CASE STUDY

Pulling yourself up by the Combat Bootstraps

Javier Galvan

This is a year long study on an Urban school in Southern California focused on promotion of military services through schooling policies and practices. This school serves predominantly low-income, Latina students. Programs such as the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC) and the Police Academy Magnet in this school are well funded and promoted military service as a postsecondary path. Along with these programs, this school was frequently visited by military recruiters whose goal was to gain students’ interest. The overall militarization of this school gave military service an unparalleled promotion as a path after graduation. JROTC claims to prepare students for higher education, but in reality this study shows how JROTC tracks students away from college. The JROTC program is funded by the government as a means to recruit students and portrays enlisting in the military as beneficial for these students. The idea of JROTC and other militarized high school programs lead with the myth of teaching students “discipline” and “leadership.” These myths are rooted in ideologies of urban youth being unruly and prone to violence. Therefore these programs translate to obedience of authority and skills that only apply to employability in the military sector. 

 

Javier Galvan is a child of immigrants from Mexico who grew up in San Diego public schools. His own education was not a priority as he had younger siblings to help care for and rent to help pay. While in high school he was approached by a Marine recruiting officer. Javier enlisted because of a guaranteed paycheck, a roof over his head, and three meals a day. As a Marine, Galvan was deployed to Iraq in 2008 and Afghanistan in 2009. Prior to his Afghanistan deployment he was trained as a combat lifesaver, this was the role that motivated him to leave the military for med school. Without his experience in the military, he would not have found that he wanted to be a doctor. Noting that having a stable job in the military got him onto his feet, but it was his own motivation to leave the Marines and pursue a new career that allowed him to become a doctor. After leaving the Marines, he was able to graduate magna cum laude from San Francisco State, got his Masters in Public Health from Johns Hopkins, and is now a Resident Physician at Highland Hospital.

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​Combined, this study and Javier Galvan’s experience in the Marines tells a story of the military targeting a certain demographic for a specific workforce. Galvan himself could have been a part of the same narrative, had he not found a new career path and left the military to pursue it. To target low-income schools as this case study showed, and to give students in those schools only skills that transfer to the military should bring into question why there are not other ways to escape the poverty cycle. High schools students in situations like Javier’s should have other resources to help them in school, and in their home life. While Javier’s is a story of success because of what working in the military gave him, others like him should have opportunities to continue school or explore what they want to do without the limit of enlisting.