{"id":5150,"date":"2009-01-12T16:43:03","date_gmt":"2009-01-13T00:43:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=5150"},"modified":"2009-01-12T16:43:03","modified_gmt":"2009-01-13T00:43:03","slug":"us-army-recruiting-at-the-mall-with-videogames","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2009\/01\/12\/us-army-recruiting-at-the-mall-with-videogames\/","title":{"rendered":"U.S. Army Recruiting at the Mall with Videogames"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>You never know who you might run into at the local mall&#8211;perhaps even an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/reuters\/2009\/01\/09\/technology\/tech-us-usa-army-recruiting.html?_r=1\">Army recruiter<\/a>. At the Franklin Mills shopping mall in Philadelphia the U.S. Army Experience Center has 60 computers with military videogames to ensnare young people. Prospective soldiers can also pretend to fire from a real Humvee or participate in a helicopter raid.<\/p>\n<p>This is certainly contributing to the modern Army&#8217;s culture of death that this\u00c2\u00a0former Army Ranger just wrote me about:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Dear Dr. Vance,<\/p>\n<p>Today I followed a large pickup bearing an Arizona &#8220;Purple Heart&#8221;\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0plate and driven by a youngish type, perhaps in his 30s, a sad\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0commentary in itself. But worse, it sported a bumper sticker reading,\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0&#8220;Special Forces. If God didn&#8217;t want us to kill people, he wouldn&#8217;t\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0have made us so good at it.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>From a culture I&#8217;m well familiar with (having completed Ranger\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0training 37 years ago), such a sentiment would once have been shared\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0only among practitioners\u00e2\u20ac\u201dRangers, Special Forces, Delta Force\u00e2\u20ac\u201dand not \u00c2\u00a0<br \/>\nthought fit for even non-elite infantrymen. Now we&#8217;re seeing it openly\u00c2\u00a0and casually expressed, as if commenting on the economy. Even a\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0generation ago soldiers expressed regret about their experiences; now\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0they want to tell you how proud they are to have killed and,\u00c2\u00a0presumably, that they would not hesitate to do it again.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Join the Army, meet interesting people, kill them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>You never know who you might run into at the local mall&#8211;perhaps even an Army recruiter. At the Franklin Mills shopping mall in Philadelphia the U.S. Army Experience Center has 60 computers with military videogames to ensnare young people. Prospective soldiers can also pretend to fire from a real Humvee or participate in a helicopter [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":41,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-5150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/41"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5150"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5150\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5151,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5150\/revisions\/5151"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5150"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=5150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}