Recruiting on the Home Front

The evening news opened with the latest madness.

The anchors looked grim. The screen flashed with Iraqi tanks smashing into Kuwait, then footage of the smiling pirate prince of the Middle East, Saddam Hussein, storming onto the international stage in a mustache, beret and uniform with holster.

Cut to:

A live interview with a U.S. Army colonel on a hill in Westlake Village. The close-up was heavy with warrior imagery: a splash of ribbons and badges on the uniform shirt, the glint of the colonel’s square glasses, his tent-shaped overseas cap outlined sharply against the stark slopes of the Simi Hills. The same kind of shot introduced Harrison Ford in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and samurai warrior Toshiro Mifune in “Yojimbo.”

Lt. Col. Richard Pack doesn’t take on terrorists anymore, except for the incorrigible teen-age variety, and he regrets not being in on the Iraqi action. But his qualifications as a commentator on the crisis are impeccable.

The retired Army Ranger is a former leader of the elite counterterrorist Delta Force, an architect of cutting-edge warfare. His resume covers a globe of hot spots--Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Grenada. He’s not particularly big, but don’t bet that Sylvester Stallone would last a round with him.

The anchors asked solemnly about our military options in Kuwait. Was Iraq’s long-bloody war with Iran a plus or a minus for the Iraqi military, they wanted to know. Would they be war-weary or tough?

The colonel answered in an accent combining his native Florida and the Davey Crockett-Daniel Boone country of Tennessee and Missouri where he was raised and lives.

“These men have been shot at for seven years,” he drawled. “Every time a soldier gets shot at, he gets a little smarter.”

When the interview was over, Pack did not head for a helicopter or the adrenaline-charged glare of a briefing room.

Instead, he stood at a white wrought-iron table in a Westlake Village neighborhood center and urged suburban parents and kids to consider the rewards of attending Kemper Military School and College in Boonville, Mo., where he became an administrator last year.

“I’ve always wondered what happens to America’s heroes,” said Rod Bernsen, an LAPD sergeant whose son goes to Kemper. “Do they just go off and play golf? I think there’s an element that do. Col. Pack is an exception.”

Bernsen told the audience about Pack’s 26-year career. Before he retired in 1986, Pack won decorations ranging from the Silver Star to a Purple Heart to a Jungle Expert Badge. He was an infantry commander in Vietnam and helped plan the Grenada invasion. “They took a simple mission and complicated it,” he lamented this week, shaking his head.

His Delta unit stalked the TWA jet hijacked by Arab terrorists in 1985 but never attacked.

During the introduction, Pack studied his interlaced fingers. His short hair, square and austere features, and uniform pants that unstylishly exposed his ankles suggested a man from another era.

But not a man of few words. The colonel’s presentation was disarmingly and unabashedly down-home. He said attending military school in Tennessee had changed his life. He said his mission is education; the military system is just a system.

“We teach kids to play by the rules,” he said. “In the military system, you know who’s boss because he’s in your face all the time. . . . We do more by 7 o’clock in the morning than most kids in California do by 10 a.m.”

The adults nodded, glancing occasionally at two Kemper students in attendance, Matt Bernsen and Benito Cortez. The cadets looked sharp. Their uniforms were busy with braids and gleaming buttons. They had more erect posture sitting down than a regiment of suburban mall rats would have trying to stand at attention.

Meanwhile, several teen-agers with longer hair and comfortable slouches were digesting the concepts of waking up at dawn, of not having cars, of Saturday night in downtown Boonville.

“Do you get TVs and stuff in your room?” asked Jason Vienna, a gangly, cheerful teen-ager who said his high school is overrun with violence. Pack told him yes, but no videocassette recorders or cable.

“No cable? No VCR?” Jason hooted incredulously, as Pack regarded him with a sniper’s smile and Jason’s mother told him he wouldn’t have time to worry about such distractions.

As Pack accepted application forms and deposit checks, he was asked whether it was hard to be on the sidelines with the Kuwait crisis boiling.

“It’s tough. You kinda get high on it,” he admitted. “Right now, we’d be burning the midnight oil. . . . With Grenada, I got a call at 5:30 in the afternoon. My boss said, ‘Oh, we have to brief the Joint Chiefs of Staff at 9 a.m.’ ”

He described the difference between conventional operations and the commando warfare that was his specialty.

“In conventional operations, when a mission comes down, orders come down, and all you do is follow orders. . . . In special operations, you get the guy who’s gonna do it, and you ask him how he would do it and what he’s going to need. You start at the bottom.”

Pack dismissed movies and TV shows about combat, “Delta Force” included, with quiet disdain. But he said he was impressed when he and his 25-year-old son, also a Ranger, saw “Platoon.”

“I can honestly say it was the most realistic portrayal I have ever seen,” he said, the eyes behind the glasses crinkling with a jungle memory. “Except you couldn’t smell anything. . . . Like the scene where they find the VC base camp. In real life, you would have smelled it way before you ever got near it.”