The Latest Fad--Joining the Military : Soldiers: The Persian Gulf crisis brings in more applicants to the recruiting offices that line Victory Boulevard.

She was still a young girl, 18 and just out of high school, sitting there shyly in front of Sgt. Bruce Meyers with her braces, jeans and high-top sneakers. And she didn’t seem at all atypical to the recruiter as an enlistment prospect for the California Army National Guard until her face flushed red with embarrassment when Meyers asked where she was born.

Her eyes turned downward, as if she were trying to hide beneath her own brown curls. And she explained she was from Iraq, but had for long time been a permanent resident alien along with her parents, who emigrated to the United States from the Arab nation years before. Listening to her explain all this in his office at the 144th Field Artillery station on Victory Boulevard in Van Nuys, it was clear that this latest applicant was more uncomfortable than most.

“I felt bad for her,” Meyers said later, with one of those old “Uncle Sam” Army recruiting posters looking over his shoulder. “It was very difficult because there were other people in here too, just waiting for test results.”

But Meyers said he counseled and encouraged her as he would any other applicant. Her high test scores had qualified her for most of the National Guard’s training schools, and she was just the sort of clean-cut, friendly kid he eagerly signed up.

After all, in the past month, dominated by news of potential U.S. military conflict in the Persian Gulf that would pit Western forces against Iraqi troops occupying Kuwait, Meyers had talked with an increasing number of young, qualified applicants born in neighborhoods spread from Van Nuys to Jordan to Vietnam.

Predictably, Meyers and most of his counterparts at recruiting offices for the other military branches located along Victory Boulevard in the Sepulveda Basin have been busier than is normal for this time of year. American troop movements to Saudi Arabia, coupled with a U.S. armada now floating in Middle East waters, have kept recruiters’ telephones ringing and brought more walk-in traffic. It’s a level of activity in contrast with the norm for these National Guard and military reserve units, which generally don’t attract much notice from the surrounding community.

In his recruiting office last week at the rear of the Navy and Marine Corps Reserve Training Center, Sgt. T.J. Kenton had spent much of the morning on the telephone and was still in his T-shirt and running shorts. The olive green shirt of his uniform, with its small stack of stripes sewn to the shoulder, hung above a pair of shiny black shoes, waiting by the door for Kenton to be released from the phone.

A Marine for 12 years and a recruiter for the past eight, Kenton normally spends his days “out pounding the bush” in search of prior-service Marines to sign up for the Marine Reserve. But since the Middle East crisis, he said he’s been anchored to the office because of a steady stream of calls from recent discharges and veterans of conflicts going back to World War II.

“They want to go,” said Kenton, 32. “And it’s admirable that after all those years, when their country needs them, they want to contribute. Unfortunately, the time has been too long.”

None of the local recruiters were willing to give specific numbers of recruits. But Kenton said his office had been three times busier than normal. One young Marine sergeant, who had just left the service after an eight-year stint, came into Kenton’s office recently looking for a way back in. His old unit apparently had been one of those sent to Saudi Arabia.

“Anybody who is a rational person doesn’t look forward to war,” Kenton said. “But those who served in the Marine Corps have that call of duty when they feel their country needs them. That sounds kind of hokey and corny. But it’s instilled in most Marines while they’re in.”

When U.S. forces were sent to Grenada and Panama in recent years, recruiters for the military reserves on Victory Boulevard said they saw similar increases in applicants. Usually a certain percentage of applicants needs to be located with recruiter visits at high schools, colleges and county fairs, with the help of newspaper advertisements and word of mouth.

Walk-in traffic for the Air National Guard was regular when Sgt. Bob Bradshaw’s recruiting office was at the 146th Tactical Airlift Wing base in Van Nuys, with its dramatic display of a Korean War-era fighter jet resting on a pedestal at its Balboa Avenue gate. Since the air base locked its doors in April, and Bradshaw’s office was moved to 261st Combat Communications Squadron installation on Victory--which is virtually hidden behind a row of trees and a tall mound of dirt--he has had to work harder to attract applicants, he said.

