveled to attend her grandson’s Air Force training graduation. She wore a sweatshirt that read “Air Force Grandma” in star-spangled lettering, and she clutched a cowboy hat, a parting gift from him.

I told her that I was an Air Force sister-in-law. When I asked why her grandson had chosen the military, she hesitated a moment and said, “He’s a good kid. His father pushed him to do it because he was 22 and he didn’t have a plan.”

Some enlist in the military because it is a plan they have had for a while. But most enlist because, like my seatmate’s grandson, they don’t have a clear direction in life or there is trouble with the direction they’ve taken. A well-timed pitch from a recruiter seems to provide the answers. In the United States, where great value is placed on opportunity and personal freedom of choice, how is it that young adults feel their options in life are so limited, and why would they gravitate to an institution that suppresses their own individuality?

Teachers, parents and counselors work overtime to steer high school students toward promising futures, but real obstacles exist. College tuition rises as money for grants dwindles. Costs of living go up while living wages become less attainable. More college students juggle work, school and family responsibilities, lengthening the time they take to earn degrees. Federally funded programs that help guide high school students toward colleges and careers are facing elimination by the Bush administration.

Investing in war means less money is available to educate young people when, at the same time, more funds are allocated to transform young people into soldiers. According to a recent report in the Washington Post, the government is now spending approximately $16,000 per recruit just to recruit them. One hand of the government takes away options for young people while the other hand pushes them in the direction of the armed forces. It’s a deadly maneuver.

I’d like to place all the blame on the Bush administration for maintaining this insatiable war machine that eats our young. But I think we all share responsibility. If we pay income taxes, recruiters are on our payroll. I have heard the same good-hearted school counselors, teachers and parents who are passionate about college also say that there are “some” kids who would be “better off in the military.” Maybe there is a behavior problem, and they think more discipline would help. Or they think some kids “just aren’t college material.” Being a soldier seems a better risk than “a life on the streets.”

Even students express similar sentiments. In an opinion survey of local public high schools in which students are asked to write down what they think about the Iraq war, recruitment in their schools and the possibility of a draft, the most frequent combination of views is reflected by this student’s response: “The war is crap because we’re fighting for nothing. The military recruiting is good because the people who want to fight for our country can. The draft is, well, it sucks.”

Why is it O.K. for “some” kids to “choose” to be soldiers while others of us transfer our share of the risk onto their shoulders? Why is it O.K. to transfer the risk to any kids at all?

Near the end of my Greyhound trip, my seatmate quietly confided that the most difficult moment during her San Antonio visit had been hearing her son tell her grandson as they parted company, “Just keep on walking. Don’t look back,” and watching as the young man squared his shoulders and followed his father’s orders.

We have a propensity in this country, and surely our current administration does, to keep our eyes on the future. Perhaps it’s a brave and rather hopeful outlook, but it makes us disinclined to understand ourselves, our history and what we could learn from our mistakes. We also have a fondness for gambling, which is another way of ignoring the past in favor of unlimited if unrealistic possibilities of the future.

The Air Force Grandma and I both are gambling that our loved ones will not die in war. If we look at our gamble collectively, however, there are no odds in our favor. If we are really a human family and a global village, we know that our loved ones include Iraqis, Afghanis and every soldier we send into battle.

A recent NY Times article on military recruitment described the guilt consuming one Army recruiter who had learned that 3 soldiers recruited by his station, one by him personally, had been killed in combat. He wondered if he would be considered responsible for their deaths.

We all recruited those young men. How could we have forgotten that children are our only future?

Mixing Guns, Schools, and the Messages we Give our Kids

By Susan Van Haitsma

One hour before 16 year-old Jeff Weise began shooting his classmates, I was standing in a high school hallway a thousand miles due south of Red Lake, Minnesota, staring at the image of another young man in a flak jacket brandishing an assault weapon. The US Navy recruiting poster, the largest item on a bulletin board labeled “Student Activities,” was captioned with the slogan, “The Timid Need Not Apply.”

