Army recruiter goes everywhere to find youths to enlist
By Sam Stanton
Army Sgt. 1st Class Jim Burns was on patrol Thursday, two days after the Pentagon announced that the death toll among American servicemen in Iraq was among the highest ever in Iraq.
But the grim news from the front was having little impact on Burns’ mission: selling young men and women near his Rancho Cordova recruiting office on the notion that joining the Army is a good idea.
“Have you thought about the Army?” Burns asked as he walked up to a young man taking a cigarette break outside a Ralph’s supermarket.
Steve Peak, a 25-year-old baker, looked slightly startled as Burns moved in with a smile and a rapid-fire combination of sales pitch and job interview.
“You’ve graduated from high school? Give it some thought. Starting pay is $1,100 a month on average. What do you want to do? You’ve got a choice. We’ve got 212 kinds of jobs.
“Come by and I’ll take you to lunch. Is it something you’d consider doing? Let me get your name real quick.”
The encounter lasted maybe three minutes total, and Peak made no commitment to sign up.
But Burns counted the exchange as a success: He got Peak’s name, he got Peak’s phone number and he didn’t hear the word “no.”
In fact, Peak said as Burns walked off that he “possibly” would join up. And, he said, the prospect of having to go to Iraq would not deter him.
“No, that’s something that would make me want to go,” Peak said.
In the next 15 minutes, Burns targeted two other potential recruits: 18-year-old Breanna Gray, who was tending the counter at Maui Tan; and Nathan Tayeh, a 21-year-old 7-Up distributor Burns found in a barber chair at the Sunrise Boulevard strip mall.
Only the soda guy said no flat-out, leaving Burns with a satisfied smile on his face at the thought of selling the Army to the other two.
“I’m going to follow up with them,” he said. “There’s a lot of personal information I need to get from them, but I’ve piqued their interest.”
As an eight-year veteran of recruiting in the Sacramento area, that is the essence of Burns’ job. If he can hook someone into listening long enough to his pitch, he may have a shot at signing them up.
All across the nation, the 38-year-old sergeant’s counterparts are doing the same thing, trolling the malls, the high schools, the college quads and burger joints in an effort to meet the Army’s mission of signing up 80,000 new recruits in the next fiscal year.
“We work probably 13 to 14 hours a day, probably 75 hours a week, six days a week,” said Burns, who has spent 20 years in the Army.
“We run the phones about five hours a day,” Burns said. “And we’re shaking 50 to 100 hands a day.”
And business is good. Since Oct. 1, Burns said, 12,000 have signed up, giving the Army a leg up on achieving its mission for the fifth consecutive year.
Across the hall at Burns’ recruiting office at a strip mall facing Sunrise Boulevard, the offices housing Air Force and Navy recruiters are locked tight. They aren’t even staffed currently because those branches have enough people, Burns said. Only the Marine Corps office down the hall poses any competition.
On the surface, this would seem to defy logic.
In the past week alone, casual readers would have seen headlines pointing out that the death toll for Americans in Iraq last month was at least 135, the highest since April.
Thousands more troops are preparing to ship out to Iraq, and thousands already there have had their tours of duty extended.
But, Burns said, “there’s no shortage of recruits coming in.”
“There’s a lot of people coming in the door. The problem is trying to find people who are qualified. We send a lot of people away.”
Today’s all-volunteer Army can afford to be choosy, Burns said, even in wartime. If you don’t have a high school diploma, you can forget enlisting. If you’ve got past legal problems, drunk driving or drug arrests, you probably won’t make the cut.
A domestic violence conviction? “You’ll never get into the Army. Never.”
Those who are qualified get the full sales pitch: cash bonuses for signing up, up to $70,000 in college tuition, job training, character building, the whole deal. In addition to salary, they get room and board and the chance at regular promotions.
Need a part-time job while waiting to graduate from high school and sign up? Burns will find you one.
