The Voice

Issue date: 3/12/07 Section: Inside WCC

Media Credit: Jennifer DeMoss Staff Sargeant Shawn Melchert (left) looks on while Christina Yocum (right, in green) speaks out against military recruitment.

Christina Yocum sat at a table across from the three Army recruiters in the Student Center building, near the south entrance. Yocum, a former Air Force member and head of the Social Justice Club at WCC, was surrounded by brightly colored books and pamphlets. One them stated in large block letters, "Recruiters Lie": the point of her location across from the recruiters. While the recruiters joked and talked with students about the GI Bill and a career in the Army, Yocum quietly handed out counter - literature to students in hopes of steering them away from the military.

The three men in camouflage towered over Yocum, contrasting her calm manner with their loud, energetic laughter, but interactions between the two groups were neutral.

"It doesn't bother me," said Staff Sargeant Shawn Melchert when asked what he thought about Yocum's protest against his presence. "We do what we do so that she can have stands like that."

Staff Sargeant Rodney Hope, who has been a recruiter for five and a half years, echoed Melchert. He said that he has witnessed protests against army recruiters, but they aren't that often.

"Look at the area," said Hope. "It's a liberal campus and [students] have no problem speaking their minds. We go over and talk to them and are cordial; it's never really a hostile situation."

Hope said that recruiters go to schools, career fairs, expos, sporting events-"anywhere there will be people." He and a few other recruiters, when asked what purpose they serve in a school setting, said the same thing: they go to clear up common misconceptions about Army life.

Melchert mentioned, for example, that people think that the Army owns recruits. "I actually run into people in my regular clothes that say, 'I didn't know you could wear stuff like that,'" he said. "One guy had no idea that you could own a car."

Yocum's protest took place right before the end of the Fall 2006 semester, and she still doubts that recruiters are at WCC merely to clear the air. In an interview after her protest she said that she wanted to present a more well-rounded view of military recruitment.

Continued...

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