COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Military Recruiting: Youth of Color
Sergeant Guzman's War
JENNIFER MASCIA, New York Times
October 30, 2005
THE lanky 15-year-old with the velvety skin flashed a deceptive grinat the man in combat fatigues standing near the curb. "You ain't no
good!" she shouted at the soldier. "You stealing these young people!"
Staff Sgt. Richard Guzman looked up from the crowd of black and
Hispanic students clustered near the entrance to the Manhattan Center
for Science and Mathematics, a high school in East Harlem. Sidling
over to the girl, he held out his hand. "Hey," he said, his voice a
sleepy mix of fine Long Island sand and honey.
"It's nothing against you," she replied without extending a
hand. "It's people like you." Then she scurried across East 116th
Street, another battle lost in the war for New York's youth. But no
matter. As far as Sergeant Guzman was concerned, the neighborhood
remained ripe with possibilities. "Everybody's thought about the
military," he said later as his dark eyes scanned the neighborhood's
pedestrian-clogged streets. "I mean, look at all the people here."
Sergeant Guzman, 26, is station commander of the Army recruiting unit
in the Armed Forces Career Center, known informally as the Harlem
Knights recruiting center, on 125th Street and Lenox Avenue. A
product of a hardscrabble upbringing in Richmond Hill, Queens, he
joined the Army after high school largely to straighten himself out.
Today, he presides over a warren of rooms across the street from Bill
Clinton's office that is one of the more powerful of the engines that
keep an increasingly unpopular war up and running.
With a monthly average of five recruits, the Harlem Knights center,
which serves both Harlem and East Harlem, is ranked in the top three
in its battalion, which includes much of the New York metropolitan
region. Since his arrival 10 months ago, Sergeant Guzman has signed
up 12 people.
This is not an easy time to be a military recruiter. Last week,
fatalities from the war reached 2,000, and last month a New York
Times/CBS News poll showed that the number of Americans who thought
that the United States had made the right decision in taking military
action against Iraq had fallen to 44 percent.
Much has been said about the efficacy of plying poor minority
neighborhoods for recruits. But several factors make Sergeant
Guzman's job easier.
Unlike the Marines, Army infantry and Special Forces, which send
volunteers straight from boot camp to the front lines, the Harlem
Knights Army unit signs potential recruits up for more than 200
noncombat jobs, everything from laundry and textile specialist to
flute player to dental specialist. Sergeant Guzman cannot guarantee
that his recruits will not go to Iraq; in fact, he acknowledges,
about half of them will probably end up there, though not necessarily
on the front lines. But the higher a recruit scores on the basic
military aptitude test, the more noncombat specialties are
available. "Pulling a trigger is not technically complicated," he
said.
Sergeant Guzman also attributes the Army's relative success among the
youth of Harlem and East Harlem to the problems that continue to
plague those neighborhoods, notably poor schools and dismal job
prospects. He has scoped out prospective recruits living in
apartments with three people to a room and no bed.
"I can recruit two to three people a month," Sergeant Guzman
said, "no matter if it's World War III or a recession."
Smooth Talker
Sergeant Guzman's skills of persuasion are not limited to sidewalk
encounters. The other day, with the soothing, gravelly tones of a
late-night disc jockey, he was on the phone, trying to lure an unsure
21-year-old girl into military service. "I'm gonna keep it real with
you, and you gonna keep it real with me," he murmured into the
receiver. "I'm setting you up for success. When you actually go to
boot camp, you're gonna be well trained."
Then he tried another tack: "Imagine your wedding. I can see you in
your uniform." He laughed a throaty laugh, his lips parted to reveal
a full white smile. "An Army dress? Yeah, a camouflaged wedding
dress."
Later, as the rhymes of Jay-Z poured out of a stereo perched on a
bookshelf, Sergeant Guzman tapped away on his laptop, courting the 18-
to-24 demographic via e-mail.
