Stan Hemry, member of the Arizona Counter-Recruitment Coalition, discusses the private information made available to military recruiters through the No Child Left Behind Act, the best way to limit access to student records and opt-out of aggressive recruitment, the effective tactics of counter-recruitment and the role Gen. Stanley McChrystal played in the manipulation of Pat Tillman’s image and the coverup of his death.
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I'm Angela Keaton and I'm here for Antiwar Radio and that's airing right now on KOS-95.9 and streaming live from Antiwar.com.
On the line with me today we have Stan Hemry, he's an Arizona counter-recruiter and he's going to set us straight on how we go about actually making some constructive changes.
We talk a lot about the problems but we need everyday solutions.
Stan, are you with us?
I sure am.
I'm glad to be here.
Oh, well, thank you.
Tell us a little bit about your organization and then we'll talk a little bit about tactics.
Well, the organization was founded right after the ironic death of Pat Tillman by friendly fire and I think that was in 2005 and we here in Arizona have a lot of like military running our state.
It's like $66 billion out of $99 billion for our total economy, so two-thirds are connected to military contractors or some sort of military spending.
We decided to start handing out flyers around high schools here in the area and we targeted high schools that were mostly minority or people that were perceived as minorities and these are where recruiters were doing the most heavy work.
So we went to these high schools and we handed out flyers and we got more high school kids to duplicate the flyers and hand them out themselves on campuses and people formed groups in various parts of the valley.
Well, one of the projects we worked on was called Opt Out Summer and I don't remember which year it was but probably 2007 we started a program where we wanted to see the opt out form given to every student so they could have their names removed from the recruiter's list because after they passed the No Child Left Behind Act, which is true, there is no child left behind that can be recruited into the military, they started hounding people because they were given personal information from students, underage students, under 18 years of age and it was given to them without their permission.
So it was just automatically handed over unless you put an opt out form in.
Well, here in the valley, those schools where the recruiters were working the hardest, they never mentioned it to the students that they had an option to remove their name from this list.
So with the campaign that we started, we were able to get the opt out form in every student handbook in Maricopa County and we feel like we were pretty successful that at least the students have a chance to escape the grasp of military recruiters.
Stan, you mentioned that there is a targeting of minorities or perceived minorities.
You're saying that there's recruiting directed directly to young black men, young Mexican American men specifically?
Well, I'm going to say that it's directed at people since I guess they're recruiting both men and women but that's correct.
They're targeting people who they perceive as low income and having less opportunities maybe available to them to go to college and other things which is totally false.
There's plenty of ways to go to school that you do not have to go into the military first in order to achieve those goals.
So they would go to these schools and they would prey on these kids and they would basically tell them that they're the only option, that this is the best way for them to make a career and to do the work that needs to be done here in this country or wherever around the world that they have to do it for the military.
And lately, they've been connecting that to citizenship.
So they're even offering the extra incentive of fast-tracking people to citizenship if they'll join the military.
Okay.
So there's several levels of game playing and exploitation that are going on with kids but young people who are 16, 17, 18 years old.
Is that fair?
Yeah.
And I think it should be mentioned here that we never went to any of the high schools that had predominantly white students or were in the upper middle class or perceived to be high-income areas.
And those folks had the highest opt-out rates of any part of the city.
So they were getting the message through to some students that the opt-out form was available.
Are there any consequences for signing this opt-out form?
Well, at this point, it's two consequences.
As far as I know, they are not allowed to remove your name from other types of recruiting that goes on in schools because there's lots of times there's sports recruiters.
There's maybe different types of athletic programs as well as different academic programs and they reach out to students and try and recruit them to their schools.
As far as I know, they're supposed to remove them from only the military recruiters list but not from all lists.
Some schools refuse to split that up.
And so they would just remove them from every recruiter's list.
Wow.
That's damning.
I'm assuming it's deliberate, but okay.
That's a very real consequence and certainly one that would hold a student back from actually doing what he or she might really want to do with one's life that doesn't involve going to a foreign country and sitting in a hole and killing people.
That's right.
And these recruiters were relentless.
They would call repeatedly.
They would not stop calling if you asked them to stop calling.
And parents were becoming irate.
I was working with lots of parents at that point who were ready to see this change.
Well, I'm not sure what year it was again, but the military added another form to the possibility of opt-out and it's called the JAMERS form.
And I can't remember the acronym for it, but if you look on the website, ArizonaCRC.org, Arizona spelled out, and it has a link to the form that you need in either English or Spanish.
And this form you send directly to the Pentagon.
So you send the form in, you ask them to remove your name, and it should take care of it for at least that year if not for the rest of your school career.
So they set up a different type of system that was at the national level to remove you from the database instead of each individual school removing you from the list that they hand over to the military in the fall.
Okay.
How involved are you with that?
