Two articles on military service....
Jun. 11th, 2005 07:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
One on the draft
In Russia, a Young Man's Dream Is Dodging the Draft
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
ST. PETERSBURG, Russia
THE hospital's diagnoses, many years old, are Fyodor Sozontov's backup plan. They can, he hopes, prove that something is wrong with him.
He reads them out slowly, the medical conditions too difficult to pronounce easily: osteochondrosis, arachnoiditis and cerebral angiodystonia. Still, the draft board was skeptical. During his first visit, obligatory for all boys in secondary school, the officers declared him fit for military service.
"But that was kind of a surface examination," he said. "They practically did not look into anything."
Fyodor, 17, soft-spoken and athletic, is embarking on a rite of passage for young men in today's Russia: dodging the draft.
The experience shapes almost everything about his present life. He is entering manhood with a desire to go to college, despite having no concrete academic goal, or, failing that, to convince the authorities - and at times, it seems, himself - that he is sick.
"It would be better," he said, "if the army were made up of people who wanted to serve."
In theory, all Russian men 18 to 27 are required to serve two years in the military. In practice, roughly 90 percent avoid it. Most do so by taking advantage of different kinds of deferments, including one for going to college, or by failing the physical fitness exam.
Either supposedly can be obtained for a bribe - something Fyodor is neither inclined nor, evidently, able to pay.
"They say you serve your motherland - you defend it," he said. "Well, it is a difficult question. You have to live here a while to understand it."
Fyodor is only slightly older than the new Russia that emerged from the Soviet Union. He was born in 1987 in Czechoslovakia, where his parents worked briefly, his father an engineer at a Soviet military base there. Two years later, he returned with them to Leningrad, as St. Petersburg was then named, as the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe began to collapse along with the Soviet system.
He has grown up at a time when his country embraced, however awkwardly, freedom, democracy and capitalism. His parents harbor little nostalgia for Soviet times. Certainly he doesn't. But what has unfolded in Russia under President Vladimir V. Putin fills him with little hope or inspiration. In fact, it dismays him.
"We do not think it is much better than the Soviet Union," he said. "What we have now is its legacy."
Corruption and bribery can infect schools, the medical system, the police. He is not overtly political, but Fyodor complains that the system has done little to end poverty, hunger and social inequities. Worse, he said, society is driven now by a cold individualism.
"The government does not care," he said. "Maybe Putin is trying to do something, but for most people the most important thing is to get something for themselves, to get something into their pockets. They only care about themselves."
Russia, for him, came into stark contrast last year when he made his first trip abroad. A teacher at his school organized a two-week bus trip to the Czech Republic. He loved it.
"It is cleaner there," he said. "People in the Czech Republic are more responsive. And they have more understanding why they go to work, why they earn money.
"In Russia, basically speaking, we have a bardak," he added, using the slang for brothel and meaning a mess.
FYODOR is, in many ways, a typical Russian teenager; in other ways he is not. He does not drink alcohol - something that 40 percent of Russian schoolchildren do regularly, according to a recent estimate. He does not take drugs. He does not smoke. And he stubbornly resists peer pressure to do so.
"Some of my friends say they do not want to die healthy," he said.
He lives in Kupchino, a neighborhood of bleak Soviet-era high-rises far from St. Petersburg's beautiful historic center. His apartment building's courtyard is an intimidating place, a hangout for drunks and thugs and "people with very unhappy faces."
Fyodor does his best to avoid them, as he does skinheads, a pernicious subculture of Russian youth, especially in St. Petersburg.
He could hardly be more different from them. He has thin, wavy hair that he wears long, often in a ponytail. He abhors the aggression that he says is deeply rooted in Russian culture. At home, he plays guitar, strumming songs by groups like Depeche Mode and Nirvana, with his younger brother, Igor.
He is slightly built, but very fit. That is a result of his passion for wushu, the Chinese martial art that emphasizes self-defense, precision physical movement and intense mental discipline. He trains four times a week.
