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News | Bringing Truth to the Youth: The Counter-Recruitment Movement, Then and Now “Back when we started, recruiters were just blatantly lying to the kids,” said Susan Quinlan, the co-founder and volunteer coordinator of the peace and justice group, Better Alternatives for Youth–Peace (BAY-Peace). For 12 years, she’s been bringing teams of youth into Oakland, California, schools to inform students about deceptive military recruiting practices. In that time, ...
Op/Ed | Thanks for Your Service, but Don’t Tell the Kids About It (We Need Them to Enlist) The question came over my right shoulder, from a well-dressed woman whose nametag proclaimed her to be a member of the Chamber of Commerce in Pittsburg, California. We were in the Pittsburg High School gymnasium, the location of an end-of-year career fair for graduating seniors. Two other veterans and I, along with a civilian friend, ...
Op/Ed | A Veteran’s Affair: How Dealing With The VA Is Like Dating A Douchebag After nearly 15 continuous years of war, you’d think more Americans would be aware of the ordeal veterans go through to get the benefits promised to us by the military. Unfortunately, because only one percent (roughly) of Americans serve in the military at any given time, there’s a massive cognitive disconnect between veterans and, as ...
Op/Ed | American Propagander: Six Ways Paul Rieckhoff’s “American Sniper” Column Deeply Bothers This US Veteran When I first laid eyes on the guest column Paul Rieckhoff wrote about “American Sniper,” I thought I’d read the byline wrong. This has to have been written by the Department of Defense, I thought, before scrolling back up. When I saw that the founder and chief executive officer of America’s largest corporately-sponsored veterans’ organization ...
Op/Ed | Who Am I, Really?: The Identity Crisis of the Woman Veteran Returning Home I just read Raul Felix’s article about the division of Generation Y (which is drawn, the author asserts, between those who are Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, and those who aren’t), and although I thought Felix made some extremely salient points, I am of the opinion that another, more specific division needs to be made. I’m referring to ...