'Just Don't Quit'

The trainees stared in stunned silence.

Think about this over the weekend, Hauber told the recruits. Make sure this is the job for you. If it is, I'll see you next week.

By the end of the weekend, two of the class's nine women had dropped out. One was Lisa, a 33-year-old Asian American corporate lawyer from Oregon who had dreamed of becoming an FBI agent since she was a teenager. When she arrived at Quantico, however, she quickly felt that she didn't belong.

"Until you get there, it's hard to explain," Lisa said. "It was the demands, the pressure, the lifestyle. It's much more of a military-type organization than I expected. A lot of the agents are police or military. I wasn't used to calling people sir and ma'am. I felt like it was going to be 18 weeks of boot camp."

Even with those feelings of doubt, Lisa stuck with it for a couple of days. After all, it had taken so long to get there. But after the firearms class, she knew she had to leave. It hit her that being an FBI agent also really meant being a cop.

'Just Don't Quit'

"Orders," another ritual, sent a different but equally powerful message about the FBI and the agents who serve in it.

During the first week of class, recruits had been asked to rank preferences for their first assignments among the FBI's 56 field offices. Five weeks later, at Orders, they very publicly learned their fates.

By tradition, recruits had to go to the front of the room and tell their classmates their first choice before receiving the sealed envelope with their assignments. Each one then had to open the envelope, call out where he was going, collect himself and pin his picture on a giant map of the United States.

Elvis was one of the few to get his first choice San Francisco. One woman said she wanted Honolulu and the class laughed. She didn't get it. Jenny asked for Atlanta but received Washington. One trainee muttered under his breath, "Boy, I didn't see that coming," as he pinned his photo on New Haven, Conn. On the map, clusters of pictures were concentrated on each coast, with 18 of the trainees headed to Los Angeles, New York or Washington. But most of the class was scattered across the country, from Anchorage to Kansas City. Every three to five years, they must be ready to pick up their families and move again.

The recruits did not complain. They were becoming part of the FBI culture, ready to serve wherever the bureau sent them. Geoffrey, a former Marine, looked at the FBI instructors, who had lined up in the back of the room to watch the ritual. "I really don't mind wherever I go as long as I can have a job and keep doing work like the people in the back," he said, opening his envelope. "And it's an honor to be here."

Besides reinforcing any lingering doubt about being at the bottom of a rigidly hierarchical system, the assignments also illustrated a cardinal precept of the training -- that agents will be responsible for enforcing a wide range of federal laws.

"Some agents may go to a two-man office in Montana or five-man office in Victorville. Some may go to WFO [Washington field office] or New York. WFO has dozens of counterterrorism squads. But if you are in a two-man office in Montana, the focus won't be on foreign intelligence," said Supervisory Special Agent Michael Esposito Jr., who oversaw class 06-01.