He laments the quality of education in Russian schools, but by his own admission, he is an average student. In fact, it is not clear he would even be considering college were it not for it being a way to avoid the draft. He calls it the greatest stimulant to higher education.
Fyodor's reasons for not wanting to be drafted are typical. He despises authority, for example, especially that of the military. "I simply cannot stand commands," he said. "If I was ordered to clean a toilet, my answer would be, 'Go do it yourself.' "
Other reasons include the grinding war in Chechnya, a brutal system of hazing among draftees and notorious cases of conscript abuse by commanders.
Fyodor's best hope for avoiding the draft remains college, but as he completes his final exams of high school this month, he has not earned the gold or even silver medals for scholastic achievement that would smooth his way to admission to college.
On his first of five exams he received the highest grade - 5 - but on the second, only a 4. "Not bad," he said, "but not excellent." He does not yet have the results for the third, and he must finish two more before graduation on the June 21. The university entrance exams come later this summer.
The next few months are crucial in determining his future, which is why his family has collected the old hospital diagnoses.
He is vague, when pressed, about what precisely ails him. He fell as an infant, he says. When he was 10, he adds, he hit his head on the corner of the bed. He also offered a list of other ailments. "I cannot stay in classes too long," he said. "My nose bleeds. I have headaches." He mentioned high blood pressure and "a bad adaptation to society."
His plans for the future are equally vague. After college, he said he would like to become a master of wushu, teaching it to others. Wushu, he said, has taught him a basic philosophy.
"The best warrior," he said, "knows that the best thing is to avoid a fight."
And one on recruiting.
Army Recruiting More High School Dropouts to Meet Goals
By ERIC SCHMITT
WASHINGTON, June 10 - The Army is having to turn to more high school dropouts and lower-achieving applicants to fill its ranks, accepting hundreds of recruits in recent months who would have been rejected a year ago, according to Army statistics.
Eight months into the recruiting year, the percentage of new recruits in the Army without a high school diploma has risen to 10 percent, the upper limit of what the Army is willing to accept, from 8 percent last year. The percentage of recruits with scores in the lowest acceptable range on the standardized test used to screen potential soldiers has also risen to 2 percent, also reaching the Army's limit, from slightly more than a half-percent last year, reaching the highest level since 2001.
The number of lower-achieving recruits is a relatively small part of the more than 41,000 recruits who have signed an enlistment contract or entered basic training since October. Officials emphasized that this year's recruits still met or exceeded the Army's quality goals, and that the service would not lower its standards to meet its overall enlistment target of 80,000 recruits.
But as the Army formally announced Friday that it had missed its recruiting goal for the fourth consecutive month, military personnel specialists said the profile of this year's enlistees raised questions about recruit quality, and whether the Army would fail to reach its annual recruiting goal for the first time since 1999.
"The overall quality of the force today is lower than it was a year ago," said David R. Segal, who directs the Center for Research on Military Organization at the University of Maryland. "It means they can anticipate more problem situations with recruits in the training cycle."
Several recruiters, in interviews over the past six months, said they were told in February to start accepting more recruits who are ranked in Category 4 on the military's standardized aptitude test - those who score between the 10th and 30th percentiles on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery.
A recruiter in Washington, who insisted on anonymity to protect his career, said that at the time, he was concerned about whether these recruits could handle the increasingly high-technology tools of combat.
Another recruiter, in New York, who insisted on anonymity for the same reason, said this month that the Army seemed to care less about quality than about filling the holes left by soldiers who decline to re-enlist. "It's about one thing: numbers," he said.
Recruiters and Army officials say news coverage of the violence in Iraq and Afghanistan has caused many parents, coaches and other adults with influence over young people to warn them against a military career.
The active-duty Army is not the only branch of the armed services suffering recruiting woes.
