Published in The Post-Star (A1)
2/12/06
Staff Sgt. Paul Beausoleil put on his black beret and stepped out of his U.S. government car into the Aviation Mall parking lot. He smoothed the front of his uniform -- a new "digital camouflage" pattern that recently replaced the more familiar Army uniforms -- and strode purposefully through the glass doors of the mall.
"I try to make eye contact with people first, to see if they're interested in talking to me," he explained. "You can usually tell a lot just from the way they greet you."
In the jargon of recruiters, this type of "face-to-face prospecting" is called "P3" time. Beausoleil, a gregarious guy with a ready smile, prefers this to "P1" -- trying to reach potential recruits by phone. Some days, his calls net him nothing more than an earful of angry words from parents or the beeps of answering machines.
"You've got to have a thick skin in this job," he said. "Parents, know this: I can't take your child off the list until they tell me directly that they want to be off the list."
It's the rare conversations that keep him going.
"As long as I can talk about the Army, I'm OK," he said, then laughed. "Heck, as long as I can talk, I'm OK."
On this weekday afternoon in the post-Christmas lull, there were only a handful of shoppers at the mall. No one wanted to talk, but Beausoleil was still upbeat and smiling as he drove back to his recruiting station in Queensbury about an hour later.
He said it can take a long time for some people to make up their mind about joining, and he's been working on a few of the mall employees.
Some of them have already enlisted, like Ashley Harris, the 19-year-old girl staffing the sunglasses kiosk. Harris leaves for basic training next month and is looking forward to it. She didn't need a recruiter to convince her -- she has wanted to be in the military all her life -- but she enjoys chatting with Beausoleil.
"Sometimes, you're just there to say hello, be a presence," Beausoleil said. "People know who I am; they see my uniform. If they want to talk to me, they will. And you never know when they might want to."
TRUMAN, PART ONE
Eighteen-year-old Truman Allen had no interest in talking to a recruiter when his best friend Joseph Clement dragged him into the Queensbury recruiting station last summer.
Both young men had just graduated from South Glens Falls high school, and Allen wasn't sure what he wanted to do next. He had recently moved out of his parents' house, but life didn't seem so hard, at first.
Allen got a summer job at the Magic Forest amusement park, cleaning toilets and performing a juggling act, but he quit in August when he grew tired of the long hours.
Then he spent more than $100 on kitchen knives that a direct-marketing company promised to help him sell at a profit. The "guaranteed sales appointments" didn't pan out, however, and he lost his investment.
Allen thought his luck had changed when he got a full-time job at a Target warehouse in late October. A month later, he was fired for getting into an accident with some of the loading equipment.
By that point, his brother Vernison, 19, was also without a steady job or place to stay, and they were running out of options.
For six days in late November, the brothers slept in Truman's 1994 Chevy Beretta, a small two-door model with a busted window on the passenger's side. They ended up at the Mountainview Motel in Wilton, where $175 a week gets them a one-room "efficiency apartment" -- what Allen calls "a cave with wood around it." He sleeps on the floor, and his brother sleeps on the couch.
"Right now my life is going nowhere," Allen said recently. "I need to get moving."
Clement, who enlisted in the Reserves last November, gave Allen a ride to the Queensbury recruiting station a few weeks ago. On Allen's third visit, he agreed to take a practice version of the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery to see what type of jobs he might qualify for if he joined.
"I think this could really help him," Clement said.
The recruiting effort
As Clement waited for his friend, he discussed his own decision to enlist. For him, he said, it came down to the money.
"I'm going into the Army to kind of get stuff on track," he said. "Right now, I'm the typical college kid, still living at home. I want to get financial stability, get my own apartment."
In the long run, he hopes to work in law enforcement, and he is counting on the five extra points -- "veterans' preference points" -- that military service will add to his civil service exam score.
He considered joining the Air Force when a recruiter contacted him as a junior in high school, but
he said he got scared when the war in Iraq started. After graduation, he enrolled at Adirondack Community College with a major in criminal justice, and he took out a student loan to pay the $3,000 annual tuition.
Not long into his first semester, he received a recruitment postcard from the Army.
It's a typical introduction to the military: Under the terms of the No Child Left Behind Act that President Bush signed into law two years ago, any high school or college that accepts federal funding is required to provide military recruiters with the names and contact information of all students 17 and older.
"When I was a young recruiter, we didn't have that rule. We had to find people by going through school yearbooks and the telephone book," said Sgt. 1st Class William Harvey, commander of the Queensbury recruiting station. "It helps a lot. That's how we find a lot of these guys."
In 2003, almost 68,000 people enlisted in the Army, according to Pentagon statistics. Half of them were teenagers ages 17 to 19. Combining those statistics with census data, as the National Priorities Project did last year, shows that military recruitment rates tend to mirror poverty rates in most regions.
Harvey, though, said he doesn't see the link.
"Sure, there's poor places here and there, but I can't see where we've benefited from it," he said. "Lake George is certainly not a poverty-stricken area, and we've put a lot of kids in from there."
The Queensbury station covers a 4,200-square-mile territory in Warren, Washington, Essex, Saratoga and Hamilton counties. Each month, the station receives a target number of new recruits -- "a mission" -- from its battalion.
The current mission, which ends Monday, is seven full-time soldiers and two reservists. Each of the five recruiters is expected to sign up two people a month, although the less experienced ones get some slack.
