a recruiters son_
By Matt Pascarella | The Progressive Magazine, March 2006

My Friend’s Wedding

As I scanned the backyard and saw my friends talking, I remembered the drive out the day before. On Route 80, the cars came to a sudden stop outside Hazelton. There was some construction, so all of the cars merged over to one lane. As I sat in the car inching toward the exit sign, I remembered when my friends and I would go up to Hazelton to play punk shows with our band. People would drive by and see us outside as we were lugging the equipment into the venues and would honk and give us the finger.

At the wedding last year, with my designer starched shirt and expensive tie on, I watched my friend get married. He had traded in his mohawk for a high-and-tight and his leather jacket for a coat decorated with chevrons, ribbons, and awards. He was posing for photos with his new wife. They were just married a few hours earlier at a small church across from the town park. It was a cliché moment, a scene from an after school special. On cue, I silently asked, “What the hell happened to us?”

We used to ask a version of that question after a night of partying. But this time when the question came to mind, it was far more staggering than waking up with a blaring headache and dry mouth, suffocating from the stench of my own breath, wondering what happened the night before. This headache was real, and wouldn’t go away with a few aspirins and a can of Schlitz.

I needed to know why.

After a while I decided to talk to my friend’s best man. He was still in uniform from the wedding ceremony and stood in the yard looking out over the hills and farms that stretch south towards Harrisburg.

"I was lucky I was in Baghdad," he told me, as he dragged on his cigarette.  "The rest of the country is a mess. Let’s hope we’ll be in Baghdad this time."

I couldn’t bring myself to talk to my friend about it. On his wedding day, I doubt he wanted to be reminded of what might lie ahead of him.

My newly married friend and his best man will be in Iraq in a few short months on orders from the 10th Mountain Division, headquartered at Fort Drum, New York.

I looked over at his stepdaughter, she’s only a few years old, and I began to remember.

Being Seven Years Old in 1990

We would arrive at Fort Drum military base daily. As we approached the barricaded entrance, the soldiers would signal us in after close inspection of our ID cards. They wore a thick black cuff on the upper right arm of their uniforms with stitching in big white letters that said, MP, Military Police. The NCOs had their pants tucked neatly into shiny black boots, and their M16 machine guns hung from a strap over their shoulders. Their faces were indistinguishable, shadowed by the brims of their helmets strapped to their heads.

We drove on to the base passing rows of white buildings, and I would sit in the back seat of our little red Ford Festiva, trying to read the signs:  10th Mountain Division Headquarters, Commissary, Central Intelligence Division.  The signs stuck out of the snow like the classic images from children’s books about the North Pole.

Our small car galloped over the railroad tracks after railroad tracks as we funneled deeper into the center of the installation. A siren would sometimes go off, and my mom would pull the car over. We’d jump out and stand on the side of the road as the notoriously bitter wind from Lake Ontario, only twenty minutes north, blew onto our faces. While Taps played on the base’s PA system, we would salute the nearest flag. Then we’d hurry back into the car and continue down the wide roads, passing tanks, helicopters, and humvees.

Once we finally got to the post office, my brother and I would sit in the car and wait in silence. The ride home would be just as quiet. Sometimes we would stop at the mess hall for dinner. It cost only a few dollars, and they gave you a lot of food. Waiting in line next to soldiers back from training, I would hear them talk about how they were in the field for weeks and that this was their first cooked meal since they left.

As time went on, I started to notice, from the back seat of the little red car, that the tanks, helicopters, and humvees, along with the uniforms of the soldiers in the mess hall, were changing from a deep green, dark brown, and black camouflage, to the color of sand. There were fewer and fewer soldiers in the mess halls, less equipment to pass in the car, and more MPs stationed at the barricades.

The President was on TV staring at me. We all sat in our living room, waiting for him to speak. From the corner of my eye, I noticed the pressed uniform that hung on our door leading down to the basement. Next to it, a pair of shined boots rested, and a camouflage hat sat on top of them.

After the President finished speaking, the screen flashed pictures of deserts, tanks, helicopters, humvees, and soldiers. I realized then why things had gone from the green, brown, and black to the shades of brown.

And I realized the power one person could have over my life in a split second power exerted by someone who did not, nor could ever, really know me and anything about my life. I was confronted with an overwhelming sense of weakness a feeling that I had never known prior to that moment. Once again, I looked over at the boots, the uniform, and the camouflage hat in the next room, and I crashed at full speed into the realization that there was nothing I could do about it.

I had just turned seven years old, and in a span of a few minutes my childhood passed before me. All it would take was a slip of paper in that shiny bronze box at the post office to send my mom to war.

I am still a soldier’s son

My mom never did get deployed during Operation Desert Storm. After working in many different domestic assignments, she eventually became a full-time Army Medical Corps recruiter.

She believes in what her recruiting badge represents. According to the U.S. Army Recruiting Command, The Circular band alludes to the continuous need of the Army for young men of quality in its ranks. The eagle stands for federal authority, and the upraised wings and flaming torch refer to the many opportunities for advancement through education and training offered by the modern Army.

Recruiting is a vicious business. You have to balance a sense of patriotic duty and idealism with the reality that you may very well be sending your applicant off to war. Yet the work can be truly rewarding for my mom. She has helped kids to go to college and helped them get the health care their family needs. My mom has also helped them fulfill their goal of simply wanting to serve our country.

She gets flack for that – in surprising places.

Last year, she told me how she stood in line in the base’s medical clinic when a man in front of her noticed her uniform and told everyone to stand clear.

Then he said, “Oh, never mind, she’s just an ‘airman.’ ”

She replied, "Sir, I am not an airman.  I am a Sergeant in the United States Army."

He looked at her rank pinned to her lapels and then noticed her recruiting badge. It was gold with three sapphire stars. She was one of the top recruiters in the Army.

You are a liar, he said. "You are a recruiter, and you are a liar."

He, too, was in uniform. He knew nothing about her own turmoil after learning that her son’s friend was about to be shipped into Iraq and that it was her old squad that had recruited him.

"Right now, I am in sniper school, my friend e-mailed me recently.  I am getting a lot of good training, and I am looking forward to applying some of it in Iraq later this year."

My mother is once again on the highway, headed to another appointment to try to get another doctor, dentist, or nurse to enlist. My friend is about to cross the border into Iraq with the 10th Mountain Division. And I feel once again like that seven-year-old sitting in front of the TV, noticing the uniform, those boots, and that camouflage hat.           

 

Matt Pascarella is a researcher, writer and producer for investigative journalist Greg Palast. You can view his reports on BBC Newsnight TV, in Harper's Magazine, and at www.GregPalast.com.