­Eigh­teen is the youngest age at which some­one can join the U.S. mil­i­tary with­out their par­ents’ per­mis­sion, yet the mil­i­tary mar­kets itself to — which is to say recruits — chil­dren at much younger ages. This is in part accom­plished by mil­i­tary recruiters who vis­it high schools around the coun­try, recruit­ing chil­dren dur­ing career fairs and often set­ting up recruit­ment tables in cafeteri­as and hall­ways. As a result, most stu­dents in the U.S. will meet a mil­i­tary recruiter for the first time at just 17 years old, and chil­dren are get­ting exposed to mil­i­tary pro­pa­gan­da younger and younger.

Out of the spotlight, dedicated counter-recruiters around the country are steadfast in their organizing to cut off the human supply chain to the U.S. military.

The recruit­ment of young peo­ple to the mil­i­tary is as old as the mil­i­tary itself, and has become more and more nor­mal­ized along with the gen­er­al mil­i­ta­riza­tion of schools. Accord­ing to the Urban Insti­tute, more than two-thirds of pub­lic high school stu­dents attend schools where there are ​“school resource offi­cers,” a name for school-based police. This police pres­ences comes on top of the role of mil­i­tary recruiters on cam­pus­es, or at col­lege and career fairs.

Counter-recruit­ment surged in pop­u­lar­i­ty dur­ing George W. Bush’s Iraq War, when the U.S. mil­i­tary ratch­eted up recruit­ment for the war. But these days you don’t hear much about this move­ment, despite the fact that the U.S. is still engaged in bru­tal wars, from Yemen to Afghanistan, and the Trump admin­is­tra­tion has been threat­en­ing war with Iran. Out of the spot­light, ded­i­cat­ed counter-recruiters around the coun­try are stead­fast in their orga­niz­ing to cut off the human sup­ply chain to the U.S. mil­i­tary. U.S. wars have caused innu­mer­able deaths, cre­at­ed long-term hard­ships in occu­pied nations, and cost tril­lions of dol­lars. Counter-recruit­ment, then, is about starv­ing the mil­i­tary of the labor it needs to accom­plish these destruc­tive mis­sions. When work­ing with stu­dents, par­ents and school lead­er­ship, counter-recruiters focus on a vari­ety of issues, includ­ing the neg­a­tive per­son­al con­se­quences that come with being a sol­dier and broad­er prob­lems like racism and U.S. imperialism.

Kate Con­nell, the direc­tor of the Cal­i­for­nia counter-recruit­ment orga­ni­za­tion Truth in Recruit­ment, a par­ent, and a Quak­er, tells In These Times that one rea­son counter-recruit­ment efforts are so over­looked these days is that U.S. casu­al­ties in Iraq and Afghanistan have fall­en out of the news. ​“I think that’s kind of what got peo­ple con­cerned and out in the streets” in the past, she says. Though this move­ment doesn’t get as much atten­tion these days, orga­niz­ers and activists say that counter-recruit­ment efforts remain crit­i­cal­ly important.

For the most part, activists who do counter-recruit­ment work in schools focus on match­ing or exceed­ing mil­i­tary recruiters in face-time with kids. Thanks to the No Child Left Behind Act, mil­i­tary recruiters are required to have the same lev­el of access to stu­dents as col­lege and career pro­fes­sion­als who recruit in schools.

Hart Viges, a U.S. Army vet­er­an who has been vol­un­teer­ing in counter-recruit­ment for around a decade and works with Sus­tain­able Options for Youth-Austin (SOY-Austin), says his role is to edu­cate chil­dren using inter­ac­tive tabling in schools. The group brings t‑shirts and a ​“peace wheel” the stu­dents can spin to learn more facts about the mil­i­tary. Chil­dren also get to dis­cuss how they’d like tax­pay­er dol­lars spent. For exam­ple, they might dis­cuss whether they want to spend bil­lions on war, or allo­cate that mon­ey else­where. Viges is blunt with them about what life will be like after time spent in the military.

“I ask them, ​‘Do you like fire­works?’” Viges says. When they respond yes, he explains, ​“you won’t like them any­more” after com­ing back from a war. He tells them the real­i­ties of liv­ing with post-trau­mat­ic stress dis­or­der brought about by com­bat, and how it does last­ing dam­age to vet­er­ans. Being real with chil­dren about the mil­i­tary has proven effec­tive for Viges. ​“There’s so many wins in counter recruit­ment I feel,” he adds. ​“I talk to kids who are think­ing about join­ing and I tell them the real­i­ties of it, and you can see their minds start to change… With politi­cians it’s like a stale­mate, but counter-recruit­ment is like a punch in the gut that will top­ple the mil­i­tary indus­tri­al com­plex.” Hart also talks to chil­dren about oth­er issues con­nect­ed to the mil­i­tary indus­tri­al com­plex that con­cerns them, such as war in gen­er­al, racism, sex­ism and cli­mate change.

