The Sorrows of Empire (17 page)

The suggestion that DU munitions are a significant factor in these deaths and disabilities is a hotly contested proposition. Some researchers, often paid for by the Pentagon, argue that depleted uranium could not possibly be the cause of these war-related maladies and that a more likely explanation is dust and debris from the blowing up of Saddam Hussein’s chemical and biological weapons factories in 1991, or perhaps a “cocktail” of volatile particles from DU ammunition, the destruction of nerve gas bunkers, and polluted air from burning oil fields. But the evidence—including abnormal clusters of childhood cancers and deformities in Iraq and also in the areas of Kosovo where we used depleted-uranium weapons in our 1999 air war—point toward a significant role for DU. Moreover, simply by insisting on using such weaponry, the military is deliberately flouting a 1996 United Nations resolution that classifies DU ammunition as an illegal weapon of mass destruction.

Depleted uranium, or uranium-238, is a waste product of power-generating nuclear reactors. It is used in projectiles like tank shells and cruise missiles because it is 1.7 times denser than lead, burns as it flies, and penetrates armor easily, but it breaks up and vaporizes on impact—which makes it potentially deadly in unexpected ways. Each shell fired by an American tank includes between three and ten pounds of DU. Such warheads are essentially “dirty bombs,” not especially radioactive individually but suspected of being capable in quantity of causing serious illnesses and even birth defects. In 1991, American forces fired a staggering 944,000 DU rounds in Kuwait and Iraq. The Pentagon admits that it left behind at a bare minimum 320 metric tons of DU on the battlefield. One study of Gulf War veterans showed that their children had a higher possibility of being born with severe deformities, including missing eyes, blood infections, respiratory problems, and fused fingers. Rokke fears that because the military relied on DU munitions more heavily in the second Iraq war than in the first, postwar casualties may be even greater. When he saw TV images of unprotected soldiers and Iraqi civilians driving past
burning Iraqi trucks destroyed by tank fire or inspecting buildings hit by missiles, he suspected that they were being poisoned by DU.
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Young Americans being seduced into the armed forces these days may thus quite literally be making themselves into “cannon fodder,” even if they have been able to secure noncombat jobs. These men and women comprise an ethnically heterogeneous group that nonetheless differs, in several important respects, from the population from which it is drawn. Because membership in the armed forces is entirely voluntary, they are no longer in any sense a citizen army, even though the Pentagon pretends otherwise. The contemporary military bears almost no relation to the armies that fought in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam—all made up of conscripts. Nor do our forces resemble armies that are based on a universal obligation to defend the country, as, for example, the Israeli army, from which only the religiously devout are exempt. Because today’s soldiers and sailors know that they constitute a special stratum of society, they tend to think of themselves increasingly in distinct, corporate terms—an aspect of militarism—and not as people who expect soon to return to civilian life. Since the military also makes exit easy for those who sign up but find they do not like life in the armed forces, the special subculture of barracks and ships only solidifies further. During 2002, the army was losing 13.7 percent of all recruits during training.

According to the twenty-sixth annual Department of Defense report on “Population Representation in the Military Services,” covering fiscal year 1999, the most recent report available, the full-time active-duty military numbered just under 1.4 million.
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In addition, active reserves—made up of the Army National Guard, the Army Reserve, the Naval Reserve, the Marine Corps Reserve, the Air National Guard, and the Air Force Reserve—totaled just under 871,000. There were also more than 405,000 men and women in the inactive reserve and the inactive National Guard. In fiscal 1999, all the services took in approximately 184,000 new recruits, and nearly 6,000 prior-service members returned to the active-duty ranks. More than 16,000 newly commissioned officers reported for active duty. Also in 1999, about 55,000 recruits without and more than 88,000 with prior military experience enlisted in the reserves. In excess of 17,000 officers entered the National Guard or other active reserve units.

The active-duty military is, of course, much younger than the overall civilian population. Almost half of those in the active-duty enlisted force were seventeen to twenty-four years old, in contrast to about 15 percent of the civilian labor force. Officers were older than those in the enlisted ranks (with a mean age of thirty-four), but they too were younger than their civilian counterparts—college graduates whose mean age was thirty-six. This means that the Americans with whom foreigners come into contact most frequently tend to be late adolescents or twenty-year-old youths, almost totally ignorant of foreign cultures and languages but indoctrinated to think that they represent a nation that President George W. Bush has called “the greatest force for good in history.”

In terms of race and ethnicity, African Americans are overrepresented among enlisted ranks. Some 20 percent of 1999 recruits to active duty were African Americans, who constitute 12.71 percent of the nation’s civilian workforce of military age. African Americans also have higher retention rates in the armed forces, boosting their representation among active enlisted members to 22.5 percent.

Hispanics were underrepresented, making up only 11 percent of new recruits, whereas they constitute 13 percent of the general population. They contributed 9.5 percent of all active-duty enlisted personnel but were overrepresented in combat positions, where they constituted 17.7 percent of the forces who directly handle weapons. Latino underrepresentation can probably be explained by high dropout rates from high school—recruits must be high school graduates or hold an alternative credential—and the fact that many are living in the country illegally. In border cities like San Diego, army recruiters have occasionally crossed into Tijuana to try to sign up young Mexicans with offers of green cards (legal alien residents’ certificates) or possible citizenship after a hitch in the army.
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The navy and the Marine Corps generally recruit more Hispanics than the army and the air force. The Marine Corps has the highest retention rate for Hispanics. “Other” minorities (Native Americans, Asians, and Pacific Islanders), slightly more than 5 percent of the civilian population, made up a further 7 percent of enlistees. Thus, in 1999, 38 percent of the total active-duty enlisted force were people of color (22 percent African American, 9 percent Hispanic, and 7 percent other).

