When Charles Lee enlisted in the Marine reserves at the end of his senior year of high school in 2001, he never thought he would go to war for his country.
The military was a way to gain some discipline, something he thought most young men his age could benefit from. The minimal obligation for training — usually one weekend a month and two weeks every summer — presented no conflict with his imminent role as a Northwestern student. But that was before Sept. 11, 2001.
Lee, a McCormick senior, finished basic training 11 days before 9/11. Even after learning of the attacks, he still wasn’t worried about getting called up to active duty.
“It didn’t actually occur to me that huge wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were imminent,” he told me last month from a Marine base in Quantico, Va. “Since I was in a reserve unit, (active duty) was still a remote chance.”
With American forces overextended in the War on Terror, however, the unthinkable occurred. Lee’s reserve unit received orders to go to Iraq in June 2004. Now he is awaiting an “other than honorable” discharge from the Marines after he failed to join his unit for deployment.
He said he thought he was not required to go to Iraq because he had begun the discharge process after having difficulty balancing his reserve training duties with schoolwork. Lee is charged with unauthorized absence — a less serious charge than desertion.
Despite increasing enlistment bonuses, the Army Reserves and National Guard — though not the Marines — face a shortage of recruits precisely because of the issues Lee faced.
Joining the reserves or the National Guard once provided many students a way to help pay for college while serving their country with a limited time commitment and little chance of ever seeing combat. That reality changed drastically after 9/11.
“You need to know what you’re getting into, which I really didn’t as a senior in high school,” Lee told me.
Yet military recruitment pitches in the form of TV commercials and mass mailings still focus on the benefits of reserve service, with little emphasis on the possible consequences: interruption of education, active duty in combat situations, physical injury, emotional distress and even death.
Maybe military recruiters, like pharmaceutical companies, should be required to list possible “side effects” in every advertisement. Then at least people could make fully informed decisions.
Reserve service provides great opportunities for plenty of people. And without people willing to serve in support of the country’s full-time soldiers, the U.S. armed forces could not function at the level necessary today.
But the military and the American public must acknowledge that the role of reserve units changed, perhaps forever, in the years following 9/11. Active duty is no longer an unreal, abstract threat, but rather a distinct possibility.
Elaine Helm is a Medill senior. She can be reached at [email protected].