Do you ever speak directly to parents?
I certainly have worked with them in recent times.
I haven't done a lot of work with parents just alone.
Most of my work has been done with young people, people in college that are seeing JROTC on campus, folks that are in high school that are getting the most phone calls and the most pressure.
And I meet them at rallies, anti-war rallies, and various other places.
And usually I just encourage them to download our flyers from the website and print them out and hand them out to people, because this is an information campaign.
And I want to add that I feel there's another component to the work in counter-recruitment, and that is that there's a tremendous suicide rate.
There's probably 15 people a day who are unable to resolve their life crises after working in the military, and they decide to end their lives.
And it's very tragic.
It has exceeded the numbers of casualties that have been actually lost in the wars themselves.
So we're not necessarily being taken out by our enemy.
We're taking ourselves out.
I think that number's closer to 18 a day, according to the Veterans Administration.
Well, and don't do that.
This doesn't include the active-duty members who are killing themselves.
So you're right.
I mean, 18 is probably for vets, but then there's another certain number that's even higher that's for active-duty people who see no way out of the military once they've volunteered for it.
Well, that's a terribly damning statement about be all you can be.
And it also shows that there's a tremendous deception that goes on in the process of recruiting, the signing of the contract, the actual terms being fulfilled in that contract, and then the breaking of them with this stop-loss program.
Okay.
Tell me, what kind of people have you been able to bring in to your organization?
Are you able to do – is it basically just people kind of committed on the left, or are you able to get kind of a coalition built of a lot of people who are really concerned about what this is doing to our youth?
Well, I haven't been able to get many of the people from the right to learn more about this information and then pass it along.
There seems to be kind of a blind patriotism a lot of times that keeps people from analyzing things and figuring out what's the best course for themselves and their children to take.
They just line up and say the pledge and find them about a line, and in they go.
That's why I mentioned Pat Tillman at the front end of the interview, because he's a very unique individual in that his parents and family were completely diehard, red, white, and blue, lots of military service up and down the line.
When, I guess, the planes hit the towers or something, soon after, he was ready to go.
He went in with his brother.
He turned down an NFL contract.
He went into the service and did the thing that every American thinks they're supposed to do if you buy the grand narrative.
He did exactly what you're supposed to do.
He was supposed to turn down every opportunity available to you and rush into the military to save our country.
Well, as it turned out, he looked into Iraq, because that's where he was first stationed in the Rangers.
He didn't like it.
They transferred him to Afghanistan.
Then there was this really weird sort of strange thing that happened while he was there.
He sort of started transforming into someone who doesn't believe what the military tells him anymore and was really beginning to question, why are we there?
Especially in Iraq, but in Afghanistan as well.
Finally, he was killed by his own troop.
Friendly fire is one of those things that you never really know exactly what happened.
His mother wrote this great book called Boots on the Ground at Dusk.
She pretty much indicts Stanley McChrystal, the head of the armed forces in Afghanistan, as the person who probably either ordered or at least for sure covered up the death of Pat Tillman.
For any right-wing person out there who might possibly be listening to this show, don't think that the military wouldn't kill its own people just to get ahead further down the road.
Stan, because I have not read Mrs. Tillman's book, could you kind of clarify that for me?
You're saying McChrystal?
Go into detail a little bit more for us here.
She's a diehard American that had flags waving all up and down the street of where they lived.
I think they lived in Oregon or maybe it was California.
They lived in California.
He was recruited to, I don't know the sports name, but I believe it's the Sun Devils here at Arizona State University.
He finished school here early and was recruited to the NFL, into the Cardinals.
He was going to be moved up even further into a bigger, better contract.
Instead of doing that, he diverted it and went into the Rangers and joined it with his brother.
They both became part of the same platoon.
While they were there, he became very popular.
I might add, the White House was always following him because of his status as a player in the NFL.
He was well-liked, but my understanding was he wasn't the best player, but he was the kind of player that everybody loved because of his enthusiasm and his relentlessness.
He was a very smart man, well-read.
But there was another flaw that the military doesn't like, and that was he was atheist.
Stanley McChrystal, according to the mother in this book, was a very diehard Christian.
At some point, they figured out that he was atheist.
Even during his funeral, they insisted that they put prayers into the service, when the family doesn't even believe in prayer.
They insisted on prayers in the service because it was televised nationwide.
They got their war hero, whether he wanted to be one or not.
They turned him into a war hero.
I just want to ask a question that you said about Stanley McChrystal.
I thought maybe I caught that you believe that he had ordered the death or that he was somehow instrumental in what happened to Tillman?
Yeah, he covered up.
I'll kind of do it backwards.
He covered up the death by saying that it was an attack and that the enemy had been fought off until they killed him.
They gave him a silver star because he had done so well in battle.
That was issued by Stanley McChrystal, and the whole story came from him.