The slogan was printed in digital-style lettering – an appeal, I expect, to the geeky and the gawky alike. According to reports, Jeff Weise was some of both. While I can’t say whether the increased militarization of US high schools played a role in Weise’s fateful decision to go on a killing spree, the mixed messages students receive in school about guns and killing are bound to influence this impressionable age group in significant and sometimes deadly ways.

The Red Lake shootings no doubt will be used to argue for “beefed up security” in high schools across the country. In my district, students must have ID’s and are prohibited from bringing into school items such as nail clippers and water pistols. At the same time, guns enter schools every day on the belts of full-time police officers and in the glossy advertisements of military recruiters who represent the biggest arms traders in the world.

Elsewhere in the school I visited on March 21 were brightly colored posters urging cooperation and tolerance. Perhaps students breeze by these and the recruiting posters without much thought, but it is harder to ignore the recruiters themselves who roam the hallways in uniform, talking to students, drawing them in. It is also hard to miss the flashy recruitment ads on the TV “news” programs piped into the high schools, the Army cinema vans that target schools around the country and the phone calls that students receive at home from recruiters who won’t take no for an answer. Recruiters hang around school bus stops handing out their cards, and they show up for college and career fairs to entice students with enlistment bonuses and education benefits.

A Veterans for Peace colleague and I were in the school during the lunch period to share information with students about alternatives to the military. Two US Marine recruiters stopped by our table. One of them had seen combat in Iraq and wanted to make sure we understood the duty he felt to his family and country to keep wars away from US shores. Later, I wondered if, when he heard about the Red Lake shootings, he caught a glimpse of the futility of his goal and the myriad ways that wars always come home.

During our tabling, we conduct a survey asking students to share their views about the Iraq war, military recruitment in their schools, and a draft. On blank legal pads, they offer thoughtful, earnest responses. A solid majority opposes the war, and responses are overwhelmingly anti-draft. Even pro-war students react strongly to the loss of personal freedom that a draft signifies. Views about military recruitment tend to be tolerant of recruiters, but at this school, more than half who responded on the recruitment issue expressed serious concerns. One student wrote, “The military should come by less often because it makes the students here a little nervous. It brings some fear into the school and an obligation to join a program to which not everyone agrees.” Recruiters were described as “dangerous” and “pushy”.

“The Timid Need Not Apply.” The implication, of course, is not only that strong people use big guns, but also that peacemakers are weaklings. Why does this myth linger? Even a cursory review of US Civil Rights history reveals the sheer guts involved in confronting terrorism without body armor and weaponry. And if one cares to look, courageous peacemaking goes on in every corner of the world in the face of widespread brutality and injustice. In recent news, there were the Palestinian children who, carrying palm fronds and olive branches, faced armed soldiers as they marched along with international supporters and donkeys toward Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. Georgetown University students accomplished a hunger strike calling for living wages for campus custodial staff. And there were the Iraq veterans and family members of enlisted soldiers who took special risks speaking out against the war during the hundreds of vigils, rallies and marches on the second anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. Did Jeff Weise know that peacemaking requires the bravest hearts of all?

The day after our high school tabling, I paid a visit to a US Navy recruiting center to ask what they knew about the poster I’d seen and if they thought it was appropriate to display in schools. The lieutenant in the office wouldn’t comment and referred me to the regional public affairs officer, who cheerfully informed me that the Navy Seal depicted in the poster represented “the most fiercely combat-ready Special Forces program in the Navy,” and she felt high school students had a right to know this was an option for them. “Just like college is an option,” she said. She stressed that the Modified M-4 military assault rifle displayed on the poster was not available anywhere other than in the military.

While I was waiting for the US Navy recruiting center to open (it was late), I’d stopped into the US Army recruiting center nearby. I wanted to ask what strings are attached to the hefty enlistment bonuses now being offered to recruits. When my conversation with the bristling recruiter moved into the subject of war and peace, he suddenly pulled out his pocketknife and opened it. “See this?” he said, with an intimidating gesture. “This can be used either for good or for bad.”

For the life of me, I can’t think of any good that is done with an assault rifle, military-issue or not.