Video games do not equal combat

I love video games.

I got my first console when I was in elementary school - a Super Nintendo. In middle school I received a Playstation for Christmas. And finally, after a long wait similar to Cartman and the Wii, I got my Playstation 2 as a junior in high school.

The world of interactive entertainment has definitely evolved from the heydays of killing brain cells in shady arcades. Video games help to develop hand-eye coordination, logic and puzzle-solving skills, and continue to turn entire generations into tech-savvy beings. And despite limited time to play, I still engage in video games as often as possible.

So I was very disturbed to hear a CNN report yesterday about a new military recruitment facility in a Philadelphia shopping mall.

According to the report, the $12 million facility "has 60 personal computers loaded with military video games, 19 Xbox 360 video game controllers and a series of interactive screens describing military bases and career options in great detail."

Jesse Hamilton, a recent veteran of Iraq, spoke out against the new recruitment effort and said, "[The Army Experience Center is] very deceiving and very far from realistic. You can't simulate the loss when you see people getting killed. It's not very likely you are going to get into a firefight. The only way to simulate the heat is holding a blow dryer to your face."

The fact that the military might be trying to make a vague connection between actual warfare and a video game like Call of Duty 4 is utterly insulting to all active and veteran soldiers. It's almost saying their job was and is no harder than pushing a few buttons.

Comparing warfare to simulated combat is like seeing "Schindler's List" and proclaiming you can sympathize with Holocaust survivors.

To clarify, this topic has nothing to do with the military overall. I'm not up for writing much about whether I support or disapprove of the war or my opinion on our outgoing and incoming presidents' foreign policies.

What I do find interesting, however, is the area of military recruitment. I constantly refer to the recruitment mall next to Hobby Lobby off of Old Fort Parkway as "piranha row."

I call it piranha row because recruiters will try to get as many bites at a potential recruit as possible - anything to boost the Army's ever dropping enlistment rate.

To be fair, I am an Army brat via my father, so my dislike of recruitment officers started at a very young age. By the age of 12, I was receiving US Army paraphernalia - bags, visors, Frisbees, sunglasses.

When I was 14, I joined my high school's JROTC program. This was mostly out of respect for my father, who was, at the time, the executive officer of the program.

When I was 15, a sophomore, the Army recruiter came to visit.

I, along with my fellow classmates, were told to come to school in dress uniform and give up our lunch periods to stand with the Army recruiter to talk with our fellow, non-JROTC peers.   We were supposed to sell the army life, despite the fact that we hadn't lived it. I just found it to be useful excuse not to be forced to find a seat in our already over-crowded cafeteria.

I ditched JROTC my sophomore year and refused to sign-up or respond to any postcards, letters or e-mails I had, and do still occasionally, receive.

But after reading another recruitment-themed story on Dec. 22, 2008 at Comcast.net, I'm actually starting to feel like recent recruiters are little more than Uncle Sam's punching bags.   The story talks about the multiple suicides that have plagued the Houston Recruiting Battalion over the past three years. All soldiers served combat tours before becoming recruiters.

One death in particular, Sgt. 1st Class Patrick Henderson, is the main focus since his widow, Staff Sgt. Amanda Henderson, and Texas Sen. John Cornyn (R) have pressed the state senate for an investigation into Patrick's suicide.

According to Amanda, her husband worked "13-hour days, six days a week, often encountering abuse from young people and their parents… When he [Patrick] and other recruiters would gripe about their pressure to meet their quotas, their supervisors would snarl that they ought to be grateful they were not in Iraq."

Barely a year after taking the recruiting position, 35-year-old Patrick hanged himself in his backyard shed with a dog chain.

Wretched isn't strong enough to describe Patrick's last year of life and tragic isn't nearly appropriate enough to describe his death.

Whatever causes these soldiers' distress, the added pressures of creating a magical illusion of play fighting through entertainment and promising real-life, video game glory at the potential cost of young Americans' lives is more than enough to cause any human being distress - especially when that person knows the truth.

At this point, I'm not sure what's worse: asking soldiers to out-right fabricate combat situations to boost enlistment numbers or being the person who has to lie to unsuspecting young men and women?

I just hope we don't start opening martial arts studios asking kids to train with Mortal Kombat and then turn around, expecting them to break cement blocks with their bare foreheads.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: 01/15/09

ORIGINAL ARTICLE:

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