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No Skills, No Jobs, No Future: Recruiters' Promises

By Evan Douthit

An interested article appeared recently in the Wall Street Journal. The Journal, a notorious leftist rag, published a front-page article by one of its staff reporters on the civilian use of military training. It was entitled, "A Rude Awakening: Many Veterans Find Military Jobs No road To Civilian Success." The thrust of the article is that for all the military's advertising hype about learning a skill, most of those who enter the army looking for skills are given none, and most of those who learn skills in the army cannot use them outside.

The result, among other things, is a higher rate of unemployment for post-Vietnam veterans than the national average. While military recruitment advertisement promise a hot career with hot new technology, when the time comes to get out, the army counselors advise dischargees to take $4 an hour jobs if they can find them.

This is not surprising, for the fact of the matter is and always has been that armed forces are basically low tech. Cannon fodder does not have to have much in the way of skills; in fact it would be wasteful to put skilled people in a cannon fodder position, which is why civilians perform many of the skilled jobs in the army.

This can be seen in the figures for military manpower use. Craftsmen are only 3.2% of service jobs, electronic-equipment repairers 7.2%, medical specialists 5.1% and other technical fields, 1.9%. General infantry are 24%, service and supply 13%, and functional support and administration 13%. The figures on skilled positions are deceptive, low as they are; many of these jobs are extremely simple and specialized in items that don't exist on the civilian market. The Journal quotes one veteran who thought he was becoming an electronics-equipment repairman and who found that his job was to replace the same part in Minuteman missile after missile. Now unemployed and waiting to go back to school, the air force veteran says, "It was a waste of my time. Not everyone has a missile in his backyard."

Another veteran found out that being a "field communications specialist" meant carrying a big radio around the field. He is also unemployed. A New York veteran who left high school to join the Navy to work on planes spent his time changing oil in engines. As Gary McMahon, an unemployed Navy veteran said after talking his broth out of enlisting, "He's only going to learn to dismantle an M-16 in the dark."

The situation for minorities is even worse, needless to say. Blacks make up only 1/2 or 1/3 of the proportion of skilled positions that one would expect from their percentage in the services as a whole. The Journal shrinks from accusing the services of racism but ordinary humans will get the point. This is especially vile in view of the fact that many of the high tech ads for recruitment are deliberately aimed at minorities. To quote from the Journal: "The Army along spent $3.2 million in the fiscal year ending Sept 30 to lure enlistees, mostly adolescents, with ads that almost always emphasize training or adventure. Many ads are tailored to minority groups. For instance, a campaign drawn up for the Army by Sosa & Associates, and advertising agency in San Antonio, is aimed at Hispanics. 'I wanted to learn about high-tech computers,' Spec Four Ivan Torres explains in one of the Sosa agency's ads."

This pitch has been very successful in some areas, so much so that real schools often cannot complete as naive youth are led off only to be dumped on the streets when they are discharged, in many cases forming unemployed veterans' ghettos around some bases.

The article in the Journal makes one very sad. Most youth who join the armed forces do so because their options are already limited. Given the promise of being paid a minimum wage and to have their basic needs taken care of while they learn a skill, it is no surprise many youth are taken in and lose years of their lives. And people at the bottom of our society can ill afford the time spend wandering down dead end corridors and following false leads. If they knew the truth many youth might try more promising paths.

But the army and its pimping advertisers, the same advertisers who hook youth on cigarettes with promises that they will become macho cowboys, have no sense of shame or decency. In a decent society people could sue such scum. Any why would a service that put 300 Marines in a unguarded building in a city notorious for its car bombs, or which would put 250 soldiers on a "Death Air" charter to save money hold back from lying to trick youth into joining?

Evan Douthit
VVAW Chicago