Don’t Enlist

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Don’t Enlist

Accelerate your life!
~ Navy recruiting slogan . This is refreshingly honest — effectively, “Get your life over with faster.”

1. Most recruits are aware of the risk of being shot or blown up, but they might overlook some of the other risks such as:
   • Being prosecuted for war crimes. This is a risk that will follow you long after the war is over. Recall that some Nazis did not face prosecution until they were in their nineties. For now, the USA will likely interfere with your prosecution, but the political power of the USA is waning. When the USA is #2 or #3 they may be less willing to spit in the eye of international law.
   • Being maimed. This is about ten times more likely than being killed. You could use lose, legs, eyes or genitals but most common are head injuries that leave you mentally challenged. Check out a veteran’s hospital to get some idea of what the future may have in store for you.
   • Psychological damage. One in three vets returning from Iraq are diagnosed with a mental health disorder. Are you willing to live with stigma of being labeled a mental patient?
   • You will inevitably pick up disgusting tropical diseases and parasites. You will be bitten by tropical insects. Just check out what often happens to tourists who stay only a week in a tropical climate. Check out a veteran’s hospital to get some idea of what the future may have in store for you.
   • War will change you. You will be away a long time. This will play havoc with your relationships. Your old friends will feel uncomfortable around you. Your lovers won’t wait for you.
   • Even today, the majority of Americans do approve of the Iraq war. That percentage will rise over time, just as it did for the Viet Nam war. People will tend to take their shame for what America did out on you. They are many social circles where you will not be welcome. You will be looked on increasingly as a low class thug.
   War is a bit like a drug. You are trading off the immediate thrill of combat, torture, bullying, raping, killing (or whatever your pleasure), for misery that lasts the rest of your life.
2. According to the US Army about nine in every 1,000 soldiers deserted in fiscal year 2007, which ended 2007-09-30, compared to nearly seven per 1,000 a year earlier. Overall, 4,698 soldiers deserted in 2007, compared to 3,301 in 2006. These are not draftees deserting. They are people like yourself, eager for war, who knew full well they would be killing innocent civilians and children. They knew about suicide bombers and IEDs. You are certainly aware of how harshly the army treats deserters, and you know the life-long disgrace society heaps on deserters. Yet still many young men like yourself decided to face the consequences rather than continue to fight in Iraq. What happens to you in Iraq must be pretty awful. Think how painful it would have to be before you would even think of deserting, much less actually do it. Shouldn’t you at least talk to some of these deserters to find out what it was that sent them over the edge? If you think you might not be able to handle it, now is the time to find out. Sometimes the army shoots deserters, a fairly harsh punishment for not doing a little research before enlisting. Those guys that deserted were just like you. They too thought they could handle it no sweat. What would it hurt you to find out what it was that made them crack?
3. On average, a surgeon has to amputate the genitals of two wounded US soldiers each day in Iraq.
4. You may be killed. Your family, friends and people who love you will have a lifetime of heartache. Any children you would have fathered will be aborted with you.
5. You may be maimed, have one or more limbs amputated or lose half your face or your penis and balls. According to military historian Gwynne Dyer, for every person killed, 8 are seriously maimed. You will live the rest of your life disabled. You may be so disfigured you will never have sex again. You will be stuck with the bulk of the medical bills. Modern medicine can resuscitate badly maimed people who would have died in previous wars. This means the Iraq war is cranking out an unusually high numbers of seriously maimed people.
6. Many returning from Iraq become mental basket cases unable to deal with the horrors of war and the guilt at what they have done. They beat up their children and wives and are emotionally distant. Friends and family reject them. They can’t hold down a job. They become homeless. Look at the way American treats the homeless vets of the Viet Nam and Iraq wars begging on the streets. Watch some documentaries about the shell shocked vets. One grabbed a clerk by the throat when she did not hand over the change with sufficient respect. Others wake up screaming in the night decades later reliving trauma. Most have marital breakdown. The sound of packing bubbles popping sends a vet to the floor in cover. Another found he could not handle his job clearing up road kill since he could not shake his fear there were bombs hidden underneath the carcasses. You will become, at least to some extent, a nutcase. 28% of Canadian soldiers returning from Afghanistan are classified as having serious mental problems such as suicidal tendencies, post-traumatic stress disorder or depression. The Veteran’s Association estimates 37% of American soldiers returning from Iraq are classified as having serious mental problems. Even the Bush administration admits 15% of soldiers returning from Iraq suffer from PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). On 2007-11-11 CBC Newsworld Sunday Night aired a documentary called PTSD: The War at Home about Iraq vets suffering from PTSD who snap and kill their families and neighbours. According to the documentary, to get treatment for PTSD, there in a terrible catch 22, men must sign up for another potential tour of duty in Iraq. They can’t face that so they go untreated. According to CBC Newsworld documentary, aired 2007-11-13 16% of Canadian soldiers returning from Afghanistan have a dangerous drinking problem, e.g. drunk driving.

