In a nation quick to point to African Americans and Latino perpetrators of crime, it is not surprising that the number of African Americans and Latinos killed and maimed receives the color-blind treatment. It’s about sending “Americans” to establish law and order. Freedom.  It is about “our troops” then.  But story after story focuses on white soldiers. If you did not know better, you would think only white high school students are recruited by the military.  Only white troops are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

Walter Reed Hospital’s outpatient services have been in the news recently.  And the “services” have been anything but pleasant.  Those suffering from “brain injuries, severed arms and legs, organ and back damage, and various degrees of post-traumatic stress,” according to the Washington Post, are awaiting further treatment or “bureaucratic decisions before being discharged or returned to active duty.” These are the young men and women who, more often, were recruited from their high schools, who served in Iraq or Afghanistan. 

“We’ve done our duty.  We fought the war.  We came home wounded.  Fine. But whoever the people are back here who are supposed to give us the easy transition should be doing it," said Marine Sgt. Ryan Groves, 26, an amputee who lived at Walter Reed for 16 months. "We don’t know what to do.  The people who are supposed to know don’t have the answers. It’s a nonstop process of stalling.” The soldiers, the report explains, feel alone and frustrated.  Military recruiters who target high schools with a heavy concentration of African Americans and Latinos never tell these students about the possibility of experiencing isolation and frustration worse than they ever experienced in their disenfranchised communities. 

These young citizens of the U.S. would never have imagined themselves residents of Walter Reed Hospital when they signed their names to serve with the Armed Forces.  “This world is invisible to outsiders,” the report claims. And so is the targeting of African American and Latino students, representing 32 percent of those who die at the hands of the enemy, or by accident, or by committing suicide, or die from illness.  Another 30 percent of troops of color are wounded.   

Military recruiters will tell high school students about cash bonuses and money for college tuition, but they will not tell these students about Walter Reed’s amputees and brain damaged patients who will not be able to use the college tuition money.  They will not tell them that, while they might survive an IED exposition, they will be among the largest number of brain-injured than any other war. There’s silence on this subject.

The Pentagon does not count stateside suicides, but they are happening at an alarming rate. At Walter Reed, according to one report, two soldiers committed suicide.  Texas Army Specialist Joseph Suell, African American, committed suicide in Iraq after he called his mother and told her that he could not kill anyone. The 24-year old husband and father of three overdosed on ibuprofen and amphetamine in 2004.

In many ways, the recruiting at the high schools, by the military, is someone else’s problem, someone else’s child.  When it is understood that the military is targeting African Americans and Latino students from low-income communities, we have to ask ourselves, what is our responsibility to these young people, asked to fight and kill another people of color—again—for the material resources owned by those other people? Will their future be one of feeling alone and frustrated, fighting a government that already ignores them?   

In a town that prides itself on being progressive, few consider the future of African American and Latino students.  According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the educational achievement gaps between black and white children in Wisconsin “remain among the worst in the U.S.” It is easy to see the connection between the prison industrial complex, on the one hand, and the military industrial complex on the other.  Equal opportunity, indeed, freedom, is at stake here, in the U.S.  The work of Madison, Wisconsin resident Willie Williams to “educate” all the high school students remains faithful to the radical struggles of the progressive movement. Williams, an African American and Viet Nam vet, is not a   Madison Public School educator, but is someone who has taken upon himself to educate students about other alternative to serving in the Armed Forces. According to Williams, he was surprised to find, “hidden” in the No Child Left Behind Act a provision that mandates “local educational agencies receiving assistance under the Elementary and Secondary Act of 1965 to give military recruiters the same access to secondary school students.” The military is a prospective employer.  The students are prospective employees.  It is that simple. Upon request from the military, these schools are required to provide students’ names, addresses, and telephone listings.  And let me say it again, the military recruiters love to do their thing were there’s a high yield of African Americans and Latinos.   

There is no policy to restrict Military recruiters from setting up tables on career day. All four branches of the Armed Forces have the same rights as job and college recruiters, said Williams who believes that “military recruiters should not be placed in the same category as career or school recruiter,” said Williams.  While some guidance counselors help students consider alternatives to the military, Williams said “most counselors are in the National Guard.”

When Williams returned from his tour of duty, he began to educate himself about the country he just left—Viet Nam.  Reading led him to understanding how the Monroe Doctrine served as the catalyst for the nation’s belief that it had a right to the resources of other people.  We come to see ourselves as “the leaders of the world rather than a part of the world.”

Williams believes that the potential for change will come with the young people if they are shown that the glorification of war breeds more war, more death.  Born in Jim Crow Mississippi, Williams recounts how he learned to hate and, in Viet Nam, transferred that hate to people “who had done nothing” to me.  “I was able to strip the face off a human in order to be able to take” his or her life. Sharing his own stories about the consequences of war, he talks about “not seeing people as people,” about the IED’s and PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder). He talks about PDD (personal disorder discharges) “which they’ve given people in order not to have to give them what they need when they come back because they say they have this disorder before they went.”

Williams takes on the military industrial complex one high school student at a time. If the military recruiters are at a school, he considers it his duty as a U.S. citizen to be present too.

Most students recruited by the military are not aware that they give up their civil liberties when they join the military. Soldiers like Suell find themselves confronting the possibility of killing someone when it is too late, and he is surrounded by death.  “If a student signs up to go to Marquette [University], or U.W. Madison, they can quit at any time without penalty.  But if they sign up for the military, they not only do the two or three years that they sign up for, but they have an 8-year obligation in the inactive services,” said Williams. 

Williams is dedicated to go to places where “we don’t want to go, but we know we have to go because it’s up to us to educate the children and others to get on board” with this effort to education our children.

Dr. Jean Daniels writes a column for The City Capital Hues in Madison Wisconsin and is a Lecturer at Madison Area Technical College, MATC. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.