Youth are active in this work, too. Jen­ny, a 16-year-old incom­ing junior at San­ta Maria High School in Cal­i­for­nia, interns with Truth in Recruit­ment. She tells In These Times that she got involved with the orga­ni­za­tion after a friend told her it would be a good way to stand up for her­self and her peers who are fre­quent­ly vis­it­ed by mil­i­tary recruiters at school.

When she start­ed high school, Jen­ny says she noticed that the mil­i­tary recruiters fre­quent­ed her school, but oth­er oppor­tu­ni­ties for stu­dents post-high school were not well rep­re­sent­ed. ​“I thought this was a prob­lem, espe­cial­ly since the major­i­ty of us are stu­dents of col­or and I thought that we were being dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly tar­get­ed because we are peo­ple of col­or,” she says.

Angel fur­ther notes that many stu­dents at her school are undoc­u­ment­ed, and she noticed that mil­i­tary recruiters were telling her peers dis­tort­ed infor­ma­tion about the ben­e­fits of mil­i­tary ser­vice based on their undoc­u­ment­ed sta­tus. She says that after speak­ing to mil­i­tary recruiters, a num­ber of her peers have said that they were promised they would get U.S. cit­i­zen­ship if they served in the mil­i­tary. While there is some path­way for non-cit­i­zens who serve in the mil­i­tary to become nat­u­ral­ized, this is not a guar­an­teed ben­e­fit. In fact, the U.S. gov­ern­ment has a his­to­ry of deport­ing for­eign nation­als who were employed by the mil­i­tary. ​“I always have to cor­rect them because I don’t want them to join and not know the full truth about it,” Angel says. ​“We would­n’t be see­ing these things at schools rich, white stu­dents attend.”

The mil­i­tary does, in fact, tend to recruit in poor and work­ing class com­mu­ni­ties, espe­cial­ly among Black and Lat­inx youth. The strat­e­gy of tar­get­ing poor, work­ing-class, and Black and Lat­inx peo­ple for mil­i­tary con­scrip­tion is known as the ​“pover­ty draft.” The tac­tics of this strat­e­gy can be seen in mil­i­tary recruit­ment efforts at schools like San­ta Maria High School where Angel attends, and is evi­dent in stud­ies on the socioe­co­nom­ic sta­tus of peo­ple who fought in recent US wars. Accord­ing to a 2016 study out of Boston Uni­ver­si­ty and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Min­neso­ta Law School, ​“Today, unlike in World War II, the Amer­i­cans who die or are wound­ed in war are dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly com­ing from poor­er parts of the country.”

Con­nell, the Truth in Recruit­ment direc­tor, says that the tac­tics used by mil­i­tary recruiters on chil­dren are ​“very much a groom­ing process.” She notes that branch­es of the mil­i­tary oper­ate social media accounts, where they will fol­low and com­mu­ni­cate with stu­dents who are poten­tial­ly inter­est­ed in join­ing up. In this way, recruiters have direct, unsu­per­vised access to young teens, who may or not be dis­cussing recruit­ment efforts with trust­ed adults in their lives. This type of behav­ior, Con­nell says, is ​“inap­pro­pri­ate.”

Still, the pres­ence of the mil­i­tary in schools has become nor­mal­ized. ​“I feel that the idea that the mil­i­tary is an untouch­able sub­ject as far as crit­i­cism or cut­ting the bud­get, [makes counter-recruit­ment] a real­ly tricky con­ver­sa­tion to have, so peo­ple avoid it.” The insti­tu­tion­al pow­er and not to men­tion fund­ing and broad sup­port that the mil­i­tary has makes counter-recruit­ment a challenge.

But the group has seen con­crete results from their orga­niz­ing and advo­ca­cy. Work­ing with stu­dents, par­ents, and school and dis­trict lead­er­ship in San­ta Bar­bara in 2014, Truth in Recruit­ment was able to con­vince the dis­trict to cre­ate bet­ter resources for par­ents to more eas­i­ly opt their stu­dents out of hav­ing their infor­ma­tion shared with mil­i­tary recruiters.

Though counter-recruit­ment is per­haps not as promi­nent as it was more than a decade ago, orga­niz­ers in this field are unequiv­o­cal about the need to sup­port stu­dents by offer­ing alter­na­tives to the mil­i­tary, such as col­lege or the work­force. As the mil­i­tary con­tin­ues to tar­get chil­dren, espe­cial­ly in low-income and Black and Lat­inx com­mu­ni­ties, counter-recruiters will con­tin­ue to work with chil­dren and their care-tak­ers to offer safer, more dig­ni­fied options for life after high school.