Near the entrance to the office, under a yellow banner that reads "An
Army of One," a bulletin board presented photos of 50 young men and
women, mostly black and Hispanic, with whom his approach had
succeeded. Each photo listed the recruit's name, age, high school or
college from which he or she had been recruited, and his or her
enlistment bonus. Nearby was a postcard addressed to Sergeant Guzman
from a recruit at boot camp. "Greetings from Henderson, Nevada!" it
read. "Thank you for helping me enlist in the U.S. Army!"
Though so far only a few of Sergeant Guzman's recruits have been sent
to Iraq, each time he receives a letter from the parents of a
deployed soldier, he ships "his" recruit a care package that contains
copies of Jet magazine and Sports Illustrated and homemade tapes of
Hot 97 radio broadcasts.
Sergeant Guzman will not be going to Iraq himself. "Recruitment is
very safe as far as deployment is concerned," he said. Nevertheless,
he admits: "Half of me wants to go. The money is ridiculous."
While a dental assistant, for example, can net $1,400 a month, a
young soldier in combat can net $2,000 to $2,500 a month, tax free.
With enlistment bonuses and tuition assistance topping out at
$40,000, it pays for Harlem recruits to be An Army of One.
It pays for Sergeant Guzman, too. Of $2,496 he receives as a monthly
housing allowance, he pays $2,000 to live in a three-bedroom
apartment in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and pockets the difference. He
travels to work in a government-provided 2005 Dodge Stratus. With his
$2,600 monthly income, plus the $425 monthly "special duty pay" that
recruiters receive, he can indulge in his passion for diamond stud
earrings, vintage X-Men comic books and sports jerseys that can cost
up to $400 apiece.
On the advice of a colonel friend, Sergeant Guzman has begun to
invest in the stock market; his portfolio includes G.E., Home Depot
and Janus Funds. "I try to stay diversified," he explained.
Just recently, he bought his first Rolex. It cost $8,000. "Everything
I've ever wanted in life, the Army's provided for me," he said,
sipping a Capri Sun from its silver pouch.
In Search of a Calling
It was a different story for Sergeant Guzman 22 years ago, when his
father was gunned down on a street in Richmond Hill "for being at the
wrong place at the wrong time." The son, who was 4, suspects there is
more to the story, but his mother, Carmen Guzman, a retired
cosmetologist, would just say, "Your daddy's in a better place."
An only child, Richard Guzman was 15 and, as he put it, "hanging out
with the wrong crowd" when a fellow he knew pointed a gun at his face
and demanded his Nikes, a trendy pair of Bo Jacksons. "I kind of had
lowlife friends," he admitted.
That year, 1994, two friends robbed a bodega and killed the
cashier. "I was so close to being involved," Sergeant Guzman
said. "I'm very lucky to be alive."
A couple of years later, with family and friends in the service and
certain that "school really wasn't my thing," he enrolled in the
Army's delayed-entry program, in which he participated in monthly
drills and some basic training. After he scored well on the Armed
Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, the basic aptitude test for
entrance to the military, a recruiter came calling.
What Sergeant Guzman calls the laid-back job choices appealed to him,
and he decided to become an administration clerk. After nine weeks in
boot camp and postings in Fort Bragg, N.C., Seattle and Alaska, he
became attracted to the idea of career recruiting, and spent four
years working at a recruiting station in Astoria, Queens, before
moving to Harlem.
He feels that he has found his perfect match. "I don't think you'll
ever find a recruiter like myself," he said. "I love this business."
With its typical 8-a.m.-to-9-p.m. schedule, recruiting leaves him
little time for a social life (although he keeps an updated black
book, just in case). And around the office, he hears tales of
recruiters in other jurisdictions who suffer nervous breakdowns while
trying to reach their quotas. "That's where the improprieties come
in," he said. "That's where you fake a diploma."
