“I Could Be Wrong” – How the military is using public schools to ‘recruit’ disadvantaged youth for life

When the powers that be talk about sending children to war, they are not talking about their children. So, whose children are they talking about, and where do those children come from?

I teach senior English at an urban high school in upstate New York. The poverty rate here is high. There are no Lucky Sons (or daughters) on my list. And many signed up to join the military after graduation. While I have nothing but respect and admiration for anyone willing to serve our great nation, I’m not sure eighteen is old enough–or old enough–to make such a drastic decision, especially now that a long-term conflict with Iran is a real possibility.

On Monday, Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) said, “If you’ve ever been there and you’ve been able to feel the war happening around you and you’ve tasted it, and you’ve felt it in your nose, and you’ve felt it, it’s something you’ll never forget.” Of course, Mr. Mullin himself never approached the war.

Trust me when I tell you: eighteen-year-olds are still children. They say dumb things. They do dumb things. They act in haste. And a high school like mine is a breeding ground for soldiers. Most days, there is a recruiter at the restaurant where the children will have lunch. You bring in flyers and a pull-up bar. You are dangling a signing bonus. And if someone does, the military has them. A contract with any branch of the armed services is the only contract for life in our culture.

According to the US Department of Defense, the military is seeing its highest recruitment numbers in more than a decade. By June 2025, the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Space Force had met their annual budgets. Perhaps this rise is due to a sudden increase in patriotism. Most likely, it is due to the tightening of the job market for high school graduates, or the rising cost of a college education.

Retired Sergeant Tony Buchanan, who joined the Army in 2001 after high school, and served in Iraq and Afghanistan, said, “While I believe the military does a good job of vetting these young men and women before they enlist, legally, the employer doesn’t need to talk to the parent.”

I have no doubt that the military teaches hard work, respect, and humility, as well as the opportunity to start cool jobs. But the truth is that, at some point, these young men and women can be called to war, regardless of their motives or beliefs. Because of that, we have to hope that our leadership sees war as a last resort.

In justifying the campaign, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, “The immediate threats are that we know that if Iran is attacked, and we believe they will be attacked, they will come after us immediately. If we wait for them to strike first after being attacked by someone else, we will be seriously injured and killed.”

As a community teacher, when I create a unit of study, the first thing I decide is where I want the content to take my students. A defined endgame drives all planning. I don’t just make it up as I go along and hope it all works out. Students always know what we are doing, why we are doing it, and where it will lead. They may not like it, and they may not agree with it, but they see the reason.

As for our attack on Iran, I’m afraid that the end has not been defined, and if it has been, this administration has done a poor job of defining it. On Monday, Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intel Committee, said he had heard the administration talk about “at least four different goals in the last eight or nine days.”

Every winter I teach Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carryd, is a collection of short stories that examines the experience of American soldiers in the Vietnam War. In it, O’Brien writes, “you don’t fight a war without knowing why. Of course, knowledge isn’t always perfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it should have a balanced belief in the justice and compulsion of its cause. You can’t right your wrongs. When people are dead, you can’t make them die.”

A CNN poll found that 59% of Americans disapprove of the Iran strikes and think a long-term conflict is likely.

So far we have lost six service members. That number will likely grow as this drags on. And the hard truth is that most of those victims will be children recruited from high schools in underserved communities.

“I’m a parent and a teacher, so I see it as my job to protect children,” said Derek Shuttleworth, a veteran educator who taught in Alaska, Oregon, California and New York. “Children should not be abused or used by adults, or sent to die in the sand, where a few months before they had to ask for permission to go to the toilet.”

This past January, I sat with an officer who had just signed with the Army. He was happy with the cash bonus, enough to pay a small fee for a “sick-ass truck.” Yesterday, he came back to see me. Now he is worried about the war. He does not want to “catch a bullet in Iran.” He said, “I may have made a mistake.”