Need an exercise regimen to get in shape for basic training? Burns and his fellow recruiters will invite you to regular physical training sessions with them.
Burns figures he has enticed 160 people into signing a contract with the Army over the years, and that on average each of the three recruiters in his office will sign up two a month.
He said none of his recruits have been killed or injured in Iraq, but concedes there are plenty of questions about Iraq. “That’s one of the big things,” Burns said. “A lot of the parents (say), ‘Will they go to Iraq?’
“We tell them straight up, ‘Yeah, we can’t guarantee that you won’t go.’
“And once they actually hear that, they suck it in and say, ‘OK, at least you didn’t lie to me or make up a story.’ ”
Six months ago, Franklin Cornejo was one of those young men.
A 21-year-old Cordova High School graduate, Cornejo spent two years after graduation “looking for a job, pretty much doing a lot of nothing, to be honest,” Cornejo said.
He ended up in the recruiting office with a mustache and goatee, and signed up after hearing Burns’ pitch.
Last Thursday, he was back in the office, clean-shaven and wearing an Army private’s uniform, fresh from his training in Maryland and preparing to ship out to Germany.
“I got a $2,000 bonus to join,” Cornejo said. “I got the job I wanted and the training I signed up for.”
For the next two weeks, as Cornejo spends time visiting friends before heading overseas, he will work out of the recruiting office with Burns, tapping his network of friends for potential enlistees.
“He knows a lot more people in the area than I do,” Burns said.
Cornejo said the prospect of eventually heading to Iraq does not bother him.
“The only thing I’m worried about is the heat,” he said.
Not everyone is as casual about the prospect of heading to war, Burns said.
He has had plenty of angry incidents as he has approached people asking them to consider the Army.
“A lot of times it gets very confrontational,” he said. “I’ve had people do some crazy stuff.
“We’ve had a lot of vandalism at our office. I’ve had to scrape eggs off our cars. I got a call about a year and a half ago from the Sheriff’s Department at 2 o’clock in the morning that our front window was smashed.
“Every day we’re in battle because a lot of moms, a lot of people, don’t agree with us, and they definitely let us know,” Burns said.
Some of the opposition the recruiters face is organized. Sacramento’s Veterans for Peace chapter began an anti-recruiting drive of its own in September that it calls Operation Enduring Reality.
“We’ve been going into local high schools, talking to classes there and to community colleges and to youth groups,” said George Main, an Army veteran and president of the Veterans for Peace chapter. “We’re received very well. We try to make them aware of the shortcomings of the military.”
The group also cautions would-be Army recruits to view recruiters’ promises with some skepticism.
“The portrayal of life in military recruiting stuff isn’t really close to reality,” Main said. “We just try to make them very aware that what the recruiter’s telling them is for the recruiter’s benefit, not their benefit.”
Another area peace activist, Sacramento physician Bill Durston, said potential recruits need to be aware that they may be hearing promises that won’t be kept, and that he believes some are being told falsely that their service in Iraq will help fight terrorism.
“If they think they’re going to make us safer from terrorism, I think they’ve been duped,” said Durston, a Marine combat veteran of Vietnam and organizer of the local chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility.
Burns takes such criticism in stride, saying he respects the views of people opposed to the war and who don’t want to join up.
“That’s why we’re in uniform,” he said. “So you don’t have to do it.”
Before leaving the strip mall where he has deposited several small recruiting displays at businesses there, Burns stopped at a pay phone and put his business card near the coin slot.
“I’ll come back in 20 minutes and someone will have taken it or torn it up,” he said. “That’s OK. I’ve got a thousand more.”
By the numbers
80,000: Number of Army recruits sought this fiscal year.12,000: Enlistments since fiscal year began Oct. 1.
212: Number of jobs for which the Army offers to train recruits.
50 to 100: Estimated number of people a recruiter meets daily.
2: Average number of recruits signed by each recruiter monthly.
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