Sergeant First Class Clay Usie (left) in "The Recruiter."
The Iraq war years have often been a brutal challenge in the field, but also at home, where U.S. military recruiters have struggled to fill the ranks when young Americans know that if they sign up they are almost certain to go to war.
In shopping malls and school halls and family kitchens, recruiters go to incredible lengths to meet their quotas for a military gasping for fresh troops.
A new HBO documentary gets inside the lives and hard sell of recruiters and recruits in a small southern town. It is intense in there.
This hour, On Point: Dreams, despair, patriotism and raw battlefront need.
-Tom Ashbrook
* * *
Guests:
Edet Belzberg, documentary filmmaker, she’s the director of HBO’s “The Recruiter.”
Sgt. 1st Class Clay Usie, U.S. Army, former Army recruiter and subject of the documentary.
Cpl. Matthew Marks, U.S. Army, a recruit featured in the film, he’s now an Army recruiter himself.
Tags: Army, military, The Recruiter
In all of the discussion of McCain’s Paris Hilton add on this morning’s show, one issue never surfaced: the implicit message in that add that taps into racist fears that black men will have sex with white women. Why choose Paris Hilton and Brittany Spears, two of the most overly sexualized female white pop stars known today? Juxtaposing their images aside Obama’s IS playing the race card, an especially slimy version of it.
(This is a point raised in a NYTimes op-ed column, perhaps George Herbert’s; but I’ve never heard anyone else take it up, and I think the McCain campaign should be called out on it.)
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