A Veteran’s Iraq Message Upsets Army Recruiters
Being a military recruiter is no easy job. One of my brothers was a Navy recruiter in Milwaukee for a few years, and he had little good to say about the experience. The hours are long, the expectations ridiculous, and, now that the nation is at war, meeting recruiting quotas certainly isn’t getting any easier. (Uh…you mean I might die?? What about my scholarship money??)
While I can sympathize with the plight of recruiters, who are only trying to do their job, I wholeheartedly applaud Scott Cameron for his honest and non-sensational portrayal of what is being lost in Iraq. Cameron is not out trying to flog the media into devoting TV time or column inches to his solitary crusade. He merely put up a very simple storefront sign that recognizes the lives lost in Iraq. Of course, that this sign is next door to Duluth’s Army recruiting station is something that is not universally well-received by recruiters, who understandably see it as a political statement.
DULUTH, Minn., Dec. 21 - As those thinking of becoming soldiers arrive on the slushy doorstep of the Army recruiting station here, they cannot miss the message posted in bold black letters on the storefront right next door.
“Remember the Fallen Heroes,” the sign reads, and then it ticks off numbers - the number of American troops killed in Iraq, the number wounded, the number of days gone by since this war began.
The sign, put up by a former soldier, has stirred intense, though always polite, debate in this city along the edge of Lake Superior in northeastern Minnesota. In a way, many of the nation’s vast and complicated arguments about war are playing out on a single block here, around a simple piece of wood.
The seven military recruiters here, six of whom have themselves served in Iraq, want the sign taken away. “It’s disheartening,” Staff Sgt. Gary J. Capan, the station’s commander, said. “Everyone knows that people are dying in Iraq, but to walk past this on the way to work every day is too much.”
But Scott Cameron, a local man who was wounded in the Vietnam War, says his sign should remain. Mr. Cameron volunteers for a candidate for governor of Minnesota whose campaign opened a storefront office next door to the recruiting station, and he has permission to post the message he describes as “not antiwar, but pro-veteran.”
“We’re still taking casualties from Vietnam, years later,” Mr. Cameron said recently. “Is the same thing going to happen again?” Despite the location, he insists that his purpose is not to prevent new recruits from signing up for the Army, but to honor those who made sacrifices. Still, Mr. Cameron also says, “Before they join the military, people better know what they’re getting into.”
I couldnt agree more…and what is so wrong with one person taking a stand by simply portraying the truth by the numbers? As Cameron has said, it’s not about making a poltical statement. It’s about reminding those who see the sign of the cost of the war in Iraq. It’s about the reality of what it taking place in this generation’s Vietnam. And more than anything, it’s about reminding those young Minnesotans who walk into the Army Recruiting Station that war has it’s costs.
Cameron’s personal “protest” (though he clearly does not see it as such) is reflective of a growing national trend aimed at making it more difficult for the military to recruit young people who may ultimately end up going off to war and dying. An increasing number of parents are working to convince school districts to limit the access of recruiters to their children. Where recruiters do set up shop, an increasing number of protestors, some quiet and some increasingly vocal, are likely to camp out nearby and protest the presence of those recruiters.
In a very real sense, this divisiveness is reflective of the growing split in American society. On the one side are those who support the President and the war in Iraq without question or reservation (Better to fight the terrorists in Baghdad than New York….), on the other those of us who are tired of the lies, the deception, and the senseless and never-ending sacrifice of our children and our loved ones. Those of us who see the war in Iraq as this generation’s Vietnam simply want to be able to make a difference by making ourselves heard. Scott Cameron will likely tell you that he is no hero, but in my book he is every bit as much of a hero as Cindy Sheehan…and without the controversy that follows Sheehan wherever she goes. Would that more of us could make a simple, heartfelt gesture of a similar nature.
Although Mr. Cameron, 55, acknowledged that he opposed the war in Iraq, he insisted that his sign was not about that at all. Its intent, he said, is simple and apolitical: to remember the troops, to care for veterans, to recognize what is being lost each day. “This is for the veterans,” he said. “And the way I understand it, this is what we’re over there fighting for in the first place - for my right to put a sign right there.”
A few days after the opening, the office drew a visit from next door. Sergeant Capan, 31, said his recruiters were upset and wanted the sign removed. One woman who had just returned from duty in Iraq, he said, found the sign especially disconcerting and impersonal. “It was upsetting to veterans who don’t look at their friends and colleagues killed as numbers on a list,” he said.
In truth, neither side agrees on what precisely the sign is saying. Each sees its message through its own prism.
Sergeant Capan said he wondered why, if Mr. Cameron was truly trying to send a “pro-veterans” message, he had not instead posted a sign listing how many soldiers had returned home from Iraq safely and placed it somewhere else - an Interstate highway, say, or the Capitol. And Mr. Cameron said he suspected that Sergeant Capan’s true fear was not so much the well-being of his recruiters as how the sign might deter potential recruits.
If Cameron’s sign is enough to deter potential recruits, perhaps we might admit that people who could potentially die in a war should be presented with both sides of the story before signing their names to an enlistment contract. What is so wrong with allowing people to have information from both sides and then allowing them to make an informed decision? And, as Cameron has said, haven’t we fought wars so people can express themselves as he is doing? After 46 operations stemming from his service in Vietnam, few people have earned their free speech rights more than Scott Cameron.
Cameron is not anti-military, but he does value his Constitutionally-guaranteed right to free speech and free expression. My hat is off to him for the manner in which he has chosen to avail himself of those rights.
