Author: Rachel McCarthy-Moya
Two Army recruiters, in full uniform, approached me with smiles and hand shakes. They politely introduced themselves with a certain ease and relaxation one wouldn’t have expected from military men. “Make the Army look good,” one of them said jokingly.
On the afternoon we met, Sergeant Benjamin Charbonier and another recruiter, Sergeant Hollis Champlain, had just finished visiting Glendale Community College. Champlain said they encountered difficultly recruiting there. “There are a lot of Armenians there . . . They may really want to join the Army, but it doesn’t serve the best interests of their culture to do so,” he said.
The motivation behind our interview stems from recent letters Charbonier sent to Oxy students. If your name begins with a letter at the beginning of the alphabet, you probably received a letter from him.
Over the past couple of weeks, Charbonier has been going through a list of Oxy students’ names and box numbers in his Glendale office. He’s sending recruitment letters to everyone on his list.
Many recruiters target college campuses because of the large number of possible recruits, and because they feel the Army has a lot to offer to college students. However, Charbonier stressed: “We recruit anyone from age 17 to 41.”
Unlike other larger Los Angeles schools, Oxy does not have an ROTC (Reserve Office Training Corps) unit. However, according to the College’s website, “qualified Occidental students may be able to participate in Air Force or Army ROTC through programs at UCLA and USC. Appropriate academic credit, not to exceed eight units, may be awarded upon successful completion of transfer work in these programs.”
A reserve recruiter for over 10 years now, Charbonier decided to become a recruiter for the army reserves.
Is being a recruiter rewarding? “It has been for me and my family,” Charbonier said.
Champlain, who has been recruiting for over three years, was selected by the Department of the Army to be a recruiter after two tours of duty in Iraq.
Because the army is the largest branch of military service, it carries the brunt of recruiting. “In Iraq, 90 percent [of the military] is the Army walking the street,” Champlain said.Both Charbonier and Champlain acknowledged that the war in Iraq makes recruiting difficult at times, but said that it doesn’t deter them. “In the times we’re in, it makes it tough for us. We made our goals for the year. See, we don’t have quotas. We have goals,” Champlain said.
Just what was that goal this year? “80,000 active duty and 26,000 reserves; President Bush wants to get bigger next year,” Champlain said. “About 7,000 more next year,” Charbonier added. The two emphasized that they do not get paid per person recruited.
According to a 2005 NewsBuster’s article, “Statistics, Lies and Damned Lies on Military Recruitment,” the Army is meeting it’s “goals” by accepting more soldiers who score in the lowest category for aptitude tests.
How are recruiters received on college campuses these days? Has anything changed since the war began? “The East coast is more patriotic. It’s closer to D.C., New York, 9/11,” Champlain said. “California has this ‘it’s not affecting us’ attitude. It’s more like ‘what can you do for me?'”
Although the recruiters say they don’t encounter much hostility on college campuses, some students at Oxy have expressed concern with the recruitment process. “I don’t like how they target minorities, people of color, or people of a certain socio-economic status,” James Ward III (sophomore) said.
Charbonier and Champlain say the Army can do a lot for students. According to the letter Charbonier sends out, if you choose to join the Reserves, you can receive tuition assistance and a monthly stipend. Likewise, Sergeant Charbonier says the army will help pay for your loans once you graduate. “The army will pay up to $20,000 in loans if you’re in the reserves . . . That’s working just two days a month,” he said.
Ward doesn’t feel that’s enough of an incentive. “They try to make [students] feel as if they have no other option but to enlist in the armed forces and seduce them by ‘paying for their college education,’ but there are many other ways to pay for one’s own college education,” he said.
Are the Army’s promises of $4,500 a year for tuition assistance and a monthly stipend attractive to you? “Hell no,” Ward said.
Alice Bauer (sophomore) was also skeptical about recruitment. “They say it’s not active reserves but you don’t know when it’s going to be active.”
Kathryn Tamayo (senior) echoed Bauer’s skepticism and added that money for education doesn’t pay for the possibility of losing one’s life. “Joining the army in turn for receiving money for school . . . is a weird trade-off,” she said. “If people want to join the Army, more power to them, but I’m just not sure if I can fully support it. It seems like a small [amount] when your life is on the line. Especially with the government we have now. Who knows what they’re planning to do?”
When discussing possible anti-war and anti-recruitment sentiment on campus, Champlain said that students shouldn’t assume that recruiters support the war. “It could be that I feel the same way, but I can’t say that or else I’m going against my Commander-in-Chief,” he said.
Charbonier added, “We’re here to do our job.”
Would he let his own children join the army? Charbonier laughed, “It’s up to them.” He then added: “My boys are really into sports. They’re working on sports scholarships right now.”
Champlain and Charbonier were eager to know about Oxy students. Champlain asked how they would be received on campus. They also asked if Oxy is a big party school, where they could pick up the latest issue of the Weekly and where they should set up booths for recruiting.
Some students have already received Charbonier’s letters. You may be wondering how they got a hold of that list with student names and box numbers.
The No Child Left Behind Act requires that high schools distribute the name, home phone number and address of every student enrolled in the school to military recruiters, unless the parent specifically states that the child’s information should not be used.
The Solomon Amendments take the military’s ability to access information to colleges and universities. Institutions of higher learning must allow military recruiters access to information or forfeit government funding from Departments of Defense, Education, Labor, and Health & Human Services.Charbonier explained the process: “We went through administration, got a letter saying ‘we would like access . . . [to] the class list.’ They were very nice about it.”
Bauer perceived a problem with the military accessing students’ personal information for recruitment purposes. “It makes an unfair bias for schools to open themselves up to [recruitment]. I think it should be somebody’s choice to go out and find [the Army], not have it forced upon them,” she said.
If you haven’t received one of Charbonier’s letters yet, he says you should soon. “We’re in the process of sending them out to everyone on the list,” he said. “It’s taking me a while since I handwrite all the labels.”
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