Unknown vandals scrawled anti-war graffiti on the sidewalk outside a South Campus military recruiting station twice last week, according to the station’s commander the third and fourth times vandals have struck the post since its windows were smashed last month.
Early yesterday morning, a pair of Mayor Menino’s ‘Graffiti Busters’ chemically blasted two spray-painted anti-war slogans from the sidewalk outside the Marine Corps and Army recruiting post at 25 Buswell St.
The messages, ‘F- War’ and ‘No War,’ were painted after hours last Tuesday and Thursday respectively, said Staff Sgt. John C. Johnson Jr., the Army station commander.
According to Johnson, someone also recently scrawled ‘No War’ on the window of the Marine Corps’ post, and both stations had their windows shattered by bricks last month. That assault was also after closing, Johnson said.
‘We put the bricks in the window with a note saying ‘Here is your brick come and get it,’ he said. ‘But no one ever did.
‘It’s different for someone to be playing around and bump into a window, but we got a brick through each window,’ he said.
Johnson said he did not know why people would vandalize the building so severely.
‘You never know what motivates people,’ he said. ‘You can mad at the fact that you have family members affected [by the war],’ but ‘people don’t understand that what we do, we do for the people. We don’t get the respect we deserve.’
Johnson said he believed the vandals were probably students, given the post’s location in the heart of South Campus, but he said the station has not had too much trouble since it opened in August.
And if the numbers are any indication, which Johnson said have remained steady, the harassment has not prevented potential recruits from coming into the office. He said it has not affected his staff, either.
‘You go about your job when you’re a soldier,’ he said.
Despite the rash of vandalism at the recruiting station since the beginning of the war, Boston University Police Sgt. Ronald Ford said the BUPD has not seen a significant increase in graffiti elsewhere on campus over the last week.
Ford cited ‘a few incidents,’ including one where an individual was writing anti-war slogans in chalk on a campus sidewalk. The student stopped and moved on when asked by a BUPD officer, Ford said.
He said there had been some spray painting on campus too, and he reminded students that marking anybody’s property, including a city-owned sidewalk in any way, including with chalk and crayons, is still vandalism and a misdemeanor.
‘You can’t mark anything up you can’t deface anybody’s property,’ Ford said. ‘Personally, I don’t understand why anybody would want to spray paint anything I guess they don’t think.’
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