COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Military Recruiting: Recruiting in Rural Areas
Recruits Tell Why They Joined
Evansville Courier & Press
November 29, 2005
SEDALIA, Mo. - Sgt. Jay Key stands in the middle of the car lot, beside a salesman. He isn't looking to buy. This is just one in an unending series of stops to make his face familiar and his mission clear. Key is an Army recruiter, charged with selling the service even as war rages and a death toll mounts, standing shoulder to shoulder with a man who need only trumpet the likes of a clutchless shift and aluminum rims to potential customers.They are brethren. "It's all the same," Key said. "It's all sales."
It's not an easy sell. For the year ending Sept. 30, the Army was 6,627 recruits below its goal - the largest shortfall in 26 years. The Army National Guard and Reserve did even worse.
Yet here in Sedalia, there is no deficit.
The recruitment station here exceeded its annual goal of 58 soldiers by three. The Army's 5th Battalion, which includes 295 recruiting stations in Missouri and 10 other states in America's vast middle, missed its goal for the year - but was still the top-ranked battalion.
"We hear all the bad stories. We hear recruiting is down," said Key. "But we don't see it here."
There is no single explanation for why Key and his colleagues are so successful. But if you follow them as they make their rounds in Missouri's small towns, if you talk with those who sign up, you'll hear certain refrains: They need the money, they seek an escape from dead-end lives in dead-end towns, they hew to a kind of heartland patriotism.
When 24-year-old Key signed up six years ago, many of the young men at his side were poor, like he was. Now, he says, things are different.
"We got everything from beauty pageant queens, car salesmen, unemployed, college grads, children of doctors," he said. "Everybody joins for their own reason."
Take U.S. 50 east from here and hang a left just past Syracuse on Missouri 5. You'll hit the tiny town of Bunceton, and 19-year-old Robert Farris says you'll understand why he left.
The railroad left town decades ago, and dreams went with it. Prosperity elsewhere drew many folks away. Those who stayed - 348 at last count - mostly commute to modest-paying factory jobs in surrounding towns.
So when it came time for seniors to turn their tassels at the local high school last May, Farris and three others in his graduating class of 17 decided to join the military.
"We need to do something with our life," Farris said. "And this is the only thing we got going for us."
He remembers changing in the locker room on Sept. 11, 2001, after hearing the awful news, and he was so angry. Farris' father is a Vietnam veteran and he has an aunt and a cousin who served in Afghanistan. He always was patriotic, but the terrorist attacks increased his ardor.
Deanna Griffith is 34 with big blue eyes and soft features beginning to show markings of age. She thinks the military can turn her life around.
Griffith thought about enlisting out of high school, but a war was on in the Persian Gulf and her Army drill sergeant father wasn't keen on the idea.
Life happened. She married an Army man, had two kids and assumed a series of low-paying jobs - gas station attendant, deli supervisor, Wal-Mart stock person. Somehow, that youthful confidence that told her she surely could serve her country had slipped away.
More than anything else, it's that confidence, that pride, that she hopes the military will help her regain.
There is the money, too.
Griffith's husband was injured and left the service and they found their way to Warrensburg, 50-some miles southeast of Kansas City. She eventually took a $9-an-hour job at Whiteman Air Force Base's commissary; her husband found work at a railyard in North Kansas City, then at a commercial battery company.
Five years ago, the couple declared bankruptcy. Last year, they made less than $24,000. They struggled to make their $322 monthly mortgage payment and to feed their children.
"I look at it as an opportunity for me, for my whole family, to change our whole lives," she said before beginning basic training at Fort Leonard Wood.
It was California, 1998, but the details beyond that are a bit murky. What Tia Bond does remember is exactly how she felt as she watched her brother graduate with his fellow Marines.
"Just watching them - the pride that they had - made me think that's something I might like to do," she said.
She is 20, living a stone's throw from the Army recruitment center in Warrensburg. She and her roommate were renting a movie at Blockbuster one Saturday last spring when a recruiter approached them.
Both decided to enlist.
"I think it'll instill a better sense of pride and self-confidence and that kind of stuff," Bond said.
For joining the reserves, Bond is to receive a $7,000 sign-on bonus and $20,000 in school loan repayment. She said that didn't matter, though.
"They could just pay me minimum wage, whatever, and I'd still go," she said. "It's just like a personal thing that I want to serve my country."
It is a chance to leave, too - a chance she's wanted for a long time.
Pfc. Glenn Stanley leans against a wall at the Military Entrance Process Station in Kansas City, alone, laid-back and calm. Today is the start of his dream. He heads out for basic training, convinced he could save thousands of lives in the Special Forces.
He is patriotic, no doubt - a supporter of the president, offended by those who drive imported cars. But he doesn't deny money has had a role in his decision.
"Finance has been quite a big influence. They really take care of their soldiers," he said. "I see so many people out there with dead-end jobs. They work real hard to make ends meet. I just don't want to do that."
At 17, Stanley has a slight build, very white sneakers and just a bit of hair poking from his chin. He finished high school in Kansas City, Kan., in three years and was too young to enlist without his mother's approval. She cried, but agreed.
Had recruits from Sedalia or Bunceton - or other small towns across the vast swath of middle America that supplies so many of the troops - been brought up elsewhere, under different circumstances, with other opportunities, there's no telling if they'd enlist.
But this is their world. And perhaps most importantly, this is a world that - unlike much of the rest of post-Vietnam America - never disdained the military.
You can see it in the way the 24-year-old recruiter, Jay Key, is received as he goes about his business. He goes to blood drives and graduation parties, shares beers with schoolteachers and chats with mechanics, hangs out at a Masonic lodge and enters pool tournaments - anything to make contact with people who can feed him potential recruits.
"Out here," he said, "it's almost like royalty."
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