Get 'em young, get 'em fresh

How old is old enough for military recruiters to approach students?

High school? Jr. High? Fourth grade?

How about ten weeks into kindergarten?

Tonight at the dinner table, my son Kailash, who turned five-years-old earlier this month, announced rather blithely, "soldiers came to school today."

What?

"Soldiers came to school," he repeated. "They only kill bad people. They don't kill good people," he said, with the same five-year-old levity he uses in recalling the plot line of Frog and Toad or a Nemo video.

My wife and I looked at each other incredulously.

"Soldiers came to school? What do you mean?" I asked.

He repeated himself and then I remembered -- today was "Career Day" at school. Kailash had mentioned a bus driver also came, but it was the soldier who stuck out in his mind, it seemed because, when my wife asked if the soldier was cool, he nodded in the affirmative, "yes."

Besides, the soldier had given my five-year-old a gift. From his yellow backpack, my son produced a six-inch white plastic ruler with big bold red letters reading ARMY NATIONAL GUARD next to a waving American flag and below that www.1-800-GO-GUARD.com.

So, now we know the answer to the above question.

Kindergarteners - children with Dora the Explorer and Spiderman backpacks and bedrooms full of stuffed animals who are still working to master their A-B-C's are now prime targets for early conditioning by the U.S. military.

Be all you can be

I could feel my blood pressure rising as I realized that recruitment now begins as soon as a child enters a public school. Nevermind that Hawaii public schools are in financial dire straits and have just approved an almost 10% cut in instructional days (17 fewer classroom days for the 2009-2010 and 2010-2011 school years), bringing Hawaii's classroom time to the bottom position among all 50 states. Even with the cuts, the school still seemed to have time to welcome the Army National Guard to come in and hand out gifts to the wide-eyed five-year-olds.

After all, Obama has already said it's full-steam ahead in Afghanistan and now it appears it is not if but how many more troops he will commit to that war.

Everyone agrees that Afghanistan is going to get harder, much harder, before it gets easier and despite what looks like the plan to "wind down" the war in Iraq so that those soldiers can be redeployed (some for their 5th tour of duty) further east in Afghanistan, the army is still strapped for bodies.

Fortunately (for the military), the economic collapse has been a boon for military recruiters as education and job-hungry young people flock to a place they know will offer what many other employers cannot - a job with benefits.

And with Department of Defense projections indicating that baseline military budget increases over the next decade could surpass $1,333,000,000 (billion), it seems likely that a dozen years from now, in 2022, when my son turns 18, there will still be plenty need for more soldiers.

So what that means, is appears, is that it is never too soon to plant the military seed in the rich, fertile minds of those little kindergarteners who will, before you know it, be old enough to drive a Humvee, carry a gun, and kill people.

But only the bad ones.

To be continued...