AWOL in America - When desertion is the only option

From Harpers: http://www.harpers.org/

Just part of one of many short stories:
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When Jeremiah announced his intention to join the military he took everyone who knew him in Portland by surprise. “He was raised in a pacifist, macrobiotic house,” his mother exclaims. “He went to Waldorf schools. Here is a kid who’s never even had a bite of animal flesh in his life!” Jeremiah had protested the Iraq war, in fact. He spent most of his senior year in high school convincing his family and what he and his mother call his “community”—a tightly knit group of families connected by the Portland Waldorf School and Rudolf Steiner’s nontraditional philosophy of education—that joining the military was the right thing for him to do.

In the spring of his senior year, Jeremiah went on a “vision quest,” hiking into an area called Eagle Creek, which was still covered in snow. There he made a video explaining his reasons for joining the Army. He sits on the ground facing the camera but looking off into the woods as he talks. He starts by making a case for the military being a tool for change, a possible force for good. But, “if you have a bunch of bloodthirsty young men with an I.Q. of twenty-three in the military, that’s what the military’s gonna be—until other people, other intelligent people with morals and values and convictions and ideals . Most people hate the military. Is the answer to distance yourself as far as you can and just protest all the time? What am I doing? I don’t know anyone in the military. Neither do any of you. It takes a lot more balls for me to join the military than it does for one of you guys to go to a forty-grand liberal-arts school. Is that a huge step? You’re gonna be around more open-minded people like yourself. You’re not gonna experience any diversity there.”

In this taped explanation he leaves out one reason for joining the Army, a reason that perhaps was too amorphous to put into words, or too personal, not something he felt the folks at Waldorf would understand. “My mom was single until I was eight years old,” he tells me. “My entire life I was raised sensitive and compassionate. I have a craving for a sense of macho-ness, honestly. A sense of toughness.” He remembers the first time he thought the military was “cool”—watching Top Gun at ten years old. Then in his senior year of high school, the recruiting commercials became a siren call. “I mean, it’s an ingenious marketing campaign. It goes straight to an eighteen-year-old male’s testosterone. You see them and you’re almost sexually aroused,” he says. He wanted to kick past the cocoon of family and community, to know how other people thought and lived. He wanted a coming-of-age ritual—his vision quest, which had ended with the insight “solitude sucks,” didn’t quite fill the bill. He wanted to become a man. Jeremiah took a year convincing his friends, family, and community, and yet within seventy-two hours of arriving at Fort Benning he was writing a letter home that began, “Hello All, You have got to get me out of here.”

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