The tug of war on campus
Flora Ortiz had to make a huge decision before her high school graduation: Did she want to join the military? She got a lot of advice, and it pulled her in two radically different directions.
By VANESSA GEZARI
Published July 17, 2005
EL MONTE, Calif. - Flora Ortiz slides into a seat in the darkened auditorium. It's the last day of school, and the choir is practicing solos. Onstage, a girl with long dark hair hurries through Scarlatti's Le Violette.
Flora sits chin in hand, pink flip-flops twitching silently in time to the music. She sang in the choir all four years, wore the prescribed evening gown in the group photo, trilled the same high notes . But most days this spring, her school ID hung from a U.S. Navy lanyard around her neck, a quiet declaration of her independence.
Or was it a sign of indecision?
One day short of graduation, Flora is a walking conflict zone: a girl with pink plastic butterflies in her hair who's contemplating boot camp, who cries at antiwar protests yet dreams of wearing a uniform.
"I just want to do something different," she says. "Something exciting."
At El Monte High School in a working class, mainly Hispanic suburb of Los Angeles, the debate over military recruitment in schools hijacked Flora's senior year. Recruiters wooed her and antiwar activists dissuaded her. She chose the military, changed her mind, changed it back.
Across the country, Uncle Sam wants high school students. But in California and elsewhere, concern about the war and unease over recruiters' access to young people have spawned a backlash. At some schools, counter-recruiters are going head-to-head with the military, trying to talk kids out of joining.
At El Monte, the battle lines were clearly drawn. Recruiters set up tables outside the Lion's Den activity center at lunchtime. They wore neatly pressed uniforms, learned names. They called homes, and when the kids recognized their numbers, some recruiters found ways to outsmart caller ID.
Down the hall in Room 15, Elaine Boyd, an English teacher with a poster of Gandhi on her door and a peace button pinned to her shirt, told kids the war could kill them. The teachers joked that if they were handing out awards, Ms. Boyd would be most likely to be sent to Guantanamo Bay.
For her senior term paper, Flora chose a topic she hoped would guide her. She wanted to know why Latino kids enlist. What could the military do for a girl born in Guadalajara, Mexico, raised by a single, determined mother in a cramped stucco house on the ragged edge of East Los Angeles?
"Hopefully, this will help me make up my mind about joining the Marines," she wrote to her teacher.
All through high school, Flora sent cards to the Marines asking for information. In their slogan - "The few. The proud" - she heard distinction, achievement. She knows her mother came to this country for a reason. Flora doesn't want to let her down.
She wanted to see both sides of the recruitment debate up close. At the recruiting offices on Lower Azusa Road, she filed papers and answered phones. She watched young men and women wander in, teenagers from Mexico, Vietnam or the next street over looking for life experience and college money.
Back at school, she sought out Ms. Boyd, a veteran teacher with an evangelist's zeal for keeping kids out of the military. Ms. Boyd is part of a small but vocal group of activists trying to blunt the Pentagon's sales pitch.
"You need to know your rights," she tells her students. "When they tell you two years, it could be eight."
In Ms. Boyd's classroom, near a movie poster for Mel Gibson's Hamlet, a picture of a cemetery screams: "You Can't Be All That You Can Be If You're Dead." She showed an antiwar documentary in her senior English class. When she heard that recruiters were frequenting the library, she slipped the librarian a stack of handouts headlined "Recruiters Lie."
To understand what drives Elaine Boyd, you have to go back to the first weeks of the war, when Jorge Gonzalez, a 20-year-ol d Marine, died in an ambush near Nasiriyah. Gonzalez graduated from El Monte. He played soccer. Ms. Boyd was his English teacher. She watched him laugh and helped him with his senior project.
"He was mine," she says.
They planted a small evergreen for him near the library. The lieutenant governor came, and Gonzalez's mother and the TV cameras.
"A reality we have to face'Doug Halvorsen, El Monte's principal, is mild and jovial. Sometimes he gets on the school PA system and jokes about the weather. It's one thing, he says, when the war is out there. When it comes home, that's another thing.
At some schools, recruiters high-five kids in the lunchroom and show up at football practice. They bring in life-sized cardboard cutouts of soldiers and larger-than-life college aid checks. Halvorsen likes to tell people that his father fought in the Battle of the Bulge, but given everything that's going on - by which he means the war in Iraq - he thinks it's best for recruiters to stay near the Lion's Den, a low-slung concrete building across from the main office. He doesn't want them buttonholing kids in hallways; they're not allowed on campus without permission.