   I feel so ashamed of myself. It is even worse than when I was in Afghanistan. I have nightmares all the time. I feel so empty because I don’t know why I did what I did in Afghanistan.
   ~ Travis , Canadian soldier returning from Afghanistan.

7. Over half the soldiers who served in the Gulf War, died of Gulf War Syndrome or were treated for it. They were in Iraq for only weeks. You will be there years. Read the fine print. Bush is keeping soldiers in Iraq for years after their contract expires. To this day no one knows for sure what causes Gulf War Syndrome, though the latest thinking it is caused by pyridostigmine bromide, a drug given to protect against nerve gasses and the pesticides used on the battlefield to protect against disease-carrying insects.
8. You will be exposed to DU (Depleted Uranium), as were soldiers in the first Gulf War. This may cause cancer later, or even more likely will cause your children and their children to be genetically deformed. Check out the middle part of this video that shows what sort of children are common to those exposed to the DU-laden winds in Iraq. Imagine explaining to your wife why you did this to her. Also pay attention to parts how can make your wife and family sick indirectly.
9. Iraq is no threat to the USA. You are not defending your country. There were no WMDs. Even Bush admits Iraq had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks on 9/11. All that mayhem is for nothing, unless you count stealing oil for Exxon as a worthy cause.

   We have no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the September 11th attacks.
   ~ George W. Bush (born: 1946-07-06 age: 63), 2003-09-17, audio.

   The USA illegally attacked an unarmed country under false pretenses. The war is about ignoble motives such as oil and world domination. There is utterly no point is you risking your life in Iraq. Granted, some soldiers do heroic work, e.g. the Navy Seals rescuing hostages from Somali pirates, or helping out in natural disasters, but when any soldier enlists he is signing over his heart, mind, soul, body, ass and conscience to the US military. Even if he joins the reserves, his is signing up potentially to torture and murder children.

10. You will be routinely ordered to kill civilians and children, and commit other violations of the Geneva conventions, according to 12-year Marine Staff Sergeant Jimmy Massey. Once you are in the military, resisting is very difficult. You will be shot or imprisoned, and treated extremely badly if your conscience awakens. American soldiers have already killed 100,000 civilians, mostly children, and that was before Fallujah. You will kill them to. That is what soldiers do, kill people they are ordered to. If you don’t believe me, have a long talk with some vets about their experiences. Keep in mind they won’t be proud of it, and won’t leap to tell you what they have done.

    Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing for their country.
    ~ Bertrand Russell (born: 1872-05-18 died: 1970-02-02 at age: 97)

11. There is some chance you may be ordered to guard and torture POWs.
12. If you are very unlucky you may be ordered to participate in the raping of young Iraqi boys and preparing kiddie porn videos of the rapes for Bush.
13. The back door draft. Everyone has been kept in Iraq far longer than the agreed term. If you find it intolerable, there is no way out. You have no idea how long you are really signing up for. Before you sign up, google for the phrases “back door draft” “stop-loss” to see what a trap you are getting yourself into. Marines who have finished their terms and gone home find that later they are dragged back for involuntary duty, the back draft.

