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The Stories War Tells Me

Rory Fanning - I helped snatch those two men—or were they teenagers?—from a house in the middle of the night. That was in May of 2003 and sometimes, right here in my workshop, I can still hear the screams of the little kids inside that house. They’re louder than the helicopter, louder than the saw. Maybe one of those men had info that would help lead us to Osama bin Laden, then missing in action somewhere, it was believed, in Pakistan—or so we were told anyway. My job wasn’t to ask or understand; it was just to snatch people, sandbag them, and ship them out. Others higher up the chain of command would ask the questions under conditions that we now know—and I guessed then—were anything but pretty.

My own kids are three and five, probably close in age to those terrified children I glimpsed ever so briefly in that house and still can’t get out of my head. My daughter and son couldn’t be sweeter, but they do like to tell me “no” a lot. Sometimes they, too, scream and sometimes, when those screams set me off, I yell back, which is frustrating for me and unnerving for them, as well as my wife.  And so I find myself out in that garage more than she would like and more than I would like, too, since it often means that I’ve taken that endlessly unnerving trip back to Afghanistan.

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New Section: Edward Hasbrouck
Resistance to Mandatory Registration for Military Service

Edward Hasbrouck grew up in Wellesley, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. He considers myself primarily a political activist. Hasbrouck began his resistance to the violence of illegitimate authority as an elected but nonvoting student representative to the local school board and as an activist for peace, disarmament, and students' rights. His first book was a handbook for high school students on their legal rights co-authored in the summer of 1977, between high school and college, as an intern for the student service bureau of the Massachusetts Department of Education. He majored in political science at the University of Chicago until leaving school to pursue direct involvement in political activism.

Visit the Hasbrouck Section on NNOMY web

Military Recruiting in the United States | Chapter 6
Love Our Enemies? Or Kill Them?

Pat Elder - The March 2010 edition of Richmond’s Benedictine College Preparatory student newspaper, The New Chevron, carried two articles on the Iraq War exploits of the school’s newly-hired headmaster, Jesse A. Grapes. During the 2nd Battle of Fallujah in November of 2004, 1st Lieutenant Grapes saved the lives of three Marines in his platoon. The newspaper reports:

Jesse A. Grapes, only three words can describe this man, patriotic war hero. He consistently showed unyielding bearing, fortitude, intuition, and courage while serving his country in war. The Marines who served under him said, “He is a hard-charging small unit tactician who literally wrote a book about modern urban warfare following his ferocious experience in Fallujah.”

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Military Recruiting in the United States | Chapter 5
Hollywood Pledges Allegiance to the Dollar

Pat Elder - In July, 2015 the U.S. Army Chief of Public Affairs responded to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by releasing a massive 1,400-page list of movies and television shows his office had reviewed and influenced from 2010 to 2015.1 The list provides insight into the murky world of military censorship and sheds light on productions the Pentagon deems helpful to the recruiting effort.

The FOIA request was initiated by Tom Secker, a British-based writer who specializes in security services. The Army’s report may be found on Secker’s website, spyculture.org. Within a few weeks of Secker’s receipt of the data, just a handful of websites had reported on the significant release, including Billboard, Alternet, Salon, Techdirt, and Center for Research and Globalization. No mainstream American newspapers or TV outlets picked up the intriguing story.

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Does "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" have a hidden message?

Henry Littlefield - In his introduction to “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” L. Frank Baum claims that the book is simply an innocent children’s story. But some scholars have found hidden criticisms of late-nineteenth-century economic policies in the book. Is it possible that one of America’s favorite children’s stories is also a subversive parable? David B. Parker investigates the text for clues.

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How Military Recruiters Prey on At-Risk Students

Alex Ellison - College planner. Education consultant. Teen advocate. NU Wildcat. TEDx and SXSW speaker.

Some of you may know that I’ve been speaking and writing a lot about vocational education lately. I see the immense benefits in encouraging certain types of students to pursue more realistic, hands-on work, while still encouraging other types of students to pursue more academic work.

However, when career and technical education is associated with a low socio-economic status and under-achieving kids, then these are the kids who will be targeted for military recruitment. The intent behind vocational education is not to prepare future soldiers, yet there seems to be an obvious correlation.

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Understanding Mass Killings

Hugh Gusterson - Media commentary on Micah Johnson, the African-American who killed five police officers in Dallas on July 7 2016, has focused on his animus against white police and his interest in the Black Lives Matter movement, playing up the racial motivation for this mass shooting. But commentators have largely ignored another important element of Johnson’s identity that he shares in common with many other mass killers: military service.

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#GivingTuesday is coming up

Tuesday the 27th is #GivingTuesday, an international day to make a contribution to a good cause of your choice. NNOMY does not ask for money very often but we have plans to expand and we need more funds. Your contribution will support more campaigns to increase our outreach to schools and teachers in the next school year to win more support for balancing the aggressive military recruiting going on in our public schools.

Make a donation to NNOMY

Please Donate to fund counter-recruitment nationally

Help Fund NNOMY to De-Militarize Schools. Your donation to NNOMY supports the National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth's efforts to balance the message of military recruiters in our public schools where minors are routinely primed for recruitment through Department of Defense school programs designed for youth.

 Making a financial contribution supports NNOMY's national demilitarization work with activist organizations inside middle and high schools.

Click to Make Your Donation

(Your donation is tax-deductible to the extent allowable by law.) through our fiscal sponsor Alliance for Global Justice. Make sure you select from the causes list, The National Network Opposing he Militarization of Youth (NNOMY), or make a check out to:"NNOMY/AFGJ" and mail it to: AFGJ, 225 E. 26th St. Suite 1, Tucson, AZ 85713