I Want You! (Before you graduate highschool...)
EL MONTE, Calif. - Flora Ortiz slides into a seat in the darkened auditorium. It's the last day of school, and the choir is practicing solos. Onstage, a girl with long dark hair hurries through Scarlatti's Le Violette.Flora sits chin in hand, pink flip-flops twitching silently in time to the music. She sang in the choir all four years, wore the prescribed evening gown in the group photo, trilled the same high notes . But most days this spring, her school ID hung from a U.S. Navy lanyard around her neck, a quiet declaration of her independence.
Or was it a sign of indecision?
One day short of graduation, Flora is a walking conflict zone: a girl with pink plastic butterflies in her hair who's contemplating boot camp, who cries at antiwar protests yet dreams of wearing a uniform.
"I just want to do something different," she says. "Something exciting."
At El Monte High School in a working class, mainly Hispanic suburb of Los Angeles, the debate over military recruitment in schools hijacked Flora's senior year. Recruiters wooed her and antiwar activists dissuaded her. She chose the military, changed her mind, changed it back.
READ: The tug of war on campus
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