amphichon

This is... just sickening, when you think about it.

The bottom line of the article – right here in my adopted hometown, one of the most liberal cities in the country, the military – either by accident or by design – courted, tested, recruited, and then repeatedly defended the enlistment of a “moderately to severely autistic” 18-year old.

So there’s a couple different ways to look at this. One way is that it was simply an oversight. The recruiters are so absolutely desperate for warm bodies to ship to Iraq (and Iran, and whoever else is next on the Bushco agenda) that they didn’t pay enough attention, didn’t do diligence with medical and school records, didn’t pay attention to the family who tried to explain that Jared was almost certainly not able to understand the repercussions of enlisting, much less act as an effective soldier. That in itself is disturbing.

I don’t buy it though. I’ve met a handful of folks with autism. The mildly autistic folks could generally pass for “normal” (whatever “normal” means) – they might seem a bit strange in social situations, and occasionally they’d do or say something out of left field, but they generally got by okay. (Some of them much better than me, actually.) Moderate to severe austism, though, is harder to ignore. Presumably Jared is closer to the moderate end of that scale – he’s working hard to get a normal diploma – but still, it’s probably safe to assume that anyone who spoke to him for more than a few minutes would begin to realize that he’s a little different. And yet apparently this didn’t give the recruiter, or the recruiter’s senior officer, any pause. They enlisted him, gave him the written test (he scored 43 out of 99, 12 points above the bare minimum to be accepted) and encouraged him to sign up to be a cavalry scout, a job which the Oregonian refers to as “the Army’s most dangerous job”. I can’t speak to that, but here’s what I found on the top Google hit for “cavalry scout”:

To be a Cavalry Scout is to be the commander’s eyes and ears of the battlefield. To do this requires a unique soldier. He must be flexible, intelligent, resourceful, courageous, and crave danger to do the unique job of Scouting. Their units are tightly woven groups, able to depend on one another at any time, irrelevant of rank, which is critical to their survival. They take great pride in both their history and traditions. They must still earn their spurs and it is not an uncommon site to see the occasional black Stetson and saber worn for certain events and occasions.

The number of common and specialized skills that they are required to know, even at the lowest rank, outnumbers any other job on the battlefield. The job of gaining and maintaining contact with the enemy without being spotted, mounted or dismounted, and reporting all this intelligence to the commander so he can mass his forces to defeat them requires this tremendous amount of knowledge.

Because the Cavalry Scout is such an invaluable asset on the battlefield, he is not usually used in the traditional combat role. He fights as a last resort and rarely as a combat multiplier, but has a tremendous amount of combat resources available to him to insure his survivability. It is not unusual to see a young Cavalry Scout coordinating both direct and indirect fires to decisively engage and destroy the enemy because he is the one with the eyes on the target. The term ” Recon** out front ” exemplifies the dangerous job and continuous threat of exposure to the enemy while working on or behind enemy lines.

It sounds like an exciting and demanding job. If I were going to enlist, I might be interested in checking it out myself. But I have a really hard time imagining how these recruiters could look at Jared, who “lives in his own private world” (per the Oregonian), and believe that he could communicate and function effectively in a combat environment.

The scenario that I find most disturbing is that the recruiters knew full well that Jared would never make it as a cavalry scout, and maybe not even as a common grunt. But they figured they could talk him into signing up, autism or not, and so they did, hoping that his family wouldn’t care enough or try hard enough to get him out of it. If he wasn’t good enough, they probably figured he’d be shaken out in Basic Training, and by then they’d have already gotten credit for the recruit, so he’d be someone else’s problem. And if he somehow made it through Basic, and ended up in Iraq this fall, well, there’s a place on the battlefield for everyone, right? Sometimes a commander needs scouts, sometimes he needs air support, and sometimes – ugly as it is – he just needs warm bodies that he can send out to catch a few bullets. The fact that apparently neither the recruiter, nor the recruiter’s CO, bothered to even inform Jared that there’s a war going on – he apparently wasn’t aware of it until his parents told him later, after he had enlisted – makes me seriously doubt that they considered his best interests for even a second. I think they looked at Jared and saw two things – one more tic under the Recruited column, and meat for the grinder that the war in Iraq has become.

And the scenario continues thusly – for every Jared whose family ends up having to contact the newspapers to get anyone to pay attention and realize how ridiculous the situation has become, how many others quietly get shuffled through basic training and shortly thereafter into combat? Not every kid with autism has parents who care as much. And there are any number of kids and young adults on the fringes of society who don’t have one or both parents looking out for them. As long as we continue our military misadventures in the Middle East, there will continue to be recruiters preying upon anyone they might be able to convince to go fight for us, regardless of who they are or how qualified they may be, even if the extent of their contribution ends up being as an unwitting IED detonator or target dummy.

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