Beausoleil had already enlisted two soldiers by the first week of February, marking the eighth month in a row he has met his mission. The office was about halfway to its recruitment goal by then, with two full-time members and two reservists signed up.
"It's pretty consistent throughout the year," Harvey said. "I don't see that it's getting tougher because of the war."
He noted that his station recruited 24 people during the October to December quarter -- six more than the same period a year earlier.
"When it comes down to it, if a young man or woman wants to join the Army, they're going to join regardless of what's going on in the world," he said.
The reasons for joining, Harvey said, are different for each individual.
"Some people want college money, some people want to travel, some want special training," he said. "When I joined 15 years ago, I think the biggest reason was just wanting to do my part for my country."
TRUMAN, PART TWO
Allen came out of the testing room and perched on the edge of a black chair embroidered in gold with the words "ARMY." He wore a red hoodie, baggy jeans, glasses and a blue ball cap cocked sideways.
"I'm not quite sure what I want to do -- whatever they want me to, I guess," he said. "I'm pretty sure I want to join the Reserves, not the full-time Army, because I don't want to be sent far away from home."
When the score printed out, Sgt. Beausoleil glanced at the paper and let out a whoop of delight.
"Dude! You got an 88! The national average is a 44! You did better than I did on mine!" he exclaimed, grinning.
Allen smiled, but he didn't look surprised.
"It was pretty easy," he said. "I was a smart kid in high school, I just didn't do my homework."
Beausoleil sat down across from Allen and took out a chart and a pencil. He calculated the pay and benefits that Allen would earn in the Reserves, compared to the full-time Army, drawing an exaggerated zero in all of the benefit categories for the Reserves.
"In the Army, you get a free place to stay," he said, pulling out a color brochure of the barracks to show Allen. "Where did you say you're living now? A motel?"
Allen laughed and looked embarrassed.
"It's an efficiency apartment," he said. "You're making it sound bad."
Sgt. 1st Class Allen Ford, who handles the Reserves recruiting, looked the young man in the eye.
"It doesn't matter to us whether you go full or part-time, but we're trying to figure out what's best for you. What would hold you back from going full-time?" Ford asked.
Allen hesitated a moment.
"Um ... the dangers," he said quietly.
'Do a greater good'
Beausoleil said later that he doesn't think most people understand what the Army is.
"They think they'll join, get a weapon, and go to war. It doesn't work like that," he said. "There's no guarantee that you will or you won't go to war. It depends on if your unit is called up, and a lot of them aren't."
In his 10 years of service, Beausoleil has never gone to war. He spent one year touring South Korea as part of a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, and his most recent post was in Hawaii.
He enlisted at age 22 because the Army offered him a job as a paramedic, fulfilling a lifelong dream.
"I was anti-military as a kid. I wouldn't even talk to my recruiter," he said. "When I joined, it was because I walked into the office and got the job I wanted."
Most soldiers become recruiters by assignment, but Beausoleil volunteered for the job in 2004.
"I felt like I could do a greater good for the community by being here," he said. "My goal is to put in 76 people in three years."
He pulled out a letter from a soldier in training and pointed to the last sentence.
"Just from asking around, I know for a fact that you are the most honest recruiter ever," the soldier had written from boot camp.
Beausoleil beamed with satisfaction as he read the words out loud.
"That's the biggest honor I've ever received," he said.
TRUMAN, PART THREE
The next day, recruiters picked Allen up at his apartment and brought him to the military entrance processing station in Albany, where he took the full-fledged aptitude test.
"I'm probably willing to sign up immediately if I pass, because if I don't, I'm probably going to back out and I don't want to," he said. "It would open up a lot of doors for me."
He said he would rather be a professional juggler than a soldier, but he feels trapped right now.
"I say a lot that I'm not afraid to die, I'm just afraid not to live. And right now, I don't feel like I'm really living. I'm stuck," he said. "I haven't really asked anyone for help, because it's humiliating, you know?"
Allen said Beausoleil told him that the chances of getting deployed are small, although that can change at any time.
"I think he's honest," he said.
He paused for a moment, thinking.
"Then again, I thought that about the guy who sold me the knives, too. ... Maybe it's an act, I don't know. But it feels real to me," he said.
Allen's score came back later that day, and it was good -- 90 points out of 99. That meant he could sign up anytime, if he passed a physical and background check. The recruiters brought him home and told him to sleep on it.
"I think he needs some time to think about it. He's confused about whether he should join the Reserves or the full-time, and we don't want to hound him," Harvey said.
Harvey said he's frustrated with the stereotype of recruiters who use high-pressure, deceptive tactics to sign up naive kids and ship them off to war as soon as possible.
"I just wish people would realize this is a job we have to do. We're not here to badger people," he said. "We're doing our job the same way they do theirs."
After hesitating for a few days, Allen went back to the MEPS for his physical last Thursday. He passed.
The same day, he took the Army oath of enlistment and committed to six years. He chose a job as an "information systems operator analyst," building computers and networks, a vacancy recruiters told him is fairly rare.
"I've always liked computers, and they're going to train me, so I'm excited," he said. "It's what I want."
His starting pay, according to Sgt. Harvey, will be $1,178 a month with free room and board, plus $988 a month for college and free tuition while he remains in the full-time service.
He leaves on March 22 for nine weeks of basic training at Fort Jackson in South Carolina, followed by 20 weeks of advanced training in Georgia. Although he doesn't know where he will be stationed after that, he decided that the guarantee of a good job was worth the possibility of leaving this area.
"I had to take a risk," he said.
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