Not a soccer mom

One of the better moments in Michael Moore’s film “Fahrenheit 9/11″ was the excrutiating scene in which a couple of super-smooth army recruiters chatted up kids outside a shopping mall with a view to getting them to enlist. Apparently, as the war in Iraq drags on, enlistment numbers across the US are down and the army is having to try extra hard to entice the young into potential combat — and that includes recruiting in schools.

In Berkeley, however, the army must just want to throw up its hands in despair. According to a feature in the September issue of The East Bay Monthly (not yet available online), last year Berkeley’s school district gave the army the names of 2,000 students who were eligible to enlist. This year the district decided to give parents a form which allowed them to ‘opt in’ if they wanted their child’s name to be given to the Armed Forces. The result? The army received 27 names.