This was before he was promoted to theater person.
He's in charge of the whole theater now.
But at the time, he was in this wonderful group called the Joint Special Operations Forces, which goes around doing all kinds of black ops around the world.
My reading of her book, this is my interpretation of what she wrote, is that he basically put special ops people into the platoon, created a very odd scenario, and then they turned and basically killed Tillman and his translator.
When they interviewed the people in the book, they said that they were just firing randomly all around.
They were confused and didn't know enemy fire was coming at them from all directions.
That might be true for some new people, but these were like highly trained rangers that should at least know what direction the fire is coming from.
If you read her book, you can understand the process that happened around him.
I don't know if she actually thinks Stanley McChrystal ordered his death, but from what I read in the book, why would he have spent so much time covering it up if he wasn't involved?
She even said in there that some of those folks weren't even really military people.
Some of the folks in his platoon weren't really in the military.
So it's like, why are these characters in this scenario?
Why are they there in the first place?
Secondly, why is he covering up and giving a post-humorous star to this man that they didn't even like?
They forced to have prayers in his funeral so they could make him look good, and they never told the family about friendly fire.
I think it was like two weeks afterwards they started to reveal what really happened, and things like they burned his uniform.
They did things that were against their own policies.
Who are these non-military people?
They're like shadowy characters hanging around?
The Joint Special Operations Forces have been jumping around all over the world.
They were in Iraq doing some things, and it's hard to connect them because it's all secrecy and shroud.
But whenever something is revealed about them, it always looks really cagey and sketchy, and it's the death of people all around them.
They either show up and kidnap them, or they just assassinate.
This man, Stanley McChrystal, has been doing this work nonstop.
During Cheney Bush, he had a carte blanche to do whatever he wanted to do, apparently.
An upstarting atheist, no matter who he was, is not going to be able to sit very long in a military that's got these kind of forces running around.
These are some of my assumptions about things, but just reading her book and the work that she put into that book, it's so clear that something was up.
I do need to read that book for myself because it does prompt some rather interesting questions here.
Though I want to say that some of these operations, it does sound kind of like these are all basically arms of the military, even if they seem like black ops or shadow characters, that they're basically some element of the U.S. military.
That is a fairly damning statement, and I definitely have to read more.
It is Joint Special Operations, so that means, joint means that they're not just using one branch of the military.
So they may have put people in there who are from other branches, or whoever, however they use them.
Of course, now we're learning that the contractors receive these type of assignments.
This has just come out in the last six months, that the contractors are doing top-secret work.
Let me ask you, going back to the counter recruitment a little bit, do you ever run into students who are, what kind of counseling do you offer students, in other words, to kind of basically give them the other side of the story?
I mean, do you get to speak to them one-on-one, and do parents and teachers allow this?
Well, a lot of times when we do tabling, some of the festivals we have around here, like Art Walk and things like that, that's the time I get to meet people and talk to them one-on-one.
Usually I just try and give them a very clear picture of what you're writing, what you're signing away when you go into the military.
A lot of folks don't understand that when you go into the military, you're signing away your civil liberties.
This is not the same thing as a prisoner who might end up in an American prison.
Our prisoners have more rights than the people in the military do.
Well, can you give us an example of some of the civil liberties one is giving up when one signs on for this?
Well, one that's probably the most important one is the right to due process and to a trial of your peers, to a trial by jury of your peers.
When you're in the military, you no longer have that right.
You have no habeas corpus rights, which means you cannot test the legality of your detention over and over and over again, which is what prisoners have, supposedly.
They write those away when you sign them without a line.
Okay.
It does seem like that's too abstract or too difficult a concept for some, I don't want to say teenagers, but young adults to really get their heads around.
Do you think they really fully understand the implications of that?
Oh, no.
In fact, until you get in trouble with the military, none of those things would come into play.
It's only when you cross the line and you have to have some type of legal test of whatever happened to you, where they line up, that's where a military tribunal comes in, where you're basically stuck in their prison system.
I think Mark Hall is a good example of this right now.
He is a man who wrote a song.
I believe it was a rap song about Stop Loss, which is a program that after you finish your contract with the military, they can retain you indefinitely, and 13,000 folks are over there in various parts of the world on these Stop Loss programs.
Well, he wrote a song about it, and they were so upset with him that they not only brought him back in the military, but now they're holding him in prison, in jail, in one of their prisons overseas.
I don't know, Iraq or someplace.
They transferred him into a prison.
Well, he has no ability to get out.
He can hire a lawyer.
They can go through the process, but the military's got him, and he has no remedy in civilian court or criminal court, for that matter.
He has no remedy outside of the military system.
So they're completely doing this out of vengeance because of this song that he wrote and sung.
So you really do believe that the U.S. military is that petty with members that even make really minor social criticisms?
