In my high school in rural North Carolina, a plastic table was set up just off to the side of the atrium where we all congregated after lunch every day. Behind that pamphlet-strewn table was a man in the recognizable khaki of a Marine’s service uniform. With a smile that never left his face, he’d reach out a hand and ask about your day. He’d inquire about your classes, whether you played sports, who you rooted for. Then, after maybe two or three minutes of small talk, he’d make his pitch.



It was always the same: fast-tracked citizenship; relief from the financial pressure of attending college; real employment prospects in a recession-era economy that had left many of my classmates’ parents without jobs. He was the flesh-and-blood version of the television propaganda we had already seen a million times over by then. But his pitch, run against a limited set of options, sounded like a good deal. It was supposed to.

That recruiter’s presence at my school was the result of a particularly insidious piece of the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act, signed by George W. Bush, which required that all public schools grant military recruiters “the same access to secondary school students as is provided generally to post secondary educational institutions or to prospective employers.” That table was his equal access.

While the law handed the military a clean reach into American high schools, its recruitment efforts remained selective. Enlistment data paints a complicated portrait of the economic makeup of the military, but what we know about recruitment is more straightforward: The Pentagon views low-income kids as easy targets for its forever wars.

In 2015, a pair of Education Week reporters making use of the Freedom of Information Act reviewed the Army’s presence in Connecticut high schools and found major discrepancies in how the branch targeted middle-class and poor kids. Throughout the entire 2011–2012 school year, Army recruiters visited a higher-income high school—in which only 5 percent of students qualified for free or reduced lunch—just four times. By contrast, at another high school, where nearly half of the students qualified, Army recruiters stopped by more than 40 times before the spring semester’s final bell.

