The Last Resort

Forty and short on prospects, Clayton Beaver traded the lush splendor of Hawaii for boot camp, barracks and the strong possibility of going to war

THE BOY LOOKS UP FROM THE BACK SEAT INTO THE REARVIEW MIRROR, where he meets his father's gaze. "So, how long?" he asks.

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The boy means, How long until you're gone? From the driver's seat of his pickup truck, Clayton Beaver feels a pang. He doesn't want his son dwelling on anything depressing during these last days together. As the truck whizzes along a coastal highway, Beaver talks in the singsong pidgin English that he reserves for his loved ones and Hawaiian friends here on the island of Oahu. Pidgin, he long ago discovered, is especially useful when trying to keep a mood light. "Wat's da matter with you, brah?" Beaver says and laughs. "You know how long -- three days, brah."

"I know that. But when?"

Beaver shrugs, understanding. "Flight probably leaves sometime in the afternoon, brah. Or nighttime, I don't know yet. Monday sometime."

"When do you get there?"

Beaver snickers. "I thought I told you: Tuesday sometimes, brah. Not sure exactly when."

There is a place whose name the boy can't remember right now. It has a Fort in it. Somewhere in South Carolina, which you get to by flying across the ocean to the mainland, and then across the mainland to the other side of the mainland, and so it might as well be on Pluto.

His 40-year-old father is joining the Army. After nine weeks of basic training and then some additional instruction, he'll be assigned to a post as Pfc. Clayton Beaver. Soon after, there's a good chance he'll end up in Iraq or Afghanistan. The boy is excited, sad and a little worried all at the same time.

Beaver, staring off in the distance, scratches his shaven skull. At 5-foot-11 and 243 pounds, with a barrel chest and thick thighs, he looks like a ferocious linebacker. Fifty pounds ago, he was a lithe golfer with dreams. Had the dreams been realized, he wouldn't be having this discussion with his son. "Wat else you want to know, brah?" he asks the teenager.

Fourteen-year-old Kalani Beaver doesn't answer, just turns to stare out a window at the turquoise ocean. His father silently looks in that direction, too, though not at the water but at tents and makeshift shanties plopped right on the beach. The shanties hold the people who have fallen off life's edge. The poor, the lost, the crystal methamphetamine addicts, the hardworking who just haven't been able to make a go of it or who have given up trying -- in some cases, people at one time just like himself, Beaver thinks.

The sight sometimes unnerves him as a harbinger of what could be. Chronic homelessness has been a problem on Oahu for more than a decade, with an estimated 1,500 of the homeless living along these 15 miles or so of beaches on the island's western shore. Beaver grew up in the nearby town of Waianae, an area beset by pockets of deep poverty. Despair for some has presented opportunity for others: Waianae is fertile turf for the area's Army recruiters. About one-fifth of Waianae Coast residents live below the poverty line, and rents and mortgages here are prohibitively high, even for many working-class and middle-income families, who sometimes have no choice but to turn to using a tarp on the beach as shelter.

This past summer, when his latest part-time job ended, Beaver decided he had had enough of life on the edge. A few weeks after his 40th birthday, he enlisted in the Army, which a year ago raised its age limitation for new recruits from 40 to 42 (a recruit cannot have turned 42 at the start of basic training), after having raised it for active-duty soldiers from 35 to 40 a few months earlier. The Army and Beaver have turned to each other out of mutual desperation. Beaver, who had never seriously considered military service as a young man, needed a steady job, income, health benefits. An already strained Army, fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan while maintaining its presence elsewhere in the world, is struggling to make recruiting quotas.