COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Military Recruiting: Recruiting in Rural Areas
Military recruiters find a receptive audience among the men and women of San Joaquin County
Christian Burkin, Record Net
July 29, 2007
Kody Cain is learning to walk all over again.Dressed for exercise, the 19-year-old stands at attention outside the
Army recruiting office in Stockton, on Pershing Avenue near March Lane.
Staff Sgt. Darrell Smith, an Army recruiter, is running Cain through
some basic drill movements. It starts easy, with stationary
movements, then suddenly gets a lot harder.
"Forward march."
The movements are new, and Cain still has to think about what he is
doing. Pretty soon, left becomes right, and instead of swinging his
arms naturally - right arm, left leg, etc. - he is "monster-mashing, "
the military's term for the Frankensteinian plod that results from
moving your arms in unison with your feet. There's a word for it
because millions of recruits before him have done the same.
"It takes me a couple of tries," Cain said.
Cain doesn't need persuading; he's already enlisted in the Army. In
the few months before he ships out to basic training, he's doing his
best to prepare himself.
"I'm a little bit nervous," he said. "More excited than anything."
The decision was years in the making, he said. He had been talking
about joining the military since he was a freshman and finally
decided to do something about it.
Most recruits take a long time with their decisions, said Smith, but
there are exceptions - men and women who walk in, sign up and are
funneled through the process in just weeks.
"One day they wake up and decide 'Today's the day!' " he said.
Cain, who attended Calaveras, West Point Alternative and Franklin
high schools, will be a welder for the Army. Welding and metal work
is a family tradition, he said.
Cain says his father, Stanley Cain, serving time in state prison, is
one of the best welders in the country.
The towering Cain says his reasons for joining stem from personal
interest and altruism.
"I want the experience, and I figure anybody who lives in America has
an obligation to do something for their country," he said.
That sentiment is an echo of the San Joaquin Valley, recruiters say,
where high enlistment numbers can be attributed to military-friendly
families, schools and youth. It's a different story across the
Altamont, they agree.
In San Joaquin County, "It's easier to sit down and talk to young
people and tell them the Army story," said Capt. Eric Petersen,
commander of the Army recruiting company that oversees the county.
Parents, teachers and friends of recruits also are more supportive
than in the Bay Area, where "influencers, " as Petersen calls them,
are often hostile, he said.
Sgt. 1st Class Mark Wilder, commander of the Golden Gate Recruiting
Station in San Francisco, is unabashed about the difference.
"It's easy street compared to here," he said.
In San Joaquin County, military recruiters enjoy almost unfettered
access to schools, Petersen said.
"They're very receptive in San Joaquin County," he said. "They let us
on campus anytime we want to for classroom presentations. "
In the San Francisco Unified School District, recruiters are limited
to just two campus visits a year, a district spokesman said. And in
November, the school board voted to eliminate Junior Reserve
Officers' Training Corps programs at local schools, saying that
military policies were incompatible with the district's values.
From May 2006 to May 2007, Wilder said, roughly 80 people joined the
military from San Francisco, which has a population of about 750,000.
In Stockton, with about 279,000 people, an average of more than 100
people a year have joined the Army alone since the start of the Iraq
war, according to data from the Sacramento Army Recruiting Battalion.
The difference is so stark that the Sacramento Battalion, which
oversees Northern California, splits the stations between the Valley
and the Bay Area for the purpose of handing out annual awards for
recruiting, Wilder said.
This regional difference may partially explain another set of
statistics - the astonishingly high number of the county's sons and
daughters killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In raw numbers, Stockton and Tracy are among the five California
cities hardest hit by the war. Stockton is third, behind Los Angeles
and San Diego. Next is Long Beach, a city of almost a half-million
people, followed by Tracy, with a population of just 80,505,
according to the state Department of Finance.
Local enlistment rates into the traditional front-line forces, the
Army and the Marine Corps, may also help explain this disparity.
The Marine Corps, in particular, is a popular destination for San
Joaquin County youths, said Gunnery Sgt. Egidio Ryan, a recruiter in Stockton.
Ryan acknowledges the toll the war has taken on the region but says
that the numbers of those killed are still miniscule in comparison
with the number who have joined.
Plus, Ryan says, recruits have few illusions about what they're getting into.
"Most people, it's been my experience, when they decide to be
Marines, they understand the risks," Ryan said.
Because of that, and because the military is still a volunteer force,
Ryan said, he never feels guilty about his work.
Despite a pressing need to fill the ranks of a growing force, Ryan
said he can still afford to be selective about whom he recruits. He
turns hopefuls away on a daily basis, he says.
"If I don't think they have the potential to make it through
training, it's part of my job as the station commander to direct them
elsewhere," he said.
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