The Pentagon also said Friday that the Army National Guard, Army Reserve, Navy Reserve and Air National Guard fell short of their targets last month for shipping new recruits to basic training.
The Marine Corps shipped its quota of new recruits in May, but for the fifth straight month missed its monthly contracting goal. Prospective marines who sign a contract are sent to basic training sometime in the future, and the military uses the contracting figures as an early indicator of trouble.
"We don't have a sense of crisis or desperation," said Lt. Gen. Robert Magnus, deputy Marine commandant for programs and resources. "Understandably, American moms and dads read the newspaper and watch TV, and may or may not have special interests and concerns as their sons and daughters consider becoming soldiers or marines."
To help, the Army has added 1,000 recruiters since September; offered a new 15-month enlistment, instead of the previous minimum two-year term; and run new advertisements aimed at parents.
The Army is also considering plans to double the top cash enlistment bonuses for recruits in some specialties to $40,000, and to begin a pilot program to provide up to $50,000 in home mortgage help to recruits who enlist for eight years of active duty. The proposals were first reported by USA Today on Friday.
The quality of recruits is a delicate issue for the Army, which halted recruiting for a day last month to review practices after some recruiters were found to have broken or bent rules to meet quotas.
According to an Army spokesman, Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty, in the first eight months of this fiscal year, 10 percent of the recruits the Army accepted earned a high school diploma by passing the General Educational Development test, or G.E.D., instead of graduating. For all of 2004, the Army accepted 8 percent of applicants without a high school diploma.
In addition, the Army has so far recruited roughly 800 recruits - about 2 percent of all enlistees - who are deemed Category 4, the lowest level. Last year, the Army accepted only about 465 recruits in this category.
Some lawmakers and independent military specialists defended the practice, saying it made sense to accept some low-achieving applicants so long as overall numbers remained within the Army's standards.
"I'm not totally naïve, but I have faith in recruiters," said Representative Joe Wilson, Republican of South Carolina. "There may be higher dropout rates. But a lot of times they're extending opportunities to minorities who wouldn't have opportunities otherwise."
In Russia, a Young Man's Dream Is Dodging the Draft
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
ST. PETERSBURG, Russia
THE hospital's diagnoses, many years old, are Fyodor Sozontov's backup plan. They can, he hopes, prove that something is wrong with him.
He reads them out slowly, the medical conditions too difficult to pronounce easily: osteochondrosis, arachnoiditis and cerebral angiodystonia. Still, the draft board was skeptical. During his first visit, obligatory for all boys in secondary school, the officers declared him fit for military service.
"But that was kind of a surface examination," he said. "They practically did not look into anything."
Fyodor, 17, soft-spoken and athletic, is embarking on a rite of passage for young men in today's Russia: dodging the draft.
The experience shapes almost everything about his present life. He is entering manhood with a desire to go to college, despite having no concrete academic goal, or, failing that, to convince the authorities - and at times, it seems, himself - that he is sick.
"It would be better," he said, "if the army were made up of people who wanted to serve."
In theory, all Russian men 18 to 27 are required to serve two years in the military. In practice, roughly 90 percent avoid it. Most do so by taking advantage of different kinds of deferments, including one for going to college, or by failing the physical fitness exam.
Either supposedly can be obtained for a bribe - something Fyodor is neither inclined nor, evidently, able to pay.
"They say you serve your motherland - you defend it," he said. "Well, it is a difficult question. You have to live here a while to understand it."
Fyodor is only slightly older than the new Russia that emerged from the Soviet Union. He was born in 1987 in Czechoslovakia, where his parents worked briefly, his father an engineer at a Soviet military base there. Two years later, he returned with them to Leningrad, as St. Petersburg was then named, as the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe began to collapse along with the Soviet system.
He has grown up at a time when his country embraced, however awkwardly, freedom, democracy and capitalism. His parents harbor little nostalgia for Soviet times. Certainly he doesn't. But what has unfolded in Russia under President Vladimir V. Putin fills him with little hope or inspiration. In fact, it dismays him.