14. The invasion and occupation of Iraq is illegal.
    ~ Kofi Annan (born: 1938-04-08 age: 71) Secretary General and Boutros Boutros-Ghali (born: 1922-11-14 age: 87) former Secretary General of the U.N.

    I think in this case international law stood in the way of doing the right thing.
    ~ Richard Perle (born: 1941-09-16 age: 68), 2003-11-20, Pentagon hawk, cat-stroking, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, James Bond villain pasty lookalike, admitting the Iraq war is illegal.

    Since Kofi Annan and Boutros Boutros-Ghali of the U.N. have declared the Iraq invasion and occupation illegal, you will technically be an international war criminal. This means you may at any time be arrested if you leave the country to travel in a country that subscribes to the International Court in The Hague. It is a hanging offence, though more likely it will be commuted to life imprisonment. The USA may not forever be powerful enough to protect you from prosecution, even on home soil. Everything you do in the Iraq war is illegal since the war itself is illegal. Even if you don’t kill, you are still guilty of conspiracy to commit murder, on the same principle the guy who drives the get-away car is guilty of bank robbery. You are in much the same position as a German participating in the invasion of Poland. Recall that some Nazis faced prosecution even into their 90s.
15. The base pay for active duty killing people according to the goarmy.com recruiting site is $14,321.00 USD a year for a private E1. Granted there are bonuses such as housing and food, same as you would get in a civilian job outside your home city. You are liable to be shot at 24/7. Presuming you get two promotions to an E3 level, that works out to $47.80 USD a day, or $1.99 USD an hour. If you are a private your pay does not even increase after 6 years of experience. Minimum wage at McDonald’s is $5.15 USD a hour. You are an idiot to risk your life for such paltry pay, especially when the work has nothing to do with defending your country. Recently the military has been offering higher and higher one time enlistment bonuses. People now realise they are not signing up to defend their country, so are demanding higher and higher bribes to sell their souls. The very existence of these bonuses indicates that soldiers know full well what a morally sleasy job they are signing up for. People don’t need to be bribed to defend their country against a real attack. If you are going to sell your soul to become a hired killer, you should at least get well paid for it. Consider becoming a mercenary or working for the Mafia. The Mafia offers better pay, better hours, you don’t have to kill children, and you can enjoy killing up front and personal, not the geeky/sissy army way using remote control weapons, like bombing school kids from remote control Predators.
16. Iraq is a hot, pestilent, fly-blown, stinking, hell hole.
17. Presuming you are a believer in punishment in the afterlife, since you will be killing innocent civilians, mostly children, you will without doubt be condemning yourself to eternal damnation. That dread will hang over your head the rest of your life.
18. When you get back, your government will treat you like shit. They reneged on veterans benefits, housing, health care, rehab…
19. When you return, many people will spit on you and treat you like shit. They will call you “baby killer” and “baby rapist”. You will receive ever increasing abuse over your lifetime as the horrors and injustice if the Iraq war surfaces. If you travel outside the USA, it will be even worse.
20. Joining the US military is a bit like joining the Mafia or the Bush crime family as an enforcer, or plotting to murder a child. It is not something you should do lightly. You should not do it just because other people told you to, or because the ads were cool, or because it’s an easy job to get. You should check out carefully who it is you will be killing and why your are going to kill them. That is your responsibility, not just the president’s. Once you are in the military you no longer get to choose who you kill. You are the one who will pull the trigger. You should be sure such murders are necessary, not just that the person you plan to kill “hates America”, which may well be a perfectly rational response after what America did to him, his family and his country and no reason to kill anyone. In Afghanistan, you will find the reason to kill is to guard a pipeline for Unocal and to guard the opium crop for the Bush crime family that, through Afghanistan, now controls 87% of the world’s heroin. In Iraq, you are there to steal oil for American oil companies by terrifying the locals through shock & awe into giving it up. You also want to consider the consequences to yourself. You are setting yourself up as a war criminal, same as any Nazi. Iraq is an illegal war. You are potential subject to the same Nuremberg war-crimes trials as the Nazis were. Following orders is no excuse for murder or torture. Also consider the penalty you will take on your physical, mental and spiritual health. Plan enlistment as carefully as you would any other premeditated murder of a stranger.
21. Enlisting is an almost irreversible step, like selling your soul to the devil, or taking your first shot of heroin. Once you hand yourself over the army, they will beat your personal will and morality out of you using standard brainwashing techniques (sleep deprivation, exhaustion, humiliation, repetition…) and replace it with blind obedience to military authority. You will never again have truly free will. Never again will you be fully human. You will become part robot, part killing machine. Your ability to reflect on the big picture of what you are doing will be inhibited. You will become as mindless as a lemming. You are not the sharpest knife in the drawer as it is or you would never even have considered enlisting. Sumbitting to military indoctination will kill off your remaining spark, intelligence and ability to think for yourself.