One recent morning, someone told Halvorsen that two Navy recruiters were on their way to the career center. In a minute, he was outside, heading down the broad walkway toward the men in sparkling dress whites.
It was a blazing day in the lap of the San Gabriel Mountains. Class was in session, so the campus was quiet and empty except for a few stray kids in tank tops and track pants. The recruiters stood between the main office and the career center, talking to a couple of El Monte seniors who joined the Navy this spring. Juan Cabrera and Jonathan A. Cueva, both 17, had been out on the football field all morning, filing in and out of midfield seats to the amplified chords of Pomp and Circumstance. Graduation was three days away.
You could see Halvorsen's anger in the length of his stride. The recruiters looked up, pulled themselves straight.
"You guys need to go," Halvorsen said.
"Roger that," said Petty Officer 1st Class Morris "Moe" Pegues, a soft-spoken man whose shaved head shone in the sun. Petty Officer Erik S. Santos stood silently by his side. Pegues tried to calm Halvorsen. They were just coming to pick up graduation tickets like every year. Halvorsen wasn't having it. Back behind his desk, he dialed the recruiting office.
"We had two Navy guys just on campus," he barked into the phone. "They know the rules, they are not supposed to be on campus without an administrator. . . . They cannot be on the campus again. If they are on the campus again I will call the police. I am really upset. I am not antimilitary. I'm upset because they have no respect for the administrators of the school. That's what really irks me. You can do whatever you want and it's wrong. Isn't that the point of the military - the command structure? What about us? The more they're on (campus) the worse it's going to get. I'm not going to tolerate it and the district is not going to tolerate it."
He hung up, took a deep breath. "I hope that kind of shakes them up," he said. "If this had been the first time, it would be no big deal. Anyway, it burns me up."
Later, in his strip-mall office with the posters of ships and sharp-winged aircraft on the walls, Pegues, 32, says this is the first time he has been kicked off a high school campus in three years of recruiting. He says that growing anxiety about the war is "a reality we have to face." He acknowledges that his officers must work harder to sign up the same number of recruits.
"There's always ebbs and flows," he says. "It dips. But we like to think we're just readjusting to the times. We haven't been in a major conflict since Vietnam."
Pegues thinks kids should know what the Navy has to offer: some of the best training programs in the world, tuition benefits, the chance to attend the Naval Academy or a big-name university on the government's tab if you go on to become an officer. Like everyone, he has heard the horror stories about recruiters misleading and harassing kids.
"No one in my office does that," he says. "I wouldn't allow it."
He understands teachers who want to protect kids from the dangers of combat, but he says teenagers should be allowed to make up their own minds.
"High school is a place for young men and women to explore ideas," he says. "To shut avenues off and just not let a young person see what's there, I find hard to understand."
Americans may be souring on the war. Recruiters may be working harder. But at El Monte, just as many kids are signing up. Of 291 graduating seniors, seven said they planned to join the Navy or the Marines, about the same as in past years. Counter-recruiters push college, but 80 percent of these students need federal help to buy lunch. Half the city's 122,000 residents are foreign-born. After Sept. 11, military service became a fast track to citizenship.
In El Monte, parents tell their kids: have a better life than mine. Better than working long hours in a garment factory like Flora's mom. Better than moving cars at Spirit Honda like Juan Cabrera's dad.
Juan wants to be an FBI agent. When people hear he has joined the Navy, they sometimes ask if he's suicidal. He doesn't like the idea of combat, but he has wanted to enlist since Sept. 11.
"Maybe it's more of a risk over there," he says. "But if you're going to die for something, it better be something good like your country."
"I'd rather die there than die sitting on the sofa," says Jonathan Cueva, a lanky kid with gelled hair. Before he enlisted, he took two weeks to mull it over. He considered the dangers and decided there are dangers everywhere.
Mario Recinos, a stocky 18-year-old with a head full of braids, was in Ms. Boyd's English class. He wants to be a police officer. A recruiter suggested he wouldn't stand a chance in the job market against someone just back from Iraq.
"The key word is "come back,' " Mario says. "It's a big if."
He's going to community college.
"She's a scaredy cat'Flora hopes for clarity, but so far it has eluded her. She is 17 with caramel-streaked hair and wire-rimmed glasses, a sister in the Army and a cousin dead in Iraq.