"We do not think it is much better than the Soviet Union," he said. "What we have now is its legacy."
Corruption and bribery can infect schools, the medical system, the police. He is not overtly political, but Fyodor complains that the system has done little to end poverty, hunger and social inequities. Worse, he said, society is driven now by a cold individualism.
"The government does not care," he said. "Maybe Putin is trying to do something, but for most people the most important thing is to get something for themselves, to get something into their pockets. They only care about themselves."
Russia, for him, came into stark contrast last year when he made his first trip abroad. A teacher at his school organized a two-week bus trip to the Czech Republic. He loved it.
"It is cleaner there," he said. "People in the Czech Republic are more responsive. And they have more understanding why they go to work, why they earn money.
"In Russia, basically speaking, we have a bardak," he added, using the slang for brothel and meaning a mess.
FYODOR is, in many ways, a typical Russian teenager; in other ways he is not. He does not drink alcohol - something that 40 percent of Russian schoolchildren do regularly, according to a recent estimate. He does not take drugs. He does not smoke. And he stubbornly resists peer pressure to do so.
"Some of my friends say they do not want to die healthy," he said.
He lives in Kupchino, a neighborhood of bleak Soviet-era high-rises far from St. Petersburg's beautiful historic center. His apartment building's courtyard is an intimidating place, a hangout for drunks and thugs and "people with very unhappy faces."
Fyodor does his best to avoid them, as he does skinheads, a pernicious subculture of Russian youth, especially in St. Petersburg.
He could hardly be more different from them. He has thin, wavy hair that he wears long, often in a ponytail. He abhors the aggression that he says is deeply rooted in Russian culture. At home, he plays guitar, strumming songs by groups like Depeche Mode and Nirvana, with his younger brother, Igor.
He is slightly built, but very fit. That is a result of his passion for wushu, the Chinese martial art that emphasizes self-defense, precision physical movement and intense mental discipline. He trains four times a week.
He laments the quality of education in Russian schools, but by his own admission, he is an average student. In fact, it is not clear he would even be considering college were it not for it being a way to avoid the draft. He calls it the greatest stimulant to higher education.
Fyodor's reasons for not wanting to be drafted are typical. He despises authority, for example, especially that of the military. "I simply cannot stand commands," he said. "If I was ordered to clean a toilet, my answer would be, 'Go do it yourself.' "
Other reasons include the grinding war in Chechnya, a brutal system of hazing among draftees and notorious cases of conscript abuse by commanders.
Fyodor's best hope for avoiding the draft remains college, but as he completes his final exams of high school this month, he has not earned the gold or even silver medals for scholastic achievement that would smooth his way to admission to college.
On his first of five exams he received the highest grade - 5 - but on the second, only a 4. "Not bad," he said, "but not excellent." He does not yet have the results for the third, and he must finish two more before graduation on the June 21. The university entrance exams come later this summer.
The next few months are crucial in determining his future, which is why his family has collected the old hospital diagnoses.
He is vague, when pressed, about what precisely ails him. He fell as an infant, he says. When he was 10, he adds, he hit his head on the corner of the bed. He also offered a list of other ailments. "I cannot stay in classes too long," he said. "My nose bleeds. I have headaches." He mentioned high blood pressure and "a bad adaptation to society."
His plans for the future are equally vague. After college, he said he would like to become a master of wushu, teaching it to others. Wushu, he said, has taught him a basic philosophy.
"The best warrior," he said, "knows that the best thing is to avoid a fight."
And one on recruiting.
Army Recruiting More High School Dropouts to Meet Goals
By ERIC SCHMITT
WASHINGTON, June 10 - The Army is having to turn to more high school dropouts and lower-achieving applicants to fill its ranks, accepting hundreds of recruits in recent months who would have been rejected a year ago, according to Army statistics.