Though he won't be going to Iraq, he maintains that the Iraqi war was
unavoidable. "I don't see how we couldn't have gone," he said. "The
World Trade Center was attacked. The Pentagon was attacked. We had to
do something."
And weapons of mass destruction?
"I'm thinking there are some there that we haven't found in the
underground caves or whatever," he said. "I believe that something is
there, maybe Russian artillery. We have Hussein in custody, we killed
his sons. We need him to confess or something."
An Escape Route Out
Unlike Sergeant Guzman, Alanna Chataigne does not support the war and
thinks the American troops should come home immediately.
"It's just causing more terrorist attacks, here and in London, us
being over there," said Alanna, a 17-year-old of Haitian descent who
wears clear-rimmed glasses and has braids pulled back into a
ponytail. Still, Alanna, a senior enrolled in the R.O.T.C. program at
the High School of Graphic Communication Arts in Midtown,
participates in the Army's delayed-entry program, just as Sergeant
Guzman did, and she is counting the days until she turns 18 so she
can fly off to boot camp and leave Harlem behind. "I have no life,"
she explained. "With the knowledge I learn from the Army, I want to
go around the world."
Precocious and poised, Alanna acts the way a teenager thinks that an
adult should act. During one of her frequent visits to the Harlem
recruiting station, she rattled off the chronology of the founding of
the American armed forces - "I was born exactly 212 years after the
Marine Corps," she announced proudly - before waxing rhapsodic, in
equal measure, about Mozart and the reggaeton artist Daddy Yankee.
Showing up several times a week in her black and gold "Army of One" T-
shirt, Alanna runs errands for the recruiters and banters with the
officers. "Watch the language!" she scolded Sergeant Guzman one
afternoon when he fired off an expletive. When he complained that his
Snapple was too warm, she jumped up to get ice.
"The Army is in her blood," Sergeant Guzman said of Alanna's passion
for the military, which is shared by a sister at Marine boot camp and
a stepfather in the National Guard. But Sergeant Guzman also thinks
that Alanna turned to the Army to escape a rough family life on West
130th Street - basically, as Sergeant Guzman described it, "that
situation that any person has with a stepparent."
Alanna would agree that the Army offers an appealing escape route for
her. "My mom just wants me to get out of the city," she said. "She
wants me to see something different. She lived here all her life."
A Battle for Hearts and Minds
On a recent afternoon, Sergeant Guzman dropped by City College on
Convent Avenue and 138th Street to obtain its "stop-out" list, a
register of students who have dropped out of college midcareer and
might be likely recruits.
Sergeant Guzman acknowledged that some high schools and colleges were
resistant to his presence, and potential recruits often report back
that their teachers try to dissuade them from military service. He
finds this attitude downright unpatriotic.
"You'd think that given the times and needs of the country now,
schools would be more understanding," he said, seeming perplexed by
guidance counselors who encourage college over the military. "I've
got a mission from the president of the United States. These schools
are not going to tell me what to do."
After a quick chat with a City College receptionist, he emerged with
a thick stack of papers containing the names of thousands of recent
dropouts ripe for recruiting. Holding up the list as a proud father
would his newborn child, he said: "All this is potential recruits.
This gets me excited right here."
Heading back to his car, he elaborated on his approach.
"I don't like taking no for an answer," he said. "I've got a mission
to accomplish each month. And it's not just recruiting. If I say no,
I won't get anywhere in life, man." Placing the list safely in the
trunk next to the boxes of key chains, stickers and yellow water
bottles he gives to potential recruits, he added: "Like in the dating
scene. Sometimes no means yes. She just says it to make you want her
more, you know?"
Yo Soy El Army
Every Harlem recruiter has goals: to make two appointments a day with
prospective recruits, to get four of those recruits interviewed that
week, and to administer an aptitude test to two of them with the hope
of a single passing grade.