22. Recruiters will lie outrageously to you. ABC caught them on tape saying things like “Your odds are 10 times higher being killed in the USA than Iraq.”, “The war is over long ago.”, “If you don’t like it, you just just quit. It is if it never happened. It is called a failure to adapt discharge.” and “Nobody’s being sent to Iraq. They are bringing them back.”
23. You may have seen movies from the WW II era and imagine women will find your uniform and your life-risking enlistment an irresistible aphrodisiac. But you are not defending your country. You will be butchering mostly civilians and of them mostly children who have done nothing to harm your country. That does not turn women on. Women are not big on serial killers. As they gradually find out what you did overseas, even in vague terms, they will shun you. Think about it, would you want to cuddle with a woman who killed 20 kids in cold blood? See my essay on why women should avoid you. Would you trust a child killer to babysit your kids? Of course not! No matter what excuses you make for it, you are still a baby killer.
24. According to the BBC, one in four veterans are homeless. According to The National Coalition for Homeless Veterans one in three homeless people are veterans. You might imagine you would return from the bloodletting a fêted hero; not so. The psychological harm from extended terms of combat often renders people so frazzled, they are unable to hold a job or even to negotiate the bureaucracy to get government aid. U.S. troops wounded in Iraq are being ordered to repay the bonuses they got for signing up, after war injuries cut short their service. The administration betrays the injured, routinely denying them the promised lifetime medical help.
25. Thousands of people will show up to the funeral of a Mountie or firefighter killed in the line of duty. Only close family and a few military personnel will turn up for a funeral of a military hit man (aka soldier). Further, many people will spit on your grave or curse you with their dying breaths to rot in hell for eternity. If you want to be considered a hero, you must save lives, not take them.
26. Ask John McCain what is was like to be captured by those whom he had been tormenting. In Iraq they have even more reason to hate you because the US targets kids and innocent civilians, routinely uses torture and employs an array of hideous banned weapons. The Iraqis would have even more motive to make your life unpleasant than the people of Vietnam had to torture McCain.
27. What sort of punishment do you think is appropriate for a serial killer who travels half way around the world so that he can rape, murder and torture kids with little chance of prosecution? Being shouted at, shunned, spat on, confined to jail for life, raped, stabbed, horsewhipped, tortured and murdered himself? If the Christians or Muslims are right, any of those punishments would be just a wrist slap compared with the extreme after-death punishments inflicted for eternity. Is the thrill of killing worth the risk? Eventually the guilt for what you did will sink through your thick skull. Men a lot tougher than you have spent the remainder of their lives waking night after night in a sweat screaming, reliving their war crimes and war trauma over and over.
28. According to CBC News, the brass at the Veterans Administration are under fire for covering up just how prevalent suicide is in veterans of the Iraq war. This is no surprise. Once soldiers come back, they realise there was no justification at all for all the atrocities they committed. By that point, the vets are useless for further duty, so the VA disowns them. It hits the vets hard what utter scum they are and, without any emotional support, they off themselves.
29. Would you consider joining the priesthood? If you join up for service in Iraq or Afghanistan you might as well be. If a woman in Afghanistan or Iraq had sex with you voluntarily, for money or by rape her family would most likely kill her. There are very few American women in Iraq, mostly lesbians and other very tough cookies. Because of the unequal sex ratio, they are driven nuts by sexual harassment, and likely won’t look favourably on you. If you can’t get laid in America, there is zero chance you will in Iraq unless you count homosexuality, rape or pedophilic rape. If you have a girlfriend or wife or boyfriend back home, what are the odds she/he will wait for you all that time, much less remain 100% faithful to you? You would not likely turn down a tempting offer of sex. Why should she? She will get many more offers than you. Don’t flatter yourself. Don’t forget the back draft. She doesn’t even know if you will ever come home. Many can’t get a girl friend, so they give up trying by effectively signing up for years of celibacy. If you go to Iraq you are an admitted loser, effectively giving up on the mating game.
30. Soldiers who fight in aggressive wars are the ultimate losers in a Darwinian sense. Consider Nazis who fought aggressive wars for Hitler. They did their country harm by going along with pointless wars costly in life and money. They were not defending their country against invaders. They died pointlessly, never having families or abandoning their families to their own devices to survive. They were wounded and maimed never again capable of fully taking on the role of father and provider. Many ended up a beggars. They were shamed for life for their war crimes. Many went into hiding or changed their identities. This is ironic since during the war they were treated as heroic. Hitler whipped the public into a football-crowd like frenzy painting their war crimes as nobles deeds.

