Letter to the Editor

Agreement to serve should be fulfilled

Negar Tehrani’s column about religious restriction in the army grasps at straws in its attempt to find reasons to distrust our military organizations (“Troops must have own liberty before securing ours,” Oct. 31).

First, the Capt. Peter Brown that Tehrani refers to had signed a contract when he enrolled at West Point.

He promised at least five years of service in exchange for the U.S. military’s financing of his education at one of the most prestigious and historic universities in the nation. In addition, the military paid him a stipend.

According to that contract, Brown should not have been allowed to exit the Army honorably until 2009.

The Army has already had many problems with officer retention. According to data released by the academy, of all the 2001 graduates from West Point, 46 percent left active duty after their required term of service had expired. Of the 2000 graduates, 54 percent had left by 2007.

Much of this can be attributed to the mandatory cycles of 12 months at home versus 15 months deployed that officers must adhere to.

Now they have an officer looking to skip out on his contract and avoid his mandatory service because he suddenly has a religious revelation?

Pardon the Army for being skeptical.

Finally, what Tehrani fails to mention is that Brown was granted an honorable discharge as a conscientious objector on Oct. 19., so the Army lived up to its expectation of religious freedom.

As a UCLA student who happens to be enrolled in the Air Force ROTC program, I can also say with certainty that Tehrani is simply ill-informed about ROTC programs.

ROTC cadets are not obligated to serve their country. They can vacate their agreements with the military at any time prior to becoming actual officers. The only requirement is that they pay back their scholarships and stipends.

The Air Force in particular allows those with scholarships out of high school to “test out the program” for one year and keep their scholarship even if they decide to leave the program.

ROTC programs and the personnel that run them bend over backward to give cadets freedom to pursue their education, and the only religious limitation is that you must be willing to fire your weapon in the line of duty.

After all, it is the job you’re signing up for.

If people like Brown do not know themselves well enough to recognize that they may become a conscientious objector, they should not sign up for military service.

The military and its people are under extremely stressful deployment cycles. The Air Force is being downsized, Marines spend only 50 percent of their time at home, and Army soldiers spend more time away from their families than with them.

All this is done so that we can accomplish the missions that our civilian leaders assign us while still remaining an all-volunteer force. Right now, we are trying to maintain the peace in two hostile war zones.

Every man lost to us through death, casualty, retirement or separation makes our jobs that much harder.

We don’t hang on to our people because we thirst for power; we hang on to our people because we need them now more than ever.

Aaron Richardson

Fourth-year, political science and Russian studies

UCLA Air Force ROTC, Detachment 055

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