LITMIR.BIZ

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members from joining its ranks. It is true that gang members tend to have criminal records, which can bar an individual from enlistment, but if they are clean, there is sufficient ambiguity in regulations to allow them through. And even criminal records aren’t always a bar. Another strange feature of the military’s enlistment process is that it relies on recruits to voluntarily reveal their past records, rather than actively investigating them. If the recruit is upfront enough they will go through a “suitability review” which includes a police record check. If that record contains frequent offenses for a number of misdemeanors, the recruit will require a “moral waiver” in order to serve.51 The FBI fingered this as a serious problem which had allowed gang members to fly through recruitment. “Gang members have been known to enlist in the military by failing to report past criminal convictions or by using fraudulent documents,” said the report.52 And once they are in, a whole new complex of problems appears. The FBI lamented the impossibility of gauging the extent of the gang members in service because “military authorities may not recognize gang affiliation or may be inclined not to report such incidences” (my emphasis). It’s an incredible suggestion: the federal government’s investigative branch cannot gauge the problem of criminal gangs in the country’s fighting forces because the military refuses to report gang activity. This dereliction of duty could, the report said, “ultimately jeopardize the safety of other military members,” as it did so tragically in the case of Johnson—and he was far from being the only one.

      The unit of the military assigned to investigate criminal activity in the service, the CID, was an integral part of the cover-up, denying the existence of the problem from start to finish. “We recently conducted an Army-wide study, and we don’t see a significant trend in this kind of activity, especially when you compare this with a million-man army,” said its report into gang activity in the military, published at the same time as the FBI report.53 CID’s own report found that gang-related investigations went up from four to sixteen between 2003 and 2006, while incidents went up from eight to forty-four in the same period, in keeping with the enlargement of the force. But FBI gang investigator Jennifer Simon told Stars and Stripes that “it’s no secret that gang members are prevalent in the armed forces, including internationally.”54 She said gang members had been documented on or near US military bases in Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, and Iraq. The discrepancy in the reporting of the problem caused huge tensions between the FBI and the military’s investigative units, who seemed piqued that the federal authorities took their job so seriously. They were shocked that the FBI was failing to understand the manpower pressures the military was under. The resulting internecine war was bitter. On the back of the worrying FBI report, the military said the bureau was “overstating the problem, mixing historical and more recent events, and using unsupported hearsay type comments and statements from various undocumented experts.”55 In the aftermath a joint memorandum from the military investigative units was sent to the FBI “contesting parts of the assessment, asking for its withdrawal, and offering increased cooperation and coordination to obtain a more accurate estimate of the gang problem in the military.” The FBI said no, and the military published its own report in riposte.

      A military spokesman later asked about the problem entered the realm of fantasy: “In nearly every one of the cases that we looked into, it is a young man or woman who thought that the symbol looked cool,” he said. “We have found some people even get gang tattoos not really knowing what they are, or at least that they have not had any gang affiliation in the past.” It’s a serious strain to believe that the significance of florid gang tattoos would be unknown to their owners: usually an indelible mark on the skin demands some research. But these dopey soldiers had company within the military in the form of recruiters, who seemed to know even less about what gang tattoos look like. It wasn’t entirely their own fault: as the military investigators demonstrated so impeccably, commanders didn’t see it as an issue and preferred to turn a blind eye in the face of pressure to maintain recruitment levels. On top of that, as the FBI pointed out, many “military recruiters are not properly trained to recognize gang affiliation and unknowingly recruit gang members, particularly if the applicant has no criminal record or visible tattoos.”56

      Hunter Glass, the gang investigator, adds: “If we weren’t in the middle of fighting a war, yes, I think the military would have a lot more control over this issue, but with a war going on, I think it’s very difficult to do.” The military was also experiencing an intense financial squeeze from the Bush administration, which was impacting its ability to control the problem. “Forming multi-agency task forces and joint community groups is an effective way to combat the problem,” says the FBI report. “However, decreases in funding and staffing to many task forces have created new challenges for civilian communities.”57 Recruiter conduct deteriorated at the same time. In a single year, from 2004 to 2005, the number of military recruiter violations increased by 50 percent as recruiters tried increasingly aggressive tactics and unscrupulously doctored documents. In the same period, the local CBS station in Denver, KCNC, did an important investigation into recruiter conduct when faced with a prospective soldier who claimed to be a gang member. The station’s reporter asked his interlocutor in the recruitment center: “Does it matter that I was in a gang or anything?” to which the recruiter responded, “You may have had some gang activity in your past and everything . . . OK . . . but that in itself does not disqualify.”58 There were also numerous reports of recruiters trying to cover up the previous affiliations of gang-members-turned-soldiers. In 2005 a Latin Kings gang member was allegedly recruited into the army at a Brooklyn, New York, courthouse, while awaiting trial for assaulting a police officer. He was reportedly told to conceal his gang affiliation. The effects were perhaps predictable. Jennifer Simon, the FBI gang detective, added: “It’s often in the military’s best interest to keep these incidents quiet, given low recruitment numbers and recent negative publicity. The relaxation of recruiting standards, recruiter misconduct and the military’s lack of enforcement have compounded the problem and allowed gang member presence in the military to proliferate.”59

      In this period, according to reports from soldiers and investigators, Baghdad had become a veritable canvas on which gang members sprayed their markings after the invasion. The Gangster Disciples, as well other heavyweights like Latin Kings and Vice Lords—groups fostered in the badlands of Chicago—had left their mark on armored vehicles, walls, barricades, and bathrooms. An Army Reserve sergeant, Jeffrey Stoleson, seeing this all around him and growing increasingly angry about it, decided to go out on a limb in an effort to alert the American public. Stoleson was deployed twice—first in Kuwait and Iraq in 2005–6, and then later again in Iraq—but he stayed away from a face-to-face confrontation with the gangs. “We all carried loaded weapons at all times and with these hot heads you never know who they may be trying to prove something to,” he tells me. He adds that there were two types of gang members: some genuinely wanted to escape from the ’hood and the lifestyle and without the military had no chance. But the majority were training themselves for the war back at home. He says they were “using the methods taught in combat to take home and use against others who have no chance in hell of defending themselves.” They weren’t trying to hide it either, many posting up graffiti all over Iraq. “It was all over the place, the graffiti was blatant; they were not trying to hide the colors or gang affiliations or even tattoos. Most of the bases had gang graffiti on them from Kuwait to the border with Turkey. It was on Baghdad International Airport, the blast walls. It was a Who’s Who of American street gangs, everything was there.” Stoleson tried hard to get pictures of the graffiti, but when his senior officer realized he was intent on publicizing the problem “he made sure I was busy and not able to get them.” Before he got to the airport to take the snaps they painted over the graffiti. “I mean it was covered with graffiti close to one mile long, twenty feet high.” “Some was ‘Hi Mom’ and derogatory terms for other soldiers but most of it was gangs,” he added. Stoleson was also hearing from his colleagues that graffiti was being sprayed on the streets of Baghdad by US troops from different bases to denote their domains of influence. “It was like their turf, you didn’t go there after certain times of the day,” he says. “Many feared for their safety.” Some troops would even wear their gang colors in their military fatigues by coloring the inside pocket of their fatigues red or blue and when they passed each other they would pull them out to show allegiance.

      As an upstanding soldier, Stoleson thought that if he

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