Right.
I mean, here was the song, and then Pat Tillman would have been someone who maybe was meeting with Chomsky or something like that, but he was still in the military, and they were still marching down the road and killing off everybody they were told to.
I mean, both cases, I think in the Pat Tillman case, though, they had already seen him as a war hero, and this was also during the time of Abu Ghraib, which was a huge torture scandal that revealed that, truthfully, America does torture as well as kill anybody they want to with impunity.
So that time period was a very revealing news time period, and they really needed something to kind of boost countries' morale.
Michael Jackson maybe was busy that day or something, and so they decided to go with the next best thing, which is a good war hero story.
And when he was killed, which, again, I think was done intentionally, when he was killed, they had a war hero story on their hands.
John McCain spoke at the funeral.
It was televised live on C-SPAN until his brother got up there and started saying negative things and cursing, and they cut him off.
They cut the whole feed, actually.
Right.
I do remember the funeral, and it was very obvious to me that I thought to myself, in about two weeks, the conservatives will pretend he never existed because his actual life story has nothing to do with what they were trying to portray.
Well, and that's right.
And the family self-duped as they went through it, and the brother who was in the platoon was very strategically separated from his brother so that the two of them were not involved.
And they didn't actually involve him in the firefight that eventually killed Pat.
His brother was off somewhere else, split off with the platoon.
They split the platoon in half, and then one half went forward with something, and the other one, I think, was dragging like a broken-down Humvee.
And then that's when things went, you know, chaos ensued, and then suddenly these two folks were dead, this translator and Pat Tillman.
In the few minutes we have left, I do want to talk a little bit about how did you get involved with counter-recruitment?
Well, I was working as an anti-war protester and volunteering my time here in a local area, and I was doing a protest on Mondays downtown in a university town here.
And for five years, I think, or close to that, every Monday I was out there with a sign that said all kinds of different things, and we interacted with people, and I talked about stuff.
And as I started going along, I realized this is not enough.
This is not enough.
This is not going to stop this country from doing what it's doing, so I need to do something else.
And I'm very worried about the young people, and this was even before the downturn of the economy.
This was before a lot of stuff has come out about suicide.
And I just felt like that people need to be informed.
If they were going to enlist in the military, at least they need to know what's going to happen, what the consequences of their actions are.
And so I started working with other concerned kids like myself, and we formed a group, and we did a lot of good tabling and a lot of good work, and formed a website, kind of proliferated ourselves a little bit so it was happening more than once.
And we just became this group that people would go to whenever they needed another angle on things.
We would try and have, for instance, Iraq Vets Against the War for Peace, those folks that would be the ones to speak if a school assembly wanted someone to speak.
Or we would ask families who are survivors, that one of their family members was killed and they are survivors, ask them to speak.
And I spoke with a producer of a film called Arlington West, and it was about a graveyard, a kind of pseudo graveyard, that they set up in the sand on the West Coast.
Because there is an Arlington Cemetery on the East Coast, which has little white tombstones all over the place.
And so they wanted one that was on the West Coast.
And they put up little markers in the sand, I think they were crosses, of every person who died.
And then people would come and put their things down to memorialize their lost loved ones.
And he did a film about it, that he tried to portray what it's like to lose family members.
And also to bring some memorial celebration to the people who died.
So some of the questions they would ask in the assemblies were like, how many people have died in your school that have gone to Iraq or Afghanistan?
And nobody knew, because they weren't tracking that.
Then he would ask the question, how many people know someone who has died in Iraq or Afghanistan?
And the hands would go up, and everybody would look around.
And that was like the first time in that school that anybody knew that other people felt the same way they did.
So there's a completely different kind of propaganda that's being applied here.
They're not treating it as if each school needs to keep track of those folks.
If each school had like a running total of how many people they've lost that were from that school, it would look a lot different to people who are thinking about going into the military.
Stan, how can people who want to get more involved with your organization, how can they find you?
We're at our website, ArizonaCRC.org.
And from that website, you can contact us.
We're also on Facebook and MySpace.
And we mostly just portray information.
We're conveying information to people so they can learn more about it.
And the Arlington West Film, it's a great place to start.
Anybody can obtain it for free.
It's in Spanish and English and in various links, so you don't have to have a long assembly.
You could have a short assembly.
But I feel that if they really want to help children, they should run these movies in the schools and then have discussions, frank, open discussions about veterans, honoring the people who've died, making sure that everybody is fully aware that war causes these consequences.
If that alone would bring information to people to make better decisions with, even if they decide to go in the military, at least they won't become suicidal because the expectations were so completely different from what they actually turned out to be.
Well, on that grim road, Stan, thank you so much for what you do for peace.
And thank you.
I appreciate the interview.
All right.
And this is Anti-War Radio.
We'll be back in just a moment.
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