    Those who fight in Afghanistan and Iraq are doing the exact same thing, fighting an aggressive war and lying to themselves that they are defending their country. They have even less excuse than Nazis since Americans, Britons and Canadians had access to the truth where Hitler had complete control of the Nazi propaganda. But it does not matter if they comprehend the foolishness of their sacrifice. They are Darwinian idiots, pointlessly sacrificing themselves and volunteering for extinction, unconsciously voting to remove their genes from the pool because they judge themselves inferior. It is a form of suicide by lot. Sound far fetched? Think how many times soldiers whine “It was the only job I could get” They think so poorly of themselves, that imagine only the army would take them. They were so ashamed of themselves they barely tried anywhere else.

31. You will be rationed to 2 bottles (3 liters) of water a day in a climate where you lose 15 liters a day just walking around. Halliburton-KBR supplies the water. It is so full of chemicals many soldiers refuse to drink it and drink the local water which of course gives them raging dysentery.
32. Many people enlist to commit murder because they want the educational assistance programs promised after their term is up. When you later go to university, either in classes or in contact with informed students, you will be forced to confront the fact you are a war criminal who have committed a capital crime and fully deserve the death penalty, and that there are people all over the world working to prosecute you, just as there were people who worked for decades to track down the Nazi war criminals. You will be shunned. You will quite possibly come to hate yourself, just as Viet Nam vets did. Right now the government is pumping out propaganda at a furious pace to suck more people into signing up for the war. Once the wars are over, there will be no need to continue that. The government will abandon the vets like a dirty tampon, just the way they did the Viet Nam vets, not even giving them medical care, much less the constant stream of lies to salve their consciences. You fully deserve that fate. You knew damn well there was no justificiation for murder. You did it for fun.
33. You might well be captured. Your captors will hold you responsible for all their friends and kids the US military has killed. Even if they fed you as well as they fed themselves, you would consider your fare inedible swill. But you won’t rate even that. You will slowly starve to death. The US routinely tortures POWs by depriving them of water. It would only be fitting if they treated you as they had been treated. Until you have endured that torture, you have absolutely no idea how horrible it is. It is far worse that your wildest imagination. It is utterly beyond anything you have experienced. You will beg for death.
34. There are many additional reasons not to enlist, which are reasons why women should not marry you if you enlist. Being shunned by women is one huge reason to avoid enlisting.

