Hostile Mission for Recruiters

Prison Scandal Discourages Enlistment in 372nd MP Unit

KEYSER, W.Va. -- In an oil-stained gas station parking lot, Army recruiter Justin Broadwater drinks iced tea and waits, paperwork ready, for an 18-year-old he says is "hard-core ready to go."

Sgt. Broadwater hopes so, anyway. His wedding plans give him only two weeks to meet his monthly quota of three new soldiers. One is already in hand. He's hoping that this will be No. 2.

His cell phone rings. "Yeah, buddy, I'm down here. . . . Yeah? Ah. That's bad," then a quick sign off and a sigh. The candidate's mother is sick. He'll reschedule soon; he's not sure when.

Broadwater's smile slips, rights itself. "It's a good sign, calling like that," he says. "Most of them, if they don't want to join, they'll just no-show you."

A military recruiter's job is rarely easy, but few have it harder than Broadwater, who's drawn what might be the toughest task in the stateside military: trying to fill openings in the notorious 372nd Military Police Company, in Cresaptown, Md., seven members of which are charged with abusing Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. Across a swath of Appalachian Maryland and West Virginia, Broadwater works 12-hour days, hunting for volunteers on increasingly hostile terrain.

The Army says it is recruiting enough soldiers nationwide, but here, in the epicenter of the scandal, it's falling short. Last year, Broadwater, 24, signed up more reservists for the 372nd and other units than anyone else in his battalion. This year, he struggles to find one in a month.

"Tough or easy, it's what you make it," Broadwater says of his job. For him, "it's a privilege."

Broadwater and three other Army recruiters work in LaVale, Md., in a strip mall office next to a bridal shop. When the phone rings, they all lunge for it. Each must find one to four new soldiers a month, and it takes nearly every waking moment to do it.

To reach his goal, Broadwater drives nearly 5,000 miles and makes 2,000 phone calls a month, getting, if he's lucky, one appointment for every 65 calls. He has signed kids up at football practices and on basketball courts, in cars and in one-room houses crowded with extended family. He chauffeurs the recruits to Pittsburgh for their physicals, coaches them for their aptitude tests and calls them every few days to ward off cold feet. Despite all that, he's missed his monthly target several times recently, including a couple of months when he went without a single recruit.

By the end of May, the battalion was more than 500 soldiers short of its year-to-date goal of 1,574. Last fall, LaVale was the most successful station among 34 in the battalion, which covers the Maryland and West Virginia panhandles and western Pennsylvania. But by spring, 11 recruits had backed out of their commitments, a rate "at least double" the rate last fall, said Sgt. 1st Class John Summerfield, the LaVale station commander. Iraq, he says, "is a big part of it."

Poor and patriotic regions like this one are the lifeblood of America's volunteer military. Kids join as soon as they leave high school, for the college money, the job training, the opportunities so scarce at home. They join because they're proud of their country and they want to help. But during the past three years, they've been seeing more combat and less college. Every reserve unit in this area has been called to the Middle East at least once. Two active duty soldiers died, one with young kids, the other a kid himself. Then came Abu Ghraib and the photos that disgusted the world. Now, pride comes mixed with anger and growing doubts about the war.

"It's the parents holding me back," Broadwater says. When he calls, they hang up the phone, refuse to put their children on the line, tell him off. They try to talk their sons and daughters out of joining, and, more often now, they succeed.

Broadwater pushes the numbers hard: Serve one weekend a month for six years and earn thousands in college money, bonuses and pay. He tells the mothers, "If the Lord's going to take you, he'll take you sitting right there in your chair." They remind him that an Iraqi bomb took Pvt. Brandon L. Davis, 20, this spring. The parts of his body that could be identified were buried near his home in Cumberland, Md., and the rest, weeks later, in Arlington. It was a mortar attack that took Sgt. George A. Mitchell of Antioch, W.Va., a soldier's soldier who used to take his toddlers to church on Sundays so his wife could get some sleep.

This is what Laura Anderson thinks about when her daughter Cecelia Haslicker -- blonde and athletic, bubbly and accident-prone -- says she wants to be an Army truck driver. "Are you sure this is what you want to do? Are you sure?'" the Winchester, Va., mother asks. Anderson's 21-year-old son just came home from Iraq, his back injured from dodging an ambush. "Does anyone listen to their parents?" she wonders.