Although curious teenagers sometimes make their way to the Harlem
office, most of the recruiting is done in the street, which was why
Sergeant Guzman was out in front of the Manhattan Center for Science
and Mathematics that late summer day. He had set up his folding
table, which is wallpapered with images of soldiers in combat, in a
patch of shade provided by the scaffolding that surrounded the
school. As he laid out pens, blank address cards and stickers that
read "Yo Soy El Army," a small crowd of rowdy teenagers began
peppering him with questions.
"If you go to the Army to play ball, you got to serve four years,
man?"
"How many push-ups can you do?"
"Is it true they can kick you out?"
"You think they're gonna do that draft thing?"
Sergeant Guzman nodded to this one.
"Oh, I am running from that!" said a young man sporting a heavy gold
chain.
"You might not have a choice," Sergeant Guzman replied dryly.
To each teenager he offered earnest eye contact and a spirited
handshake. He opened by asking, "What year are you?" and closed
with, "Do good in school." Some of the young people filled out the
address cards, giving the Army their contact information; when they
did, Sergeant Guzman watched over their shoulders like a hawk. Upon
returning to the office, Sergeant Guzman would file the cards and
call the young people who had filled them out. If a person sounded
hesitant on the phone, Sergeant Guzman would send him or her
information and phone once more in the hope of setting up an
interview.
"Who's a senior?" he called into a crowd of teenagers outside the
Manhattan Center school. Most were curious, but politely declined to
volunteer their status.
"Hello, I like your T-shirt," he said to a girl wearing a camouflage
tank top. Smiling, she moved on.
Sergeant Guzman greeted familiar faces by their first names. In his
opinion, matching names to faces is part of the job. "It's like if
you were buying a car and the sales rep didn't remember your name,"
he said. "You'd think it was funny."
While Sergeant Guzman followed one teenager down the street, a group
of girls commandeered the folding table. "Buenas," one of them said,
handing out T-shirts to her friends as if she were a staff sergeant
herself. Her friends began taking Sergeant Guzman's pens and
attaching his stickers to their stomachs.
On average, Sergeant Guzman estimates, each visit to a high school
nets three or four interviews, two passing aptitude test scores and
one recruit. This session would attract one teenager, who stopped by
the recruiting center a few days later, failed the test, and was sent
home by Sergeant Guzman to study.
The crowd at Manhattan Center High had dispersed into the bright
summer day. But before leaving, Sergeant Guzman plastered "Yo Soy El
Army" stickers onto the scaffolding poles. Just in case.
who was 6 when she traveled through the Southern California desert with her mother to enter America illegally. "Nobody can kick me out of here.
My rights will be defended."
In exchange, Quintero-Espinoza and her comrades assumed
responsibilities and risks, including being sent to fight in Iraq or Afghanistan. Phone,
24, the airman first class who came from Burma in 2002, didn't hesitate to
volunteer to serve a nation willing to help him get ahead in life.
"I would be grateful to meet somebody who offers you what you want" in
return for accepting an obligation, said Phone, who became a citizen
about
two years after enlisting. "That's fair -- totally fair -- I think."
A history of service
That deal, with the promise of naturalization, has appealed to millions
of
immigrants and the military throughout American history. The Army, in
particular, has sought out and relied on immigrant recruits, especially
during wars.
In the 1840s, almost half of all recruits were not U.S. citizens, said
Conrad Crane, director of the Army Military History Institute at the
Army
War College in Carlisle, Penn. "They're just right off the boat,
basically."
During the Civil War, the government promised citizenship to
immigrants,
and recruiters sailed overseas to make the pitch. Noncitizens
constituted
as much as 20 percent of the 1.5 million-man Union Army.
"Some of them were attracted, of course, by glory; some of them by a
chance
for adventure," Crane said. "For a lot of them, citizenship is the
promise."
So many immigrants populated the ranks during World War I that the Army
was
dubbed the "American foreign legion" in Europe. After the war, an Army
unit
of 14 nationalities toured the United States to recruit immigrants,
touting
the promise of naturalization.
