Peace Corps Option for Military Recruits Sparks Concerns

Vasquez emphasized that recruits have no guarantee that they will be accepted into the Peace Corps. Once they complete their active duty and Reserve or National Guard service, they can apply to the Corps. But they will not receive any preferential treatment, and the Peace Corps is not changing its admission standards, he said.

"Ultimately, the impact to Peace Corps in terms of how we recruit, who we accept into service, remains very much intact and consistent with what we've done for 40-plus years," the Peace Corps director said. "I am an individual who embraces a very important facet of Peace Corps, and that is the Peace Corps' independence as an agency within the executive branch."

Wofford, who worked in the White House with Sargent Shriver, the Kennedy brother-in-law who became the Peace Corps' first director, said the Corps historically has shown "passionate determination" to maintain that independence. At the outset in 1961, Shriver appealed to Kennedy to keep the Peace Corps from being placed under the Agency for International Development. Later, the Corps fought to uphold rules barring intelligence officers from joining the Peace Corps and prohibiting former Peace Corps volunteers from working for U.S. intelligence agencies.

Several current Peace Corps volunteers said they opposed the military recruitment option but were reluctant to speak out publicly, because the Peace Corps forbids volunteers from talking to the media without permission.

"We are already accused on a daily basis of being CIA agents so I don't see how this [link to the U.S. military] could help," a volunteer in Burkina Faso said by e-mail.

"It is hard enough trying to integrate yourself into a completely different culture, convincing people that . . . Americans are not these gun-toting sex maniacs . . . without having a connection to the U.S. military," another volunteer in Africa wrote.

Former volunteers expressed a variety of reservations. Pat Reilly, a former chairwoman of the National Peace Corps Association who served in Liberia from 1972 to 1975 and spent several years as a full-time Peace Corps recruiter, said she worries about the motivation of people who enter the Peace Corps to fulfill a military service obligation.

"The magic that makes the Peace Corps work is motivation, and when you tinker with that, then it won't work for the applicant and it won't work for the people it serves," she said.

John Coyne, who served in Ethiopia during the 1960s and was a regional director in the Corps' New York office from 1996 to 2001, said numerous military veterans have joined the Peace Corps and been superb volunteers. But he said there has always been a "clear separation" between the two kinds of service. The new recruitment program "eats away at the purity of the Peace Corps as designed by Kennedy, which is that it was not going to be military," he said.

So far, the number of enlistees is tiny compared with the 1.4 million men and women serving in the military, but large compared with the Peace Corps, which receives about 12,000 applications to fill about 4,000 openings each year.

In 2004 and the first five months of this year, 4,301 people entered the armed services under the National Call to Service program. Of those, 2,935 enlisted in the Navy, 614 in the Air Force, 444 in the Army and 308 in the Marines. Pentagon and Peace Corps officials said they have no way of knowing how many will apply to the Peace Corps when they become eligible to do so in 2007 or 2008.

In his 2002 State of the Union address, Bush called for doubling the size of the Peace Corps, from 7,000 to 14,000 volunteers, within five years. That same year, the administration named a career Navy officer with 12 years of experience in military recruiting to head the Peace Corps' recruitment and selection office.

Since then, however, the Corps has grown by little more than 10 percent. Barbara Daly, a spokeswoman for the Corps, said that tight budgets -- rather than a shortage of qualified candidates -- were the reason.

"The president has been very supportive of the Peace Corps and has requested budget increases each fiscal year that would allow for this" gradual doubling, she said. "Congress has not approved our budget at the levels requested by the president."