Where is it written in the Constitution, in what article or section is it contained, that you may take children from their parents and parents from their children, and compel them to fight the battles of any war in which the folly and wickedness of the government may engage itself? Under what concealment has this power lain hidden, which now for the first time comes forth, with a tremendous and baleful aspect, to trample down and destroy the dearest right of personal liberty? Who will show me any Constitutional injunction which makes it the duty of the American people to surrender everything valuable in life, and even life, itself, whenever the purposes of an ambitious and mischievous government may require it?… A free government with an uncontrolled power of military conscription is the most ridiculous and abominable contradiction and nonsense that ever entered into the heads of men.
~ Daniel Webster (born: 1782 died: 1852 at age: 70), US Senator, Speech in the House of Representatives, 1814-01-14

Most likely you will pay no attention to me, and you will sign up anyway. Think of me when you are sitting in Iraq with one eye blasted out like a smashed boiled egg, one leg missing and your penis dangling by a thread of skin. Think of me in the mental hospital when you are afraid to sleep because the nightmares of the kids you slaughtered come to haunt you. Think of me when you are on your death bed, wondering how you will explain to your maker why you killed all those people. Remember that I told you so. That is your natural punishment for being such a smartass, sadistic little brat.

In my youth I did that [killed people] for money, and rather enjoyed it. The adrenalin rush, the gamble of life, youngsters tend to bit playfull with life.
~ Jim E , serial murderer, 2005-04-19 in alt.politics.bush, believed living in Seattle, on why he enlisted in the 101Abn.

If you decide to enlist anyway, please ask your Mom to drop me a line when you are killed or rendered a vegetable. I want to celebrate one more sadistic asshole leaving the gene pool.

If you are a parent or relative of someone at risk for enlistment you might want to check out LeaveMyChildAlone.org.

Friends don’t let friends drive drunk.
Friends don’t let friends take drugs.
Friends don’t let friends enlist.

Let Jesse Macbeth, Ranger vet who served in Iraq tell you what it is like. “We would interrogate a family. We’d ask the man of the family a question; if we didn’t like his answer, we’d shoot his youngest kid.” The military blog sites claim this tape is phony.

Books

	recommend book⇒10 Excellent Reasons Not to Join the Military
		paperback
	ISBN13:	978-1-59558-066-5
	publisher:	New Press
	published:	2006-05-01
	by:	Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg (Editor), Cindy Sheehan (introduction)
Some of the reasons include: Over 2,000 American soldiers have been killed in Iraq, and over 14,000 have been wounded. Nearly 100,000 civilians have been killed in Iraq as a result of the U.S. invasion. One in six soldiers returning from Iraq experiences mental health problems. Two-thirds of all recruits receive no college funding from the military, and only 15 percent graduate with a four-year degree. According to the VA, 90 percent of recent women veterans reported experiencing sexual harassment; a third were raped.
abe books.co.uk abe books.ca amazon.co.uk amazon.ca abe books.de chapters.indigo.ca amazon.de abe books.com abe books.fr amazon.com amazon.fr barnes and noble.com abe books.it powells.com iberlibro.com sony e-books abe books anz

Americans are furious with me when I point out that aggressive war (attacking first unprovoked) is a capital war crime, in particular the unprovoked invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. They respond “But what about 9/11?” Even President Bush said that bin Laden, and his Saudi Al Qaeda henchmen, were responsible, not Afghans or Iraqis. On 2003-09-17, Bush and his administration explicitly stated Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. Attacking Iraq is like attacking the USA for something Colombian criminals allegedly did, on the grounds both nations are nominally Christian. Americans have justified their carnage with a racist belief that the only good Muslim is a dead Muslim, blaming a billion people for the 9/11 crimes of a handful.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)

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