The Wake

Let’s face it. The American forces aren’t fighting the Nazis anymore. What one person might call the “good fight” isn’t exactly black and white. It’s more open to interpretation these days. Unfortunately for our armed forces, more people are realizing this fact every day. Each time someone turns on BBC instead of Fox for their daily news, or maybe when one remembers that Allah is really just another name for the same God, or that Jesus is of frequent crucial presence in the Qur’an, it gets a little harder for recruiters to do their job.

Speaking of how our media treats Islam, why is it when someone is strictly religious, they’re “devout” in Christian-speak, they’re “orthodox” in Judaism-speak. Yet, change the name they employ for the same God, and now they’re “fundamentalists,” “extremists” or “Jihads.” This mindless prejudice is unfortunately present in our culture today, is termed by some as “incognizant racism.” Think about any action movie you’ve seen post-1980; whenever they need a token bad-guy super-villain, what does he look like? For instance, Dan Brown calls his bowel movement Angels and Demons. Brown loves emphasizing the evil-doer’s dark brown skin, especially in situations like when the bad guy considers strangling a sleeping prostitute with whom he’s just fornicated. But the good news is that we can see efforts to explain Islam’s complicated aspects given to us by media members with consciences like Morgan Spurlock and his show “30 Days,” where myths and misconceptions about Islam were dispelled by having a prejudiced Christian interact with a Muslim community. Through this effort, coupled with common knowledge that we just can’t trust the Bush administration anymore, it appears that Americans’ ignorance about Islam is dwindling. It might not be as fast as we’d hope, but it’s still something. Because of this, it gets harder all the time for the people trying to get you to sign up. As people realize that this war, they’ve engaged us in is dangerous and uncalled for, less people want to fight for their cause.

When I was still living in Montana, I got into a shouting match with a recruiter who called me. After we hung up, I felt proud and happy after ruining his day. But moments later this bent pride mutated into despair, and from there to something worse. What he told me isn’t exactly something a person forgets. Every time I open a newspaper and see another headline about whichever horrendous current event our armed forces is responsible for, I hear his voice.

The man spoke with a foreign down-home country accent. Never mind the fact that literally nobody I met in Missoula ever spoke like this; the back forty drawl sounding nearly as legitimate as Ms. Cleo’s Jamaican. The recruiter, after making bullshit chitchat about where I was from, asked, “Say, you ever think about joining the army?”

I was angry with the media from my History of Islam class, loyally liberal and attending anti-war protests so any shred of courtesy I may have employed quickly disappeared. I asked him how many he’d killed and how he slept at night. I asked how Iraqis would remember our occupation twenty years from now, especially with haunting memories of American soldiers’ exploits at Abu Ghraib. Then I asked how long it took to perfect that Larry the Cable Guy-esque bogus accent. The recruiter was just as pissed, though. He screamed back at me about my duty to my country and how I had no idea how much I owed the army. I apologized sarcastically for not blindly supporting his terrorist organization. (It’s all a matter of perspective, dear reader. One person’s trash is another’s gold, just like one person’s terrorist is another guy’s hero.)

Anyways, the recruiter went for my Achilles’ heel. He asked about money. If I know anything about college kids, it’s that we all worry about money. Because of this, army recruiters have a goldmine in our demographic. What, with a seemingly endless supply of cash at their disposal, recruiters can offer to buy your soul for a pretty penny and a little window of time in your life. Two years, big deal! Afterward you’ll have X amount of dollars to spend on education. What they forget to tell you in those commercials is that even all the money Michael Jackson has paid out in lawsuits won’t matter when you die “serving your country.” We shouted about tuition assistance for a minute and after providing him with a list of the things I’d rather do than enlist, he dropped his bomb. I’ll never forget those words. Mistakenly slipping out of his forced accent, he said, “I’m not concerned with morality. I’m just offering you forty-thousand dollars for college.”

Not concerned with morality! What? Here’s a man who’s representing the American Armed Forces, trying to show people the fun side of enlisting and trying to legitimize a war which could easily be considered the worst fucking mistake in modern history and he isn’t concerned with morality. Money’s all that matters? We hung up and I didn’t sleep that night because somewhere on the western side of Montana, Satan had been personified and my taxes were paying for him to continue.

In the Middle East, a place that has been shamelessly exploited by American and European forces for at least the last 100 years, the body count can’t be determined and probably never will. The Iraq Body Count Project estimates Iraqi casualties at around 50,000; meanwhile, the BBC puts it at around 600,000. Why don’t we know an exact number? What does that say about our army? Aligned with this, there are roughly 3,000 Americans dead. Numbers don’t really matter. Because the minute the first person died, someone who was probably your age, my age, that’s when it became unacceptable. One dead is one too many. No matter what a Bill O’Reilly-praising xenophobic sycophant might tell you. It’s really all that matters.