Amor for Fatima, Andrew and Anthony

Published in the Ventura County Star on 3/4/2005

AMOR means “Love” in Spanish. The acronym stands for Alternatives to the Military: Options and Resources. The AMOR group is composed of community activists, deeply troubled by the war in Iraq, who meet at Oxnard’s Café on A. We range in age from 20 to 80, and we include concientious objectors as well as veterans of WWII, Vietnam and other conflicts.

What we have in common is respect for the dead. Like Andrew Aviles, age 18, dead in Baghdad. Or Anthony Roberts, 18, dead in Al Anbar Province.

The long list of American teenage soldiers who have perished in Iraq demands our loving attention, but it would be obscene to memorialize their deaths without also acknowledging those who died by their hand. By our hand.

There is no list of Iraqi dead. Just estimates. Five thousand? Ten thousand? A hundred thousand? The Iraqi dead are nameless to us, faceless, almost incorporeal. Iraqi civilian dead are “collateral damage.” Accidents. Nobody’s responsibility. “Co-lateral” means off to the side. Not at center stage, not at the heart of the matter, not where the flag flies and the band plays. Extraneous. Out of sight, out of mind.

For months before the war many of us tried to remain mindful of the still-living Iraqi civilians. We wore buttons with the name and age of an Iraqi child: “Fatima, age 2.” A faith-based group in Massachusetts distributed the buttons. Pray for these children, they said.

In contrast to the nameless Iraqis, CNN has a website with our dead soldiers’ photos, names, hometowns and ages. It looks like a high school yearbook. Except the graduates are dead. It is those deaths that AMOR addresses. Pray for them too. And consider why they died.

Not why we waged war under false pretenses and in defiance of international law. Not why we elected a president too eager for battle. You already know that. What you may not know, however, is how our children were lured to this war.

Under a provision of a law whose very name, “No Child Left Behind,” is an unintended tribute to the atavistic evil of conscripting the young, every high school in the US is required to submit the names, addresses and phone numbers of all boys and girls in 11th and 12th grade for military recruitment purposes. It is possible to “opt-out” of the Defense Department’s recruitment hit list, but most kids and their parents don’t know that. Oxnard let two years lapse before they even began to inform parents that the Pentagon was compiling data about their children.

The military spent about four billion dollars of taxpayer money last year to recruit our children to the killing fields. Professional recruiters charm impressionable teens with glossy mailers and unsolicited phone calls. No Child Left Behind guarantees recruiters a competitive edge over other post-high school employment and education alternatives that are required by law to honor children’s privacy.

Military recruiters are also on our campuses with Junior ROTC programs. They show up for job fairs and career days, and at some schools they’re allowed to just “hang out,” schmooze the kids and give away trinkets: t-shirts, baseball caps, miniature toy rockets.

The military targets the poor and minorities for its bloody missions of putative glory. Jessica Lynch joined up and went to Iraq after she had been turned down for a job at Wal-Mart.

Recruiters promise kids job training, a college education, adventure and excitement. They promise to build character. Most of these promises are inflated and misleading. As Mose Allison used to sing, “Life is short and talk is cheap. Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”

Life was 18 years short for soldiers like Andrew and Anthony. What promises did recruiters break to them?

There are better, nonlethal ways to get job training and a college education, and there are peaceful ways to serve your community and your country. There is nothing glorious about war. War is a trick we play on our children, the quintessential broken promise.

Chris Hedges writes, “War is always about betrayal. It is about the betrayal of the young by the old, idealists by cynics, and finally, soldiers by politicians. Those who pay the price, those who are maimed forever by war, are shunted aside, crumpled up and thrown away. They are war’s refuse.”

AMOR challenge the notion of teenagers as refuse. We provide walk-in, telephone and online counseling services to youth looking for alternatives to the military, and we work to create peaceful employment, education and service options on high school campuses.

We do it for Andrew and Anthony, and we do it for Fatima.