My School Has JROTC Isn’t That Enough?
SA
Spiro Agnew High School
Mr. President, I live in America. I live in the most beautiful country in the world. We have many hospitals and parking lots and I can buy a grenade from the dark parts of the net. I am truly free. But since Pearl Harbor I guess some people decided I shouldn’t have all my freedoms, that I was too powerful. No longer am I free. To be more specific: No longer can I simply enjoy a goddamn Ham and toast sandwich without some vegan Navy recruiter asking me if I’m interested in knowing more about the combined cost of healthcare and in-state tuition for a teen in America today. Is it not abundantly clear to him that I’ve done all I can to ensure that our military remains built upon the skeletons of the greatest we have to offer? I own a flag. I plan to vote during at least one more presidential election in my lifetime. I have no place in your war. I came up through the best classrooms American schools had to offer. Baby school where I learned to spell. Puberty school where I learned to identify weakness. Driving school where I learned that school is for cowards. Yet here I am, stuck molding the minds of young Americans as they toil in the halls of cinder and concrete at a post-puberty school of my own. And in this American institution I must suffer for my country in the only way I know how: by eating my Ham and Cheese in silence everyday as they stalk the young and attempt to further my complicity. Don’t they know how much I love this country? I preside over a school that has a JROTC. My students wear the uniform; they know what it means to swallow their fear. They’ve done enough. And I have done enough. I walk alongside the oblong buzz-cuts of nearly three dozen serious teenagers every day. I watch as they say goodbye to their loved ones in the hallways, not knowing if they’ll survive the next drill team practice, unsure if they’ll ever see a day when their whispy facial hair grows thick enough to conceal at long last a vast harvest of acne. Not that the
14
service would ever let them. I have been principal of this school now for seven years, after two tours of duty as Vice Principal in Iowa from 20032006 and again from 2008-2010. Every day, I sit in wait, knowing that if and when my country needs me, I have at least 50 young, spry, often either very short or very lanky bodies at my disposal; bodies who have no idea what that actual horror of wars hold for them, and how mundane all the stuff that isn’t war really is. Yet without fail, every day I must suffer. Every day the recruiters stare me in the eye and ask if I, myself, a human specimen of strength and power, have what it takes to defend my country. They crawl all over the lunchroom with Sisyphean fervor, attempting with no success to convince table after table of theater kids and pep band no-names to wash the Kool-Aid out of their hair and lay their bodies on the line for Dick Cheney. Everyone from the army to the navy to the coast guard has practically force fed my students the same damn pamphlet about Protecting God and Country. I am God. I am country. I am sorry God, I am not you. But to these potential future martyrs I am a god. A lesser one no doubt, but like, a cool one. A god who allows grinding at the Spring formal. Just a little.
Sincerely,
Mark McDuf
Mark McDuff Principal at large, of Spiro Agnew High School