Peace groups protest Navy presence at Summer Jam Peace groups protest Navy presence at Summer Jam (August 26, 2005)

By Jenny Baer

U.S. Navy recruiters were met with counter-recruiters at Shoreline Amphitheatre last Sunday, when various peace groups descended on the KMEL Summer Jam concert to vie over the hearts and minds of 22,000 attendees.

The Navy was a major sponsor of the event, and put up a recruiting booth as well as sporadic Navy propaganda throughout the show. For their part, the protesters said they want Clear Channel, the Texas-based company which owns Shoreline, to know that military recruiting is not welcome in Mountain View.

The counter-recruitment protest was made up of Mountain View Voices for Peace, along with several youth peace organizations such as the Media Youth Council, Art in Action and Global Exchange. Wearing shirts that read "Military Recruiters Lie," they stood outside the main concert gates handing out pamphlets and flyers with information on citizen's rights as well as descriptions of military life.

"We want to make sure that the youth out here knows that there are alternatives to recruitment, and to make KMEL and Clear Channel accountable to what they're doing and to know that there are groups that don't appreciate their presence," said Vrinda Manglik of Global Exchange.

The protesters also accused the Navy of targeting a certain demographic to fill its ranks.

"The military recruiters are targeting poor, young people of color to try to get them to serve in the military," said Lenny Siegel of Mountain View Voices for Peace.

However, the recruiters claim to have chosen the concert because much of the audience was in the Navy's target age for recruitment -- between 17 and 21 years old. "The people who go to rap, hip-hop and even country concerts tend to be younger, and we want to be where they are," said Craig Coleman, PIO for the Navy Recruiting District of San Francisco. "That's not our first concert and that's not the only genre of music where we have a presence." Coleman added that the Navy was present at Shoreline's BFD, a modern rock concert, earlier this summer.

Once inside the concert gates, the counter-recruiters stood outside the Navy booth -- they would have had to pay $5,000 as a sponsor to obtain a booth inside -- distributing material and making conversation with concertgoers as well as the recruiters, who were giving away sunglasses, pencils and cup holders.

Reactions to the counter-recruiters were generally positive, with some shouting slogans such as "Hell, no, we won't go!" as they passed by. The counter-recruiters even came into contact with a recent Iraq veteran who was attending the concert.

"He supported our presence. When he enlisted in the Navy, he was told that he'd never see war," said Code Pink's Claudia Rodriguez. "He talked about the lack of equipment for soldiers in Iraq such as clothes and body armor. ... They didn't have a lot of the physical things that make their job possible."

Recruiters did not seem to have a problem with the counter-recruiters' presence. "Every person in the Navy has sworn to uphold the Constitution, said Coleman, adding that protesting the Navy's presence "is their First Amendment right. The Navy's point of view is to defend the right to free speech. They have the right to their own opinions and we support that entirely."

E-mail Jenny Baer at jbaer@mv-voice.com

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