SAN FRANCISCO - Students from 20 Northern Californian high schools will return to their classrooms this fall with more than vacation stories.  They will be experts on military recruitment and service – having met with veterans, recruiters, the San Francisco school board that phased out the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC), a conscientious objector and toured Camp Pendleton Marine base, among other activities.

The week-long trip, which goes from August 5 to August 12, is the ACLU of Northern California’s Howard A. Friedman Youth Project’s twelfth annual trip.  The ACLU activist class of 2007 says this trip is very personal and have named it “The Truth Behind the Camouflage:  A Youth Investigation into the Myths & Truths of Military Recruitment & Military Service.” (A full list of trip activities is available on request.)

“Where I go to school, there’s a lot of military recruiters,” said Aliesha Baldé, a 17-year-old student at Vallejo High School, who was approached by recruiters several times.   “The military recruiters actually came to my home offering me all sorts of things, including money for college.  I want to go on this trip because I want to inform my classmates about the truth behind the promises.”

Eveline Chang, director of the ACLU-NC’s Friedman Youth Project, highlights the importance of this year’s trip, in light of the armed forces not being able to meet recruitment goals and California’s demographic realities. Compared to any other state, California has the greatest number of youth between 15 and 24 years old.  In addition, California ranks second among the states where the army finds the greatest number of new recruits, and Los Angeles County ranks first among counties nationwide, according to the nonprofit research organization National Priorities Project. 

“California youth are at the epicenter,” Chang explains, “because of the state’s demographics. We are especially concerned about the reports of abuse and misrepresentations by military recruiters. Young people are not getting the full story.”     

As the public debates the war in Iraq, last week the U.S. Army, as reported in the Army Times, ordered a surge in recruiters to meet the largest shortfall in Army recruitment in over two years and some of the greatest recruiting challenges since the beginning of the all-volunteer army.

Nationwide, while African-American recruits are in decline, Latino recruits are on the rise, as is the so-called “green card soldier” phenomenon, where permanent residency status is offered to those willing to serve in the armed services. 

California is on track to have a majority Latino population by 2042.

Chang says that one of the biggest challenges facing youth is the military’s huge advertising budget that glamorizes military service. “When the amount the government spends on advertising for military recruitment surpasses Nike’s total advertising budget, we can understand why youth face an uphill battle when trying to make well-informed decisions.”

According to the most recent Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimate, well over half of the federal government’s total advertising budget, more than $700 million, went towards military recruitment advertising – a figure that surpassed Nike, Wal-Mart, Mastercard, and Coca-Cola in a 2007 Advertising Age study. When advertising is combined with recruitment support, the campaign to find recruits for the armed services is well over a billion dollars, says the CBO.

Seventeen-year-old Jacquieta Beverly who is part of the Friedman youth project and recently graduated from Tennyson High School in Hayward put it this way: “The first encounter I had with a recruiter, they came on campus with this big Hummer.  Our teachers at that time were on strike, so I just didn’t understand how the government has all this money to spend on a war and on recruitment when our teachers are on strike and our textbooks are all outdated.”

Beverly adds:  “It seemed the recruiters had the run of the campus; they have access to classrooms and students in the lunch room. It got to the point where it felt like they were harassing you.  They would follow you into the lunchroom offering to buy you snacks and stuff.  It felt like it was an invasion of your privacy.”

“An overarching goal of this trip is for these students to be resources on the realities of military recruitment and service to their peers.” Chang explains.  After the trip, students will make presentations in high schools throughout Northern California.

The diverse group of students, ranging from age 14 to 18, come from high schools in Oakland, San Francisco, Sacramento, Berkeley, Vallejo, Castro Valley, Chico, Hayward, Hercules, Orinda, Palo Alto, Petaluma, and San Rafael.

“The ACLU-NC Friedman Project hopes to spark discussion of issues that directly affect youth and create opportunities for young people to lead the movement for change,” adds Chang.

On August 12, the last day of the trip, students will present their preliminary findings, which will be compiled in a report documenting their personal writings, artwork and photographs. 

The Howard A. Friedman First Amendment Project of the ACLU-NC was founded in 1991 and works with teachers and students to engage youth in making connections between the Bill of Rights and the issues they face in their daily lives.  ACLU-NC’s Friedman Project has sponsored eleven previous summer trips that have covered a wide range of topics including economic justice, immigration, and juvenile justice.