Uncle Sam lures more (recruits) from rural Michigan

Headline article in Sunday's Detroit News

http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051127/METRO/511270387

Uncle Sam lures more from rural Michigan

Money, education attract military recruits who see few opportunities in small towns.

Brad Heath and Norman Sinclair / The Detroit News
November 27, 2005

NORTH BRANCH, Mich.-- The U.S. Marine Corps didn't have to go looking for Steven Letts. He came to them. "I always wanted to be a Marine, ever since I was a little kid," he explained. Plus, signing up means he won't have to pay rent or an insurance bill, and he figures he'll be able to save enough money to open his own auto body shop when he's done. "I have a dream, and I should follow it."

Military records show that Michigan's military recruits come disproportionately from the state's most rural areas, where young people enlist at a rate double that in the most populous parts of the state.

Last year, the slab of land around North Branch sent 30 people into the U.S. Air Force, Army and Navy, according to the military records provided by the National Priorities Project, a Massachusetts research group. It got the figures from an anti-war group that requested them from the Pentagon. Their figures did not include Marines, but similar studies that did include them reached the same conclusion.

The records offer the most detailed picture yet of where the United States gets its soldiers, and come at a time when the nation is fighting a war against a stubborn insurgency in Iraq, thousands of soldiers remain in Afghanistan and several branches of the military are struggling to attract enough recruits.
In the state's 45 most rural counties -- those in which at least 60 percent of people live in rural areas -- about seven of every 1,000 young people ages 18-24 enlisted last year. In the state's most populous counties, about four of every 1,000 young adults signed up.

The pattern is similar nationwide.

more...

I hope his "dream" does not involve being blown up on a desert roadside.

Along with a trove of other valuable demographic profiles of the US electorate. Why speculate when you can have the facts? (BTW, turn to the Tables section, starting on page T1, for your answer.)

Stuff like this is what makes the internet the greatest invention of my lifetime.

http://people-press.org/reports/pdf/196.pdf

Peace.

sign up and their parents are the Bible toting parents too...
Republicans and conservatives...

This is the religious right army ... thing is are these kids getting disallusioned!!!

Same as it ever was ...

I wanna kill. Kill.

I wanna, I wanna see,

I wanna see blood and gore and guts

and veins in my teeth.

Eat dead burnt bodies.

I mean kill,

Kill,

KILL,

KILL."

...what kind of choice is that?

We should also observe that choosing Wal-Mart--an unsustainable institution that runs on the very cheap oil for which Iraq has been invaded--is also a choice to kill foreigners.


Still I often think of going back
To the farms, to the farms
Golden arms, golden arms...
--Sufjan Stevens, "Say Yes! To Michigan!"

And I would far prefer to work at Walmart than arm myself and shoot people. But maybe that's just me.

And so would I prefer a life in the Wal-Mart dungeon to even a minute on the US-created killing fields.

But that doesn't change how Wal-Mart is run: cheap oil. And cheap oil, plainly, is being exhausted. Hence our wars, which might well be called Wal-Mart Wars.

The unsustainable suburbs of which Wal-Mart is both symbol and exemplar need this cheap oil, and they will have it: at any cost to anyone, anywhere. Iraq is about that insatiable need much more than it is the sum of bed-time stories about Saddam Hussein.

See William Howard Kunstler's work for an examination of the issues:

http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/
http://www.kunstler.com

There are plenty of Detroit kids who enlist, too, however.

I disagree with those posters who say that the enlistment rates in rural areas are higher because those kids are overly religious or they want to kill people. They enlist for honorable reasons-they want to serve their country, they want to get a higher education that they wouldn't be able to afford otherwise, or, because the best training for certain trades and skills is offered by the military (flying planes, for example). Just because that is not my choice of careers, or yours, doesn't mean it's not a good choice for the people that make it.

My dad served in the Army right after the Korean War, and some of my cousins and one uncle served in Vietnam. My great-uncle was a Sea Bee in WWII. I have a cousin who is currently considering enlisting (I advised him to enlist in the Coast Guard, if he's going to enlist at all). The teenager is a slacker and needs to do something with his life. If he's not going to work or go to college, I don't have a problem with him enlisting and developing some character and usable skills. I just wish it wasn't during war time.