About a year ago, I was walking through Brooklyn, NY and saw a flier posted on a lamppost calling local citizens to action. Usually I love this kind of stuff, no matter what side of the issue I fall on- because I think America is made stronger when citizens care about the issues and participate- but this poster perplexed me. It was from a group called “Brooklyn For Peace” and called on citizens to protest military recruiting efforts in Brooklyn.

Last week, a Marine sent me an article from the AP that said that the Berkeley, CA city council had declared the US Marines at the city recruiting station “unwelcome intruders” and passed a resolution that encouraged the “Code Pink” organization to “impede, passively or actively,” the Marines’ recruiting efforts. The city council made clear their intention to find a way to get the Marines to leave.

This story is less about the actions of the Berkeley government and more about the attitudes and ideas of the protestors. As I’ve written on 2 Dinar before, I’ve always been an advocate of Americans who have questioned the Iraq war and speak their minds in general- I was the only person I knew writing letters to senators before the war started. But today, as the country slips into malaise about the war, protesters are displaying a variety of tactics ranging from incredibly bold to incredibly lazy and the war against recruiters is a perfect example of the latter.

Targeting military recruiters when you don’t approve of a war is pointless. Our military is an all-volunteer force and aside from actual warfighting, almost nothing is taken as seriously in the military as recruiting and keeping the force healthy. What is the protest’s desired goal- to scare recruiters out of town? (Unlikely.) To scare recruits away from joining? (More likely.) To somehow subvert the human resources strategy of the US military and end the war based on supply and demand? (Completely ridiculous.) Why aren’t the anti-war protestors targeting the war’s creators and facilitators and putting their time and effort into changing politicians’ minds? The people who control the future of America at war are not 25-year-old sergeants telling kids about college benefits outside the mall.

The recruiter targeting protest is an example of what is often called “hitting the closest alligator to the boat”- reaching out to the nearest, easiest target. While this is lazy and ineffective, it also sends the message that your own point of view is more important than others’ in your community and that you’d rather deny young Americans the opportunity to serve than take the fight where it needs to be taken.

It also displays a profound ignorance about the kinds of things our military does. During the Iraq war, I’ve known servicemen who have evacuated refugees from post-tsunami Indonesia and provided massive amounts of foreign aid to the coastal communities that were devastated in the event. They’ve gone to New Orleans to repair the levees and help protect homeless Americans. They’ve stood in Penn Station trying to give millions of daily commuters a small sense of security. The list goes on- our military doesn’t exist just to fight in Iraq. Our military protects and provides for people all over the world and all over our own country. And if citizens could get together some real political power, our military could have been used to stop the genocides in Rwanda and Darfur.

In one of the articles I read this week, there was a suggestion that Americans are supposed to know that Berkeley, CA is not the kind of place that the military should recruit in. Again, here is this primacy of the protesters’ perspectives- that their opinions outweigh the needs and desires of the rest of their community.

I grew up in a broadminded family in a liberal and very diverse neighborhood at the center of a famously liberal city. But ever since I learned about the military as a kid, I wanted to be a part of it. My parents never stood in my way and neither did my teachers or my friends (they encouraged me). I didn’t need the military to get “job training” or “status”- but nonetheless I still needed the military. I can’t possibly explain all the intangible and tangible ways serving as a Marine has affected me. Aside from the influence my parents had on me and the experience of growing up in New York, I can attribute nearly everything else about my character development to the US Marines. Should I have been denied the life I have today because someone in my neighborhood didn’t like the Clinton administration’s foreign policies?


What is also fascinating to me about the Berkeley story is that the right wing wasn’t able to let this episode get by without jumping on the opportunity to beat up the liberals - while using the military once again as the stick. In this case, six Republican senators drafted the “Semper Fi Act” which would punish Berkeley by re-appropriating $2 million worth of earmarks for their city and university to the Marine Corps.

This is as idiotic as the protests themselves and almost more insulting given the misappropriation of our motto. Yet again, politicians are politicizing the US military, and waving us around for their own gain. This will only tarnish the brand of the US Marines- in one of the very places where Americans clearly need to be educated and understand that the Marine Corps is not a political entity but an asset that exists simply to serve Americans. The whole situation is a confrontation between two political forces and the subject of debate- the US Marine Corps, caught in the middle- is essentially irrelevant.


I hope that Americans realize that the war against recruiters is an opportunity wasted. It’s lazy, it’s ineffective, and it makes people angry without forcing them to confront the real issues. Trying to end a war you don’t believe in is honorable, but screwing around in recruiting station parking lots is a waste of everyone’s time. If you want to solve a problem, you have to go straight to the source. I learned that in the US military.


Further Reading: NY Times AP Via SF Gate Bay Area NBC Marine Corps Times