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From the Classroom to the Battlefield: a National Guardsman talks about his experience in Iraq.

Article Excerpt
Many American high school students from lower socio-economic backgrounds see military service as a vehicle for advancement. Various branches of the Armed Forces have consistently provided underprivileged youths enlisting in the military with a means to escape poverty. Generous benefits, adequate pay, college tuition, and specialized training in career interests-generally inaccessible to them in their struggle for a future-provide these young people with opportunities in American society of which they could otherwise only dream.

The Armed Forces recruitment station was located next to the main entrance of our brand new high school in the poorest section of Miami. Students arriving and leaving school had easy access. A provision in the No Child Left Behind Act requires schools receiving federal aid to provide military recruiters with names, addresses, and phone numbers of high school juniors and seniors. Noncompliance jeopardizes a school's receipt of federal funds stipulated in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. (l)

I became more aware of the effects of these recruitment efforts as I followed the career of one of my former high school students, who joined the National Guard in the hope of building a better future. He did not anticipate that the time would come when he would be sent to war in Iraq. Bikransky may already be familiar to readers of Social Education as one of four students from my high school who spent time in Russia in the U.S./Russian Student Exchange Program on which I reported in 2001. In that issue, I described the effects the trip had on the preconceptions of my students about Russia and the Russian people. (2)

During his senior year in high school, Bikransky and five of his friends signed up for the military. "It was informative to converse with the friendly recruiters in smart-looking uniforms about possibilities in the service," he told me. (3) Of his classmates, Candice went straight into the Air Force; Yoruba and Jonathon joined the Marine Corps; St. Todd enlisted in the Army; and Bikransky and his friend Reggie signed up for the National Guard. That year, a total of 160 graduates were recruited from Miami's public schools, the majority of them from inner-city schools. (4)

These impoverished, at-risk high school students found it difficult to ignore the offer of opportunities for building a better future. Many of them held full-time jobs and came from single-parent or dysfunctional families. How well I remember some of them falling asleep in my first-period classes, having come home after midnight from working as bus-boys at Miami Beach resort hotels.

Bikransky represents a classic case of the graduating inner-city high school student joining the National Guard. Despite hardships as a child of Haitian immigrants, working full-time during his high-school years while maintaining a 3.1 grade point average, he reasoned that participating in military training one weekend a month and two weeks a year would provide him with sufficient resources to attend university to study engineering. "My father kept on reminding me that one of his reasons for fleeing Haiti was for his children to have a future," he said.

Bikransky was a sophomore at Florida Atlantic University when the United States invaded Iraq. Soon after, the Department of Defense mobilized more than 100,000 National Guards. He was given two weeks to report to active duty. Having to leave his studies in the middle of the semester, Bikransky was forced to request course "incompletes." On his way to Fort Stewart, Georgia, he stopped by my house to say good-bye. When his car turned the corner, my heart sank as I considered the possibility that a student whom I regarded as an "adopted son" might not...

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