Protesters target military recruiters on campus
Antiwar rally part of effort in several cities
About 50 antiwar protesters rallied outside a military recruitment center in downtown Boston yesterday and called for a ban of recruiters on college campuses.
Chanting ''books not guns" and waving banners saying ''No more war," demonstrators marched in a circle on Tremont Street in front of the recruiting station. The protesters also called for the immediate withdrawal of US troops in Iraq.
''It's an extension of the antiwar movement," said Richard ''Web" Beveridge, 18, a Northeastern University student who helped organize the rally. ''The first battle is to stop recruitment in colleges, then high schools, and basically show them that we will not support the military over education."
Similar rallies were held in Chicago, New York, and Seattle yesterday as part of a national movement organized by college students protesting military recruitment on campuses. The rallies came as the US Supreme Court debated whether universities can exclude military recruiters in protest of the Pentagon's ''don't ask don't tell" policy on gays in the military without losing federal funding.
Those gathered on Tremont Street said universities should be able to exclude recruiters from their campuses in protest of the war.
''When recruitment levels are down, it's a really important step in weakening their war machine," said Julie Keefe, 22, who lives in Mission Hill. ''We don't support the war, so we don't want them in our schools."
Khury Petersen-Smith, 23, said that when he attended public high school in his hometown in Albany, N.Y., recruiters would try to talk to students during the lunch break, showing videos of uniformed recruits and highlighting the adventure of combat. Now, as a graduate student at Northeastern, he said he has seen recruiters on campus offering tours of Humvee vehicles and free use of a rock climbing wall.
''They are completely preying on kids," he said. ''They give this idea that the Army is about climbing rocks or something, but it's about killing people or possibly getting killed." 