For just a moment, imagine a fighter jet swooping across the screen. The pilot gives the thumbs up. The voice-over explains to us that this pilot is a person of honor, he is defending his country. While being a hero, he is earning money for college. The music is pumping and it’s so cool that it makes me want to sign up.

For another moment, imagine the charred shell of a hummer burning in the streets of Baghdad. Imagine your friend recovering from losing his arm.

Imagine attending your officer’s funeral. Imagine coming back home to the United States to be homeless.

Many of the soldiers doing the dirty work for our government are people who were recruited by the massive $1.9 billion dollar advertising budget the military spends yearly on recruitment. But what many of these recruits don’t know is that they were specifically targeted because of their skin color or they were in a certain demographic.

To fight a war in Afghanistan and Iraq, our government needed to rebuild the army. The recruiters were given new goals, new tools and a lot of money. They were even rewarded monetary bonuses for signing you up. When the recruiters fell short of their goals, a new campaign was devised and the recruiters were released back onto the streets.

Military recruiters have typically gone after minorities in poor areas, and a recent study published in The New York Times shows that while nearly equal numbers of the American population live in rural and metro areas, the number of rural soldiers who have been killed is nearly double that of those coming from densely populated areas, according to data is from the Pentagon and the Census Bureau.

When people in rural areas have fewer opportunities, and the economics are against them as well, the opportunity to join the military seems encouraging.

They are offered scholarships for college, opportunities to travel the world and more important than anything else, an opportunity to leave.

When the economy is doing poorly, and there is a rise of poverty and unemployment, the number of recruits goes up. When people have fewer opportunities to build a life, they join the military. Seems harmless, but when you consider the demographics of the people with fewer opportunities, it’s disproportionately biased against the rural poor and minorities.

When the number of Spanish-speaking American recruits dropped below goals, the military devised new Spanish-language advertisements, and literature.

Why does the Iowa National Guard have a hummer with a speaker system that includes several subwoofers and thousands of watts? It looks pretty cool, right? They use these tools to trick you into thinking differently about war and fighting.

Fancy cars with a sound system are the gimmicks recruiters use to lure you into thinking the military is a chance of a lifetime, that they’ll pay for your college. Before you enlist in the military, take a moment and consider some of the facts that the recruiter did not tell you.

Did they forget to mention that you are five times more likely to end up living on the streets when you finish? Five hundred thousand veterans are homeless at any one time during the year, which averages out to roughly 33 percent of all homeless people being veterans of the U.S. military.

When they promise you that college money, look at the facts: 65 percent of recruits do not receive any money for college. Only 15 percent of recruits receive 4-year degrees. Although 33 percent of all enlisted soldiers are people of color, only 12.5 percent of officers are people of color.

The next time a military recruiter approaches you, ask him about these facts. Ask him why 50 percent of soldiers on the front line in the first Gulf War were persons of color.

Ask him why so many veterans are homeless.

Don’t fall for military recruiters’ tricks. The facts simply don’t add up, and their immoral and unethical recruitment process won’t fool us any longer.

The recruiter wants his bonus, and the government wants you to fight their war.

– Ramsey Tesdell is a senior in English from Slater.