The Mission

Staff Sgt. Jason Baxley with recruit Travis Mitchell at the Marine Corps office in Columbia. (Photograph by Chris Hartlove)

"You look so worried," Baxley says. "You got to smile more."

The recruit nods his head and says softly: "I'm straight, man. Don't worry."

But Baxley is worried, at least a little. "Man, I think every time he comes in here he's going to say, 'I changed my mind.' " Baxley says later. "He'll be all right," he adds after a moment, though he sounds as if he's struggling to convince even himself.

By now, it's close to 7 p.m. Time to do some actual recruiting. He picks up the phone to call 17-year-old Bradley Secrest, whose mother, Kathy Jacobs, won't sign the release form.

Jacobs doesn't want her son to join the Marines, though she knows he's eager to serve. "I fear for his safety," says Jacobs, an assistant principal at a local elementary school. "I hear every day about our soldiers being killed, and many of them are Marines."

She's been annoyed by the constant calls her son is getting from recruiters from every branch of the service. If she gets home in time, she deletes the messages before he can listen to them. "I have never considered that he would do anything other than go to college," she explains. There's good reason for that: Bradley Secrest is an outstanding student at Wilde Lake High School and a member of the National Honor Society.

Baxley knows there is going to be a lot of resistance at this house. He leaves a message anyway, asking if Secrest is still interested in signing up.

"Hopefully his mom won't delete it," he says, hanging up.

ZIP. NADA. A BIG FAT ZERO. An entire week has gone by, and Baxley hasn't landed a single recruit. Secrest did get the message. But he also got an acceptance letter to the University of Maryland -- and a full academic scholarship to Villa Julie College near Baltimore. Now there is no way his mother will sign the release form.

The prospect who vowed to enlist on his 18th birthday also called. But when Baxley called back, he had to leave a message with the teen's mother, who was not happy to hear from him. He'll have to track down the kid another time, he decides, when she can't interfere. "I'm going to have to get him at school," he says.

His best hope for now is Manveet Chadha. At 19, he's sick of community college and says he's ready "to do something with my life." All he has to do is pass the Marines entrance exam. But that hasn't been so easy. He's already failed once, and if he fails again he has to wait six months before he is able to retake it. Today, though, the scores are due, and should be in any minute.

Gowl paces in the Columbia recruiting office, impatient for the results. He makes Baxley call the regional headquarters for them once, then again, but they're not in yet. As head of the recruiting station, Gowl is under pressure, too. His station has made its quota only twice in the past six months -- not good. A tally sheet that tracks the progress of all the stations in the area like a baseball box score shows that Gowl's shop is off to a decent start this month, thanks to Stepney, who has already recruited two. But so far he's the only one of Gowl's four recruiters who has enlisted anyone.

Finally, the phone rings. Chadha has passed by a slim margin. Gowl and Baxley exchange smiles of relief. They don't high-five or slap each other on the back. Chadha has passed the test, but he hasn't signed yet. Baxley calls to give him the news. "Congrats," Baxley says. "We ready to do this today?"

Baxley wants to get him processed as soon as possible, before Chadha has second thoughts. But there's no cause for concern. Chadha assures him he'll sign whenever Baxley wants him to.

"That takes a load off my back," Baxley says after he hangs up the phone. "Once you write that first contract of the month, you feel better."

The next day's tally sheet from headquarters notes Baxley's contract, and a handwritten note on the sheet says, "Congrats on #1 today." But just because he's gotten one doesn't mean the pressure is going to let up. The note continues, "Can you get a double nickel?"

AT ANY GIVEN TIME, there are about 3,300 Marine recruiters looking for prospects across the country. Since the creation of the all-volunteer military in 1973, Marine recruiters and their counterparts in the Army, Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard have been charged with finding the young men and women willing to defend the country. They've gotten help from increasingly slick marketing campaigns. The Army spends $180 million a year on its "An Army of One" campaign, airing frequent commercials and even creating a video game that can be downloaded from the Army's Web site. Marine recruiters are backed by $45 million annually in marketing that is orchestrated, in part, by the advertising firm J. Walter Thompson, which also helps Ford craft its message.

Recruiters are the public face of the military, "ambassadors" to the civilian world, explains Master Gunnery Sgt. Scott M. Hansen, the chief instructor of the San Diego recruiting school. They personify military honor and discipline. The best take the mission so seriously they go well beyond merely filling the ranks. They become fixtures in their communities, helping to coach high school teams or helping students with homework, becoming mentors.