Eight months into the recruiting year, the percentage of new recruits in the Army without a high school diploma has risen to 10 percent, the upper limit of what the Army is willing to accept, from 8 percent last year. The percentage of recruits with scores in the lowest acceptable range on the standardized test used to screen potential soldiers has also risen to 2 percent, also reaching the Army's limit, from slightly more than a half-percent last year, reaching the highest level since 2001.
The number of lower-achieving recruits is a relatively small part of the more than 41,000 recruits who have signed an enlistment contract or entered basic training since October. Officials emphasized that this year's recruits still met or exceeded the Army's quality goals, and that the service would not lower its standards to meet its overall enlistment target of 80,000 recruits.
But as the Army formally announced Friday that it had missed its recruiting goal for the fourth consecutive month, military personnel specialists said the profile of this year's enlistees raised questions about recruit quality, and whether the Army would fail to reach its annual recruiting goal for the first time since 1999.
"The overall quality of the force today is lower than it was a year ago," said David R. Segal, who directs the Center for Research on Military Organization at the University of Maryland. "It means they can anticipate more problem situations with recruits in the training cycle."
Several recruiters, in interviews over the past six months, said they were told in February to start accepting more recruits who are ranked in Category 4 on the military's standardized aptitude test - those who score between the 10th and 30th percentiles on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery.
A recruiter in Washington, who insisted on anonymity to protect his career, said that at the time, he was concerned about whether these recruits could handle the increasingly high-technology tools of combat.
Another recruiter, in New York, who insisted on anonymity for the same reason, said this month that the Army seemed to care less about quality than about filling the holes left by soldiers who decline to re-enlist. "It's about one thing: numbers," he said.
Recruiters and Army officials say news coverage of the violence in Iraq and Afghanistan has caused many parents, coaches and other adults with influence over young people to warn them against a military career.
The active-duty Army is not the only branch of the armed services suffering recruiting woes.
The Pentagon also said Friday that the Army National Guard, Army Reserve, Navy Reserve and Air National Guard fell short of their targets last month for shipping new recruits to basic training.
The Marine Corps shipped its quota of new recruits in May, but for the fifth straight month missed its monthly contracting goal. Prospective marines who sign a contract are sent to basic training sometime in the future, and the military uses the contracting figures as an early indicator of trouble.
"We don't have a sense of crisis or desperation," said Lt. Gen. Robert Magnus, deputy Marine commandant for programs and resources. "Understandably, American moms and dads read the newspaper and watch TV, and may or may not have special interests and concerns as their sons and daughters consider becoming soldiers or marines."
To help, the Army has added 1,000 recruiters since September; offered a new 15-month enlistment, instead of the previous minimum two-year term; and run new advertisements aimed at parents.
The Army is also considering plans to double the top cash enlistment bonuses for recruits in some specialties to $40,000, and to begin a pilot program to provide up to $50,000 in home mortgage help to recruits who enlist for eight years of active duty. The proposals were first reported by USA Today on Friday.
The quality of recruits is a delicate issue for the Army, which halted recruiting for a day last month to review practices after some recruiters were found to have broken or bent rules to meet quotas.
According to an Army spokesman, Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty, in the first eight months of this fiscal year, 10 percent of the recruits the Army accepted earned a high school diploma by passing the General Educational Development test, or G.E.D., instead of graduating. For all of 2004, the Army accepted 8 percent of applicants without a high school diploma.
In addition, the Army has so far recruited roughly 800 recruits - about 2 percent of all enlistees - who are deemed Category 4, the lowest level. Last year, the Army accepted only about 465 recruits in this category.
Some lawmakers and independent military specialists defended the practice, saying it made sense to accept some low-achieving applicants so long as overall numbers remained within the Army's standards.
"I'm not totally naïve, but I have faith in recruiters," said Representative Joe Wilson, Republican of South Carolina. "There may be higher dropout rates. But a lot of times they're extending opportunities to minorities who wouldn't have opportunities otherwise."
