America's Military Today: The Challenge of Militarism, by Tod Ensign with Christian C. Appy, Martin Binkin, Dan Fahey, Linda Birde Francke, George and Meredith Friedman, Charles Sheehan-Miles, and Servicemembers Legal Defense Network. The New Press, 430 pages, hardcover, $27.95.

The conditions of daily life in the military are largely invisible to a majority of U.S. citizens who've never served a day in the armed forces. This is something of a paradox, given the centrality of military imagery in U.S. cultural life, from the ubiquity of honor guards in public parades and ceremonies to the virtual saturation of televised sporting events with glitzy recruitment ads, not to mention the steady flow of films dramatizing the nation’s wars and military exploits, past or present, fact or fiction.

Certainly, there is a general level of public acceptance, largely unexamined, of the need for uniformed forces within a highly disciplined and regimented institution to carry out the mission of U.S. defense, and, when necessary, to fight the nation's enemies. But the actual details of military life experienced by the average service person under everyday circumstances – not just in the context of warfare – are seldom a topic of probing journalistic interest or popular concern.

America’s Military Today, written by Tod Ensign and several collaborators, provides an antidote to such neglect. In truth, for a general readership, no better primer on this subject exists in print today. But the book will serve most valuably perhaps as a resource and reference for the activist community in which Tod Ensign (and Citizen Soldier, the organization he heads) has played a leading role for decades as watchdog of United States militarism, and advocate for the human rights of GIs and veterans.

Through such activist networks, this work will ideally find its way into the hands of people currently presented with the option of military “employment.” This population would reap immediate benefits from a read of at least half the book’s chapters, in particular those describing in generally objective language the contemporary recruitment scene, which provide a fascinating account of what basic training looks like in today's all volunteer force, as compared with the draft-based military of the Vietnam era.

From the outside, today's military actually looks like a job with a competitive pay scale (at least if you're single) and living conditions that are closer to a college dorm than a barracks. But, in reading Ensign's book, a potential recruit might also learn – ideally before, not after, signing an enlistment contract – that a recruiter (especially an unscrupulous one) can promise a chosen area of training, but not deliver on it for reasons of “military necessity,” a Catch-22 that trumps any individual claim or expectation, and from which there is no redress.

Separate chapters treating the special, often disadvantaged, experiences of minorities, women, and gays and lesbians, are warning signs for those within these cohorts who buy the hype about discriminatory cultures and practices being absent in today's military, or whose fantasies about military life are fixated on the outward bound idyll portrayed in those sexy TV recruiting spots. In fact, for anyone joining the military today, in the context of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the experience is a bit like checking into the Roach Motel. It's easy to get in, but harder and harder to get out (assuming you keep your skin intact).

Stop Loss, a policy much employed of late by the Defense Department, can legally extend a service person's obligation beyond the terms of his or her enlistment contract. And, given how the reserve component of a service person's commitment is interpreted these days, even those returned to civilian life remain vulnerable to recall, a little known, but all the more draconian element of the so-called back-door-draft.

Many enlistees today must be prepared to serve, and possibly fight, in a war zone. From the letters of such fighters currently in Iraq, Ensign has fashioned a chapter that painfully demonstrates how, like their Vietnam counterparts, many of today's U.S. combatants haven't a clue as to what they're supposed to accomplish in Iraq, other than to wreak havoc and destruction.

A chapter on the Gulf War Syndrome reveals a second disturbing parallel between Vietnam and Iraq, mapping a new episode in the impact of a toxic battleground on the long-term health of vast numbers of returning veterans. In Vietnam, it was Agent Orange. Now, it is feared that tens of thousands of Gulf War vets, and no doubt many more Iraq War veterans to come, have, or will have, ingested doses of damaging radiation from shells fabricated with depleted uranium (DU), whose exploded particles are blown helter-skelter about the war zone. It need hardly be said that the numbers of Iraqis victimized from such exposures could, in the years ahead, reach epidemic proportions.

America's Military Today may find its primary use as an anti-recruitment handbook, but the book's other half takes the reader well beyond a nuts and bolts account of the conditions and problems faced by contemporary GIs and into areas of military structure and policy that threaten immediate pan-societal consequences.

In his essay, “Filling the Ranks,” Ensign examines the potential for a service-wide “personnel crunch” resulting from spreading U.S. troops too thin in Iraq, and throughout the world, that could replace today’s volunteer military with a new draft. Ensign's discussion is comprehensive, but he recognizes that any prediction on the outcome of this debate is still premature.

One thing is for certain: Should a new draft come, it will take women as well as men, and might even go beyond the military to universal service for all individuals of draft age, with few of the exemptions that formerly made military service the disproportional burden of minority and white working class males.

In “Policing America,” Ensign, a lawyer, writes knowledgeably on a trend advanced by the PATRIOT Act in our post-9/11 national security environment toward weakening the time honored doctrine of posse comitatus, which limits the military's role in domestic law enforcement. At issue here, ever in the minds of generations of U.S. lawmakers from the framers onward, has been the commitment through such traditional safeguards to prevent the military from ever posing a challenge to the institutions of civilian control.

What may be the book’s most important essay, “Military Justice,” is co-written by Ensign and Louis Font, an experienced courts-martial trial attorney. The two advocates take aim at the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), exposing the pattern of systematic violations of civil and human rights that pervade the military justice system by virtue of the arbitrary, often unassailable, powers of judicial authority invested at every level of command. If a reader who has not served in the armed forces reads only this chapter, he or she will grasp the most singular distinction between the rights of civilians and the rights of those in service: When you join the military, your ass belongs to Uncle Sam, and you can basically kiss due process goodbye.

Michael Uhl is a writer living in Maine.