When Mickiela was 15, her mother was evicted for not paying rent, and the family was out on the street. [Mickiela and her sister] returned to Nana [their grandmother] once again, but this time they only found more trouble. Nana had developed gallbladder cancer, which had metastasized. Soon she began losing weight and her red hair. Gradually, she also started losing her mind.
Just as Mickiela was in the middle of this crisis, and at the end of her junior year in May 2002, she and all her classmates, most of whom were also Mexican, were sent to the school auditorium to take a test called the ASVAB. No school officials bothered to explain what it was, but Mickiela soon found out. It was the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery test, the test you take to get into the military.
Military recruiters were a common sight in the hallways of Rosemead High. They would set up tables covered with alluring pamphlets promising money and adventure and call out to students as they walked by. With their clean, pressed uniforms and flashy smiles they were such a seductive presence that Mickiela can’t even remember the recruiters who were offering other careers.
Since 9/11 and the start of the Afghanistan War, the military has been targeting schools like Mickiela’s—schools in communities where jobs are scarce and the students are poor or the children of immigrants—and promising glamorous careers and citizenship to those who join. But by the time Mickiela was in 11th grade, the government had given recruiters another advantage as well: the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.
The act stipulates that no public high school can qualify for federal money unless it gives the address and telephone number of every student to the military and allows recruiters access to the school. Any family that wants to keep its address private has to submit a form saying so, but most people don’t know this. Once recruiters have this information, they court the students like basketball scouts, calling them at home, taking them out for meals, and making any promises they want. Recruiters can do this because the enlistment contract that every recruit must sign states that none of these promises have to be kept—something else most people don’t know.
The main reason the government smoothes the way for recruiters like this is because after 9/11, enrollment in the military dropped drastically, especially in the Army. Between 2000 and 2005, recruitment declined 20 percent among noncitizens, nearly 7 percent among Hispanics, 10 percent among whites, and 58 percent among African-Americans. This made recruiters so desperate to meet military quotas that they grew reckless; the army reported a 60 percent rise in “inappropriate actions” by recruiters between 1999 and 2005. They were helping high school students forge diplomas and cheat on drug tests, threatening to arrest students if they didn’t sign up, and lying. In 2006, two news stations equipped students with hidden cameras and sent them to recruiting offices. “Nobody is going over to Iraq anymore?” one student asked a recruiter. “No, we’re bringing people back,” he replied. Another was filmed saying, “We’re not at war. War ended a long time ago.”
Mickiela’s recruiter was a white man in his mid-30s who was married with children. He would drive up to the school in a new car, blasting hip-hop out of the window, and take her out for nice lunches. “He said that if I signed up with the National Guard I wouldn’t have to serve outside the country. National—that means in the country, right?” He told her the Army would give her $3,000 just for enlisting, pay for college, train her in the job of her choice, and enable her to travel abroad, all of which sounded dazzling to the 16-year-old. But what actually happened was that the $3,000 came in increments over the next four years and was taxed, she never got any money toward college, she was trained in the one job she asked not to do, and she didn’t get to travel anywhere abroad—except to the war in Iraq.
Mickiela said the recruiter was “really, really flirty,” too, and when she introduced him to a 17-year-old friend who was also interested in enlisting, he began dating her. “I don’t know if they ever had sex, but I know when they were supposed to go out on a date, he would just drive off to some place and make her give him head and that was it. She told me about it later.” Mickiela pulled a disgusted face.
In 2005 a press investigation found that over 100 young women were sexually exploited like this by at least 80 recruiters from the Army, Marines, Navy, and Air Force. Some were raped in recruiting offices, some assaulted in government cars as they were driven to military test sites, and others intimidated into sexual relationships, like Mickiela’s friend. Recruiters have a power that makes teenagers afraid to reject them or report their assaults, for they control whether the teen will get into the military at all, which for someone who can see no other way out of a dead-end life is power indeed.
In spite of her recruiter’s pressure, Mickiela resisted the military at first. The only part of the life that appealed to her was the physical challenge, for she had always been athletic. But when she went to her career counselor to discuss alternatives, all he said was, “When you’re 17 you’ll be old enough to sign up.”
Then Nana grew worse. She became addicted to morphine and turned delusional, accusing her family of trying to poison her, and she was wasting away in front of their eyes. Mickiela couldn’t bear it. In an effort to numb herself, she took to ditching school and partying all the time. She joined a graffiti crew and got kicked out of one school, then another. “My boyfriend lived right opposite my school, so I’d go see him instead of going to classes. I was smoking a lot of weed. I was really messing up.”
And then, on June 24, 2002, the day before Mickiela’s 17th birthday, Nana died. She was 52.
“I knew she was sick, but you never actually expect it,” Mickiela said quietly from her other grandmother’s couch, pulling a cushion over her belly. “If I cried when I was little, Nana would always say, ‘Save your tears for when I die.’ But she could say that ’cause death was such a distant thing, you know?”
After Nana’s death, Mickiela was left alone with her stepgrandfather, who made it clear right away that he couldn’t cope with raising her on his own. “He made me feel like he wasn’t my grandpa anymore. I felt so vulnerable. I didn’t know what to do.”
For a time she continued to slide downhill. Nana had always been the one to get her to school, make her do her homework, keep her organized. With no one to look out for her, Mickiela didn’t care anymore. But after a summer of partying, she grew disgusted with herself. Not knowing where else to turn, she went back to the recruiter. “I wanted to do something to be proud of. I imagined telling my grandchildren one day that I’d done something to protect the country.” After all, it was September 24, 2002, by then, a year after 9/11.
The recruiter was delighted. He told Mickiela that all she needed was her mother’s signature because recruits under 18 cannot enlist without signed permission from a parent. Mickiela hadn’t seen her mother in months by then, but she called her anyway and explained. “If you wanna join, forge my name, I don’t care,” her mother said, and hung up.
Mickiela forged her mom’s name right under the recruiter’s nose. “We do this all the time,” he told her. “Don’t worry about it.”
So, at the beginning of 12th grade and exactly three months after Nana died, Mickiela signed up with the California National Guard for what her recruiter told her would be six years. In fact, anyone joining any branch of the military for the first time is committed for eight years, or longer, if the military wants. But Mickiela didn’t know that yet, just as she didn’t know the country had been at war with Afghanistan since October 2001 because she never watched the news. Nor did she know the National Guard could send her to war whenever it needed to. She still thought she would be fighting forest fires, helping with floods, and protecting her country from terrorist attacks, all at home in California.
By the time Mickiela graduated from high school in June 2003, the United States had invaded Iraq, and National Guard members were being turned into combat soldiers for the first time since the Korean War.
From The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq by Helen Benedict.
