An ex-military recruitment officer, his wife, a local activist, a spoken word artist and a soldier’s wife may have seemed like a mismatched crowd. But sitting before a dozen local educators and activists in Durham Thursday night, they were part of a group that hopes to change the face of military recruitment across the state—and perhaps the country.
Headlined by Jim Massey, a former military recruitment officer in North Carolina, the event presented several speakers and a hip-hop performance by artist Langston Puze at Hayti Heritage Center as local organizers spoke out against military recruitment.
“This is not just about military recruiting,” local activist Ajamu Dillahunt said to introduce the workshop. “We oppose the war in Iraq. We oppose the occupation of Iraq.”
The meeting served partially as a starting point for future counter-recruitment activism throughout the state. Planning to begin in Durham, the leaders spoke of their ambition to spread their message across the campuses of North Carolina's high schools and colleges.
“We want to help the youth to organize themselves [and] to inform the youth that they have the right to opt out” of military recruitment, Dillahunt said.
The speakers stressed the need to raise awareness of alternatives to entering military service and warned of pitfalls created by recruitment officers, whom they said often target young, low-income minorities.
“As a recruitment officer, I started witnessing how they were manipulating and lying to young men,” Massey said. “I was also noticing... this economic conscript where we were basically forcing our younger generation, be it male or female, into the military.”
Since his honorable discharge, Massey has sought to convey this experience to the people he would have been attempting to recruit only years ago.
One speaker, Kara Hollingsworth, told of her family’s personal experience with military recruitment. Reiterating that recruitment officers are often engaging in “economic conscription,” she told the story of how her husband left college for the military as a last-ditch financial effort.
“It was sold to us like a college scholarship program,” Hollingsworth said.
Instead of entering the service for a brief period, she explained, her husband was sent into combat for months, and since joining, he has yet to attend a college class. Hollingsworth said her husband’s situation is identical to that of many other young fathers who choose to enter the military because of its lure of easy money.
“They told him if you do communications, you won’t see any fighting,” she said. “Everything they prepared him for—everything they prepared us for—it all fell apart. It was a lie.”
Although its primary goal is to reach youth, the campaign also hopes to convince school boards and town councils to limit the military’s access to students. As one of the next steps in the campaign, Massey’s organization, Iraq Veterans Against the War, has helped organize a public march opposing the war in Iraq in Fayetteville March 19.
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