Many immigrants fought in World War II, but patriotism more than
citizenship drove enlistment, Crane said. Conscription also helped fill
the
ranks and continued to do so until the all-volunteer military returned
in
the 1970s.
Military resource
Given that history, Bush's executive order fast-tracking citizenship
was no
surprise, Crane said. With the Iraq war in its fourth year and military
recruiters struggling, speedy naturalization can attract volunteers and
is
a fitting reward.
"When times get tough to fill the Army and immigrants are available,
they're a resource," Crane said.
Despite raising enlistment bonuses and offering other new incentives,
the
Army has had a tough time attracting people. It missed its target last
year
by 6,600 recruits. April was its worst month effort since last summer.
The military typically accepts only U.S. citizens or legal residents.
Illegal immigrants have slipped in, in some cases with fake citizenship
or
immigration documents, said Stock, the U.S. military academy professor.
As a result of Bush's order, illegal immigrants serving honorably on
active
duty and meeting other requirements are eligible to apply for
citizenship,
Stock said. Also, a new law gives the military the authority to enlist
at
any time anyone, even an illegal immigrant, whose enlistment is deemed
"vital to the national interest."
"They could form a foreign legion right now," Stock said. "I get calls
all
the time from illegal immigrants who want to join the military."
For the most part, recruiters have not targeted noncitizens, said
Douglas
Smith, spokesman for the Army's recruiting command. Recruiting that
targets
populations of noncitizens likely accounts for at least some of the
noncitizen recruits, he said.
California's Army National Guard recruiters do not systematically seek
noncitizens, Guard officials said. They do point out that soldiers can
get
on the naturalization fast track, said spokeswoman Lt. Toni Gray.
"For us, noncitizens contribute valuable language and cultural
expertise,"
Gray said. "The value of their skills, however, is often surpassed by
their
sincere appreciation and commitment to our nation."
Noncitizens have been military standouts, according to a May 2005 study
by
the Center for Naval Analyses, a federally funded research organization
serving the military. For instance, they are about half as likely as
their
U.S.-born comrades to wash out before completing their enlistment.
The military's need for foreign-language speakers recently spurred the
Army
to relax enlistment requirements, including maximum age and English
proficiency, to attract people with such native skills, reported the
Center
for Naval Analyses.
Opposition
Not everyone is pleased at the prospect of increasing the number of
noncitizens in the military.
Among the critics is Krikorian, head of the group that wants stricter
immigration controls. What concerns him is the potential for the
combination of military needs and political pressure from immigration
advocates to widen the ranks and expand benefits for noncitizens.
"This is one of those feel-good issues, at least for politicians," he
said.
"There's no reason that it wouldn't be tacked on to an immigration
bill, if
one were to come up."
Krikorian hasn't much of an argument, says Rep. Hilda Solis, D-El
Monte,
who favors expanded benefits for noncitizen soldiers. The California
congresswoman said immigrants have proved their value to the military
and
have earned their benefits.
"I think he's barking up the wrong tree," Solis said.
Spc. Cristianne Silva, 29, said enlisting in the California Army
National
Guard helped her complete a journey that began eight years ago, when
she
left her native Brazil and illegally entered America in search of a
better
life.
After cleaning houses and doing other jobs, Silva hired an immigration
lawyer and became a legal resident. She learned that her military
service
could help her become a citizen after she joined the Army in 2003 and
was
sent to Iraq.
"I'm still, actually, kind of shocked that I have accomplished this,"
said
Silva, who was naturalized in April in Sacramento.
"After so long of dreaming, now, finally, I can say: Yes, I am a
citizen."
Times staff writer Steven Harmon contributed to this story. Reach Dogen
Hannah at 925-945-4794 or dhannah@cctimes.com.
This archive consists of a topically organized selection of
articles culled by members of the Counter-Recruitment List Serve from printed
publications and web sites. The archive is not complete. We have chosen
material relevant to the work of