Among officers the percentages were different. Almost 9 percent of newly commissioned officers were African American, 4 percent Hispanic, and 9 percent other. Within the active-duty officer corps, 8 percent were African Americans, 4 percent Hispanics, and 5 percent other. African Americans thus constituted a much smaller proportion of officers than of enlisted men and women. The same pattern holds for the reserves. All three service academies, West Point for army officers, Annapolis for naval and marine officers, and Colorado Springs for air force officers, implement explicit race-preference policies in their admissions. West Point maintains specific percentage goals. It seeks an entering class of 10 to 12 percent African Americans and normally gets 7 to 9 percent. All three academies actively recruit racial minorities, sending promising but under-qualified candidates to one-year preparatory schools before admitting them. (These policies directly contradict those of the Bush administration, which on January 15, 2003, announced its opposition to the University of Michigan Law School’s employment of “affirmative action” to produce a “diverse” student body.)

The military defends its use of race in admissions on the grounds that since 28 percent of air force enlisted personnel and 44 percent of army enlisted personnel are racial minorities, an all-white officer corps would hurt morale, a possibility that also brings to mind fears of the “fraggings” of the Vietnam War era, when enlisted men conscripted into a war they did not support sometimes lobbed or rolled grenades into officers’ quarters.
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In many of the 209 reported fragging incidents in Vietnam, the men who tossed grenades or shot their officers were African Americans and the targets of the attacks were mostly white junior field officers. Racism in the armed forces was clearly a contributing cause. In a January 2003 background briefing at the Pentagon on the all-volunteer force, the issue of fragging came up. “Not a pretty picture,” commented the senior defense official who gave the briefing. There was at least one fragging incident, on March 23, during the subsequent war in Iraq.
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In 1999, women made up 18 percent of new recruits and 24 percent of new members of the active reserve. Among all enlisted personnel on active duty, 14 percent were women. Some 20 percent of new officers were women, who constitute 15 percent of the overall officer corps. Most
significantly, military women, whether in the enlisted ranks, the officer corps, on active duty, or in the active reserve, are more likely to be members of racial or ethnic minority groups than military men. Half the enlisted women in the U.S. armed forces are members of minority groups. African American women made up 35.3 percent of the women in the enlisted force.

Sexual assault remains a pervasive problem for women serving in all branches of the armed forces, including those deployed overseas. According to a report in the
American Journal of Industrial Medicine,
28 percent of female veterans reported sexual assaults during their careers—MSTs, or “military sexual traumas,” as they are called in the Pentagon and Veterans Administration offices. In 1996, the Defense Department surveyed women in the military about their experiences during the previous twelve months, and found that 9 percent in the marines, 8 percent in the army, 6 percent in the navy, and 4 percent in the air force had experienced a rape or an attempted rape that year. Since about 200,000 women serve in the military, these numbers would represent about 14,000 sexual assaults or attempted assaults each year. Few of these, however, are reported. According to the Department of Defense, only twenty-four cases of sexual assault were actually reported during the buildup to and carrying out of the first Persian Gulf War.

Marie Tessier, an authority on violence against women, writes, “The entire military criminal justice system is worlds apart from the civilian world.... The most important difference is that decisions about investigation and prosecution are made within the chain of command, not by an adversarial outside agency like a prosecutor’s office. This leaves commanders with an inherent conflict of interest.”
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A rape scandal at the Air Force Academy that burst into the open in 2003 exposed just these issues. The air force disclosed to Congress fifty-four reports of rape or other sexual assaults that had occurred there over the previous decade, but Air Force Secretary James G. Roche testified, “There’s probably another hundred that we’ve not seen.”
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The director of the local civilian rape-counseling center said that the most consistent complaint of cadet women coming into the center was their fear that academy officers and investigators would violate their confidentiality. The issue of consent to a sexual
encounter is also more complicated in the military than in civilian life because of hierarchy. Both male and female service personnel are indoctrinated to obey the orders of a superior officer or upperclassman.

Today a slight majority of soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen are married, up from about 40 percent in 1973. Men are more likely to be married than women. In terms of education, the Department of Defense reports that 1999 recruits had a mean reading ability at an eleventh-grade level, whereas the mean for civilian youths in the same age range was tenth grade. The South, in particular the South Atlantic and West South Central states (Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana), had the greatest geographical representation. More than two-fifths of new recruits came from this area. Both the Northeast and North Central regions were underrepresented, while recruits from the West were approximately equal to the percentage of eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds in that region’s population. Based on a survey of parents’ education, employment status, occupation, and home ownership, the 1999 data also showed that both active and reserve recruits came primarily from families in the middle and lower-middle socioeconomic strata. As the report concludes, “Although the force is diverse, it is not an exact replica of the society as a whole. The military way of life is more attractive to some members of society than to others.”

The military is founded on the ideals of patriotism, defense of the nation, and loyalty to an abstract set of values often called the “American way of life.” Most of its members, however, are motivated by defense-establishment careerism, the possibility of using the military as a way out of racial and economic ghettoes, and a fascination, often media-inspired, with military technology. Young African Americans join the military in large numbers in part to escape from inner-city racial ghettoes and employment in the “informal economy,” which frequently leads to prison time. Almost none enlist primarily out of patriotic or public-service motives. In conversation after conversation with journalists, youthful soldiers and sailors referred to the problems of high civilian unemployment, made worse by the shift of entry-level manufacturing jobs abroad and the likelihood of a clash with the law if they tried to make it on their own. One said that if he had not joined the navy, “I would only have ended
up in prison.”
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“Probably if I hadn’t joined the Army,” said a nineteen-year-old woman, “I would be doing the same thing most of my friends are doing, which is working fast food.”
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