She took the Marine Corps placement test. She says a corporal's wife tutored her to help raise her score. This spring, as part of her term paper research, Ms. Boyd took her to a training session for counter-recruiters. Between speakers, Flora met Fernando Suarez del Solar, a Mexican-American from San Diego whose son was killed in Iraq. She told him she wanted to join the Marines.
Don't do it, he told her. It's not worth it.
The conversation changed her. At home, she tore down the Army and Marine Corps posters in her bedroom.
"I just got so mad," she says.
Two days later, she was in class when they told her a Marine recruiter was waiting for her in the library. It was the end of the month, and he had an open slot. She says she started to cry, but she couldn't say no. She had been talking to him for months. Together, they went to the factory where her mother inspects clothes. She needed her mother's signature on the papers.
They drove to Los Angeles for her physical. In the car on the way back, Flora had time to think.
"I don't want to join," she told the recruiter, just like that. She told him she didn't believe in the war. She took the contract back.
On the Saturday before Memorial Day she stood in front of hundreds of people at an antiwar gathering at Emanuel Presbyterian Church in downtown Los Angeles.
"I've decided not to join the Marines," Flora told them. "I owe it all to Fernando Suarez."
What she didn't tell them was that she was thinking about joining the Navy. High school was almost over and she had no idea what to do.
Flora's sister Imelda is a pharmacy technician at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. When Flora told her about the Marines months back, Imelda cried on the phone. At work she sees amputees, soldiers in wheelchairs on the elevator.
"They're like my age," says Imelda, who is 23.
She pleaded with Flora, offered to buy her a car for graduation. Anything to make her change her mind.
"All the guys dying now are Marines," Imelda says. She is home for a visit, seated in the living room with the picture of Jesus on the wall and the elaborate creches under the TV. Flora's mother sits on the sofa, a tissue balled up in her hand, water in her eyes.
"Why is it that she can't make up her mind?" she asks.
Flora goes into the kitchen so she doesn't have to listen.
"I think she's being selfish," her mother says. "I'd like to spend more time with her. It doesn't matter what she does. I'll support her."
In Flora's lavender bedroom, the vanity table is strewn with dry corsages and bottles of nail polish. At sleepovers, strange noises startle her. Her friend Nancy Gallegos says Flora won't like boot camp.
"She's a scaredy cat," Nancy says.
Flora tries to explain. She had a C average in high school. Her family didn't think she would graduate and she doesn't think she'll make it in college.
When a Navy recruiter called this spring, she said she wasn't interested. Then she thought about it. The Navy lacked the thrill and flash of the Marines, but it seemed safer. She called the recruiter back.
She keeps a porcelain angel on her bedside table, a prayer from her second-cousin's funeral gripped in the statue's small pale hands. Sgt. Atanasio Haro Marin, Jr., died when his unit came under attack at a checkpoint in central Iraq two summers ago.
My soul magnifies the Lord,
And my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.
Flora cannot imagine death, but she knows what death leaves behind: a prayer in cold hands. She's sure it won't happen to her. "Well," she says, "I hope it won't happen."
She took the Navy placement test three times, aiming for a high score. She didn't pass the physical - something about her eyesight - so she asked for a waiver. The Navy said no, but Flora's still trying. Someone told her it was just a matter of paperwork.
In her term paper, Flora wrote that citizenship is useless to Latino soldiers who die fighting, that there is no way to compensate a mother for the loss of a child.
"We are losing many Latinos, yet the only ones the Government seems to care about are the Caucasian soldiers," she wrote. "Many don't pay attention to the Latinos, many care (more) about names like Jessica Lynch than Jorge Gonzalez."
But that was a term paper, a handful of words laid down in a utopia of paper and ink. Flora's reality is here, in the shadowy living room where Imelda watches CNN with the volume turned low and their mother naps on the cool floor beside the sofa.
The living room wall is covered with framed plaques, diplomas and photos of Flora's four older sisters: Maria in a white graduation gown, Bertha with her children, Imelda among a group of cadets in olive uniforms, Robertina, the first in the family to go to college.
Flora is nowhere on this wall.
Epilogue: Flora recently learned that she has bee n permanently disqualified from the Navy. She plans to study child development at a local community college. She is disappointed but resigned: "I guess things happen for a reason."
Times researcher Cathy Wos contributed to this report. Vanessa Gezari can be reached at vgezari@sptimes.com or 727 893-8803.