During peacetime, many young men and women join the military for the leadership skills and money for college touted in the commercials. But as the death toll rises in Iraq, recruiting has become more complicated, more crucial -- and more controversial.

Rep. Charles Rangel, a Democrat from New York, says relying on a recruited military, especially in wartime, is wrong. He has proposed restoring the draft, an idea that he concedes is a tough sell in an election year. Still, he thinks, the issue is worth raising during a war being fought, he says, largely by poor and working-class people from inner cities and rural areas. They join the service because they have limited prospects, and wind up risking their lives in Iraq or Afghanistan. The sons and daughters of America's middle- and upper-class families are largely absent from the service, he says, creating a fundamental imbalance.

It was easy for politicians to support invading Iraq "when you're fighting a war with other people's children," he says. "It's not shared sacrifice. It's so unfair . . . The people in the military are those who can't afford not to be in the military."

Meanwhile, many of those already in the military are having a hard time getting out. The Pentagon has lengthened the tours of some units serving in Iraq. It recently invoked a provision known as "stop-loss" to prevent many soldiers from leaving active duty at the end of their volunteer service commitments. In June, the Defense Department announced that thousands of veterans who have completed their active-duty requirements will be called back to duty. Critics, most notably Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, have labeled this a "backdoor draft."

There is growing concern in Congress and at the Pentagon that many service members won't reenlist when their time is up. Recruiters for the Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force already have to find more than 180,000 new active-duty enlistees every year -- a number that could spike sharply if reenlistment rates take a nosedive.

Some lawmakers and military leaders are especially worried about the Army Reserve and National Guard, whose ranks have been relied on heavily since September 11, 2001. Members of the Guard and the Reserve make up about 40 percent of the 146,000 troops serving in Iraq.

"This is the first extended-duration war our nation has fought with an all-volunteer force," Lt. Gen. James R. Helmly, the chief of the Army Reserve, said earlier this year. "We must be sensitive to that. And we must apply proactive, preventive measures to prevent a recruiting-retention crisis."

So far, no crisis has emerged, though the Army acknowledged last month that the number of people in the "delayed entry" program -- those who have enlisted but not been shipped to boot camp -- has dwindled to a three-year low. That could make it tougher for the Army to make its numbers next year.

The Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines all met their quotas for the first half of this fiscal year. The Army, which signs up about 100,000 active-duty and reserve enlisted soldiers a year, hasn't missed its annual goal since 1999, when it fell nearly 17,000 soldiers short of its objective of 120,084. The Navy has made its numbers every year since 1998, when it was able to fill only 88 percent of new active-duty enlisted slots.

The Marine Corps, which signs up about 38,000 recruits a year, has had the most success, making its annual quota for almost 10 years. The Corps can sell a mystique -- "Semper Fi," "First In, Last Out," "The Few. The Proud" -- that the other branches don't have. But there is always tremendous pressure to "make mission," especially during wartime.

"The chances of getting shot at so closely after signing on the dotted line are higher probably than any other time since Vietnam," acknowledges Maj. Joe Kloppel, the public affairs officer for the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San Diego. But whatever the political climate, he says, "we can't ever fail."

LIKE ALL MARINE RECRUITERS, Baxley spent seven weeks learning the art of persuasion at the San Diego recruit depot.

Only about half the students who come through the school request recruiting duty, and many of them do so in pursuit of a promotion. The other half are ordered to become recruiters. Baxley fell into the latter category. He was, as he puts it, "voluntold" to do it.

Regardless of how Marines become recruiters, almost all of them voice apprehensions about their new assignment once they arrive in San Diego. When instructor Jackie Freiberg asks a new class of 125 recruiters how many will be nervous speaking before groups of teenagers, almost all of the hands go up. When she asks how many are scared to go into combat, none do.

The reason, she says, is that, while they've been trained for combat, they haven't learned the strategic maneuvers required for approaching a clique of teenagers at the mall, or keeping the attention of a high school class for 45 minutes. One of the recruiting school's favorite techniques for getting Marines comfortable with public speaking is to have them each make a "What Makes Me Angry" speech.

"Beautiful day. Sun's out. I got my rooftop open. Listening to the tunes. Just driving," one sergeant begins his story softly. "Then, all of a sudden, a car cuts me off," he continues, his voice and brow rising in unison.