Events like the current Middle East crisis help business, he said, but the motivations of some applicants can confuse matters.

“It’s like every time a local station shows ‘The Sands of Iwo Jima,’ the old John Wayne film, Marine Corps enlistments go up,” Bradshaw said. “And when they show one of these new Air Force films, it’s kind of the same thing. People’s perspectives are a little off.

“These things have a way of bringing out some of the crazies. A lot of people are frustrated and couldn’t get into the military normally, the Rambo type that buys a lot of stuff at the Army surplus stores.”

At the Army National Guard recruiting office to the west, Meyers insisted that the majority of applicants that he’s talked to have expressed serious interest in the Guard beyond the possibility of being shipped to some world trouble zone. Indeed, even during quieter periods of the military, Meyers said he makes a point to remind the applicants of the Army’s primary function--to defend the country--rather than let it be obscured by education and other benefits.

“You have to be a good listener in my position,” said Meyers, 43, who served in the late 1960s as a helicopter crew chief and door gunner in Vietnam. “You have to be a counselor, a psychologist, just about everything. People come in for different reasons. But you put the uniform on, you’re subjecting yourself to conflict at some day in your life. And the Guard can be called up.”

Guardsmen stationed at the Van Nuys Armory were called to action during World War II and the Korean War. The local Guard’s domestic actions also included helping quell the 1965 Watts Riots. In peacetime, most part-time soldiers in the various reserve or National Guard services participate in exercises one weekend every month and one two-week “summer camp” every year.

The sudden interest in the offices along Victory Boulevard carries a certain irony, given the talk in recent months of massive cutbacks in the federal military budget. The warming of relations between the United States and the Soviet Union created eager discussion of a “peace dividend,” and some preparations for the expected financial trimming had already begun earlier this year.

Those rumors and discussions were still dominating congressional banter in the media in July, when Army Guardsmen returned by bus to the Victory Boulevard armory after the annual 15-day exercise at Camp Roberts, near Paso Robles. Lt. Col. Richard Throckmorton, whose command of a field artillery battalion includes the Van Nuys armory, said he had heard the rumors. And some cuts had already been made.

“They cut our damn buses,” Throckmorton said, chuckling. “It’s one of the cheapest things we have, getting our guys up there. Who knows how these things work. But so far there’s been no armory cuts, no personnel cuts.”

Throckmorton explained in July that costs of a National Guard unit run about 20% of that for the regular Army. So cuts in the full-time military may actually lead to a larger part-time Guard or reserve force, he said.

The looming budget pressures had also reached recruiting offices, in subtle ways. By the beginning of the year, requirements to join the Army National Guard had grown stiffer, with a high school diploma one of several minimum requirements, Meyers said. And those already in the Army were being encouraged to seek early retirement.

“It actually got tougher on the recruiter for a while,” Meyers said, adding that they had to work harder to find recruits that met the new, stricter requirements.

That change lasted about 60 days, he said.

“They found out that we need bodies, we need trained soldiers,” Meyers said. “It’s a big country and there are a lot of other countries out there that are really not friendly to us.” Meanwhile, Meyers and the other recruiters continue leading the line of applicants through tests and physicals, including the young Vietnamese residents that inevitably end up in his office.

“I’ve had people ask me: How could you do that? And I tell them this is not 1968. These kids didn’t even know about Vietnam. They read about it in their history books.

“I will talk about Vietnam over coffee with veterans I see in a restaurant,” Meyers said. “But with applicants I stick to their needs, wants and desires. They don’t want to know what happened 25 years ago. They want to know what’s happening now. How much money can they get? How much education can they get? What’s the Army all about now?”

The young Iraqi woman who visited with Meyers expressed a serious enough interest in the Guard, he said, but she may wait before joining. He said her mother has expressed serious reservations, given the current world crisis.

“I think that when this all dies down, and hopefully it will be soon, she’ll probably come into the Guard.”