A Veteran's Iraq Message Upsets Army Recruiters

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A Veteran's Iraq Message Upsets Army Recruiters

Sun Jan 1, 2006 20:01

A Veteran's Iraq Message Upsets Army Recruiters
MONICA DAVEY

DULUTH, Minn., Dec. 21 - As those thinking of becoming soldiers
arrive on the slushy doorstep of the Army recruiting station here,
they cannot miss the message posted in bold black letters on the
storefront right next door.

Scott Cameron, a wounded Vietnam veteran, with his sign
noting the numbers of Americans killed or wounded in Iraq.

The two storefronts. Staff Sgt. Gary J. Capan wants the sign removed
from the window next door to his Army recruiting office in Duluth, Minn.

"Remember the Fallen Heroes," the sign reads, and then it ticks off
numbers - the number of American troops killed in Iraq, the number
wounded, the number of days gone by since this war began.

The sign, put up by a former soldier, has stirred intense, though
always polite, debate in this city along the edge of Lake Superior in
northeastern Minnesota. In a way, many of the nation's vast and
complicated arguments about war are playing out on a single block
here, around a simple piece of wood.

The seven military recruiters here, six of whom have themselves
served in Iraq, want the sign taken away. "It's disheartening," Staff
Sgt. Gary J. Capan, the station's commander, said. "Everyone knows
that people are dying in Iraq, but to walk past this on the way to
work every day is too much."

But Scott Cameron, a local man who was wounded in the Vietnam War,
says his sign should remain. Mr. Cameron volunteers for a candidate
for governor of Minnesota whose campaign opened a storefront office
next door to the recruiting station, and he has permission to post the
message he describes as "not antiwar, but pro-veteran."

"We're still taking casualties from Vietnam, years later," Mr.
Cameron said recently. "Is the same thing going to happen again?"
Despite the location, he insists that his purpose is not to prevent
new recruits from signing up for the Army, but to honor those who made
sacrifices. Still, Mr. Cameron also says, "Before they join the
military, people better know what they're getting into."

Clashes like this are emerging elsewhere, too, even as the Army
wrestles with the challenge of recruiting during a war, a struggle
that left it 8 percent shy of its goal to bring in 80,000 new
active-duty soldiers in the most recent recruiting year.

Some of the conflicts are part of a growing number of planned
"counterrecruiting" efforts by antiwar groups, parents and individuals.

They have fought to prevent recruiters from getting access to
students' contact information from schools or have set up their own
booths near recruiters' at job fairs to tell potential recruits why
they should not sign up.

At George Mason University in Virginia, an Air Force veteran was
arrested this fall while standing near a recruitment table on campus,
wearing a sign that said "recruiters lie." At Kent State University in
Ohio, a former marine climbed a recruiter's rock-climbing display in
October and unfurled a peace banner.

But some of the debates, like the one here, have played out far more
quietly, seeming less staged, more ambiguous and more like the natural
edges of the country's debate over war seeping out on their own.

Early this month, State Senator Steve Kelley, a candidate for
governor of Minnesota from the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (the
Democratic party in Minnesota, whose name is a vestige of its liberal
heritage), held a grand opening for his new campaign office along
Superior Street, a main thoroughfare in downtown Duluth. When Mr.
Cameron, a Kelley volunteer, asked whether he could put his sign up in
the window of the office, alongside the collage of campaign posters,
Mr. Kelley agreed.

Mr. Cameron, who was shot in Vietnam in 1969 and says he has since
undergone 46 operations to repair the damage, said he felt compelled
to post his message to remind people of the soldiers now lost. Decades
ago, he said, he did not speak his mind about Vietnam because he
feared he might harm support for the troops. He is not, he said,
"going to be silent again."

Although Mr. Cameron, 55, acknowledged that he opposed the war in
Iraq, he insisted that his sign was not about that at all. Its intent,
he said, is simple and apolitical: to remember the troops, to care for
veterans, to recognize what is being lost each day. "This is for the
veterans," he said.

"And the way I understand it, this is what we're over there fighting
for in the first place - for my right to put a sign right there."

A few days after the opening, the office drew a visit from next door.

Sergeant Capan, 31, said his recruiters were upset and wanted the
sign removed. One woman who had just returned from duty in Iraq, he
said, found the sign especially disconcerting and impersonal. "It was
upsetting to veterans who don't look at their friends and colleagues
killed as numbers on a list," he said.

In truth, neither side agrees on what precisely the sign is saying.
Each sees its message through its own prism.

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