US Army using Six Flags Atlanta to recruit kids

So the wife and I were watching something like ABC World News or something equivalent at about 4am Monday morning… Apparently the U.S. Army is using Six Flags in Atlanta, Georgia as a recruitment base. According to the clip, and the article on the Atlanta Journal-Constitution website the army has a tent set up there basically to recruit future enlistees via video games. Excerpt from above linked article:

The Virtual Army Experience — a noisy world of genocidal killers, Humvees and improvised explosive devices — looms under a tent at the edge of the park. The show, which launched at the Daytona 500 in early 2007, travels the country and already has had 60,000 visitors.

Strapping Army officers in battle fatigues greet the youths, take down their contact information and give them official-looking tags to wear on lanyards around their necks.

Ah, so it’s not just Six Flags, they travel the country trying to encourage our young people to help the U.S. government be mighty and smite those it wishes to. Ok, ok, bias aside, who doesn’t want someone to convince your 14 year old that in three years (s)he should sign up to a)take human life, b)have a chance at being blown up, c¹)perform horrible acts of torture on other human beings.
Here’s a couple more quotes from the article that I think further exemplify why I’m worried:

The participants were issued replicas of M-4 carbine assault rifles with pneumatic recoil so they feel like real guns when fired.
When the bad guys die, they fall bloodlessly and disappear.

You say, “Kids know war isn’t really like that. They know it means blood and death.” But I question that. If you’re training them with a video game (read:fiction) where they kill without bloodshed, where no one screams into the night, who’s to tell them they just shot someone’s Father, Brother, or Son? When army recruitment is a media experience and a P.R. campaign (which it has been for years), who will tell your kids about watching their buddy bleed to death from a grenade?
I personally think watching Full Metal Jacket would be better for our kids. Mine certainly isn’t going anywhere near some army recruitment video game.

¹:See Gitmo; Waterboarding; wikileaks appears to be down at the moment so also Wikipedia:Wikileaks:GitmoOpsManual

~ by wynneth on April 14, 2008.