Army Recruiters: “War Ended a Long Time Ago”

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There are 138,000 American soldiers in Iraq, and no signs of a drawdown in sight. But don’t tell that to the bunch of Army recruiters caught on tape by ABC lying to potential recruits about whether they might end up in the sandbox.

“Nobody is going over to Iraq anymore?” one student asks a recruiter.

“No, we’re bringing people back,” he replies.

“We’re not at war. War ended a long time ago,” another recruiter says.

And if the recruits don’t like Army life? One recruiter falsely claimed they could easily get “a ‘Failure to Adapt’ discharge…. It’s an entry-level discharge so it won’t affect anything on your record. It’ll just be like it never happened.”

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OUR DEADLINE MATH PROBLEM

It’s risky, but also unavoidable: A full one-third of the dollars that we need to pay for the journalism you rely on has to get raised in December. A good December means our newsroom is fully staffed, well-resourced, and on the beat. A bad one portends budget trouble and hard choices.

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We simply can’t afford to come up short. There is no cushion in our razor-thin budget—no backup, no alternative sources of revenue to balance our books. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the fierce journalism we do. That’s why we need you to show up for us right now.

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