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Why Terrorism Won't Improve Military Recruiting

© Andrew Willis

Back in the early 90s, I spent three years as a Navy recruiter in southern Illinois. For the most part, it was a successful tour (most of the success coming in the fact that I survived it with both marriage and career intact). To be honest, it was the toughest duty I’ve ever had, not the most hectic (that was a Unitas cruise, with Desert Storm coming in a close second), but certainly the most difficult. Any time you deal with people and the most important decisions in their lives, things are going to be interesting.

Now to bring this to the present, I was listening last week to the local talk radio station, and the host asked if the current situation regarding our actions here and in Afghanistan, this new war, was helping recruiting. His assumption was the number of walk-ins to military recruiting offices would shoot way up, then was disappointed and confused when he talked to an Army recruiter, and it had no effect on it at all. So the host’s next question was, “Why not?”

I thought to myself, “Vietnam-era parents.”

Now, before you think that I’m about to disparage a whole generation, please understand what Lincoln said, “The philosophy of the schoolroom in one generation will be the philosophy in the government in the next.” Now, who is the government in the United States? The people are. Most of the people who were of warfighting age then were either in Vietnam or protesting it in colleges. The protesters wanted so desperately to “change the system” from the outside, but discovered that they couldn’t. So now, those people, the protesters I mean, have become part of the system that they wanted to change, and are changing it from within (see Clinton’s misuse of the military for a perfect example of that).

The flip side to that is that those same protesters have liberalized (in the political sense of the word) the outlook and philosophy of the media and schools as well as the government, and in doing so, they have changed the outlook and philosophy of parents. Now, I understand that there have always been protesters against any war that we’ve been involved in (read Howard Zinn’s book, The People’s History of the United States, if you don’t believe me), but there never existed in this country an anti-government climate like that in the late 60s and early 70s, except perhaps during the time of the Revolution itself. Is it any wonder that now, with parents like these, that today’s young people are distrustful of their government, disrespectful of authority, or even worse, apathetic toward any public service?

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