COLUMN ONE : Blacks and the Army: Why Join? : At one recruiting station, protesters say African-Americans should fight for justice at home. Recruits talk of neighborhood violence and see few better choices.

The U.S. Army Crenshaw Recruiting Station sits tucked between a tax office and beauty shop, an easily overlooked storefront amid the shops, restaurants and offices that line busy Crenshaw Boulevard in Central Los Angeles. You might pass it by and never know it--unless you had business there.

On a recent Thursday night, while a solitary young man sat on one side of its glass door and spoke earnestly with a recruiter, 50 protesters marched by candlelight on the sidewalk outside, their placards and chants condemning racism, wasted lives and war.

“Black G.I.’s, You Bleed for White People . . . What About Us?” read one sign. “Black G.I.’s,” read another, “Come Home To Fight the Klan.”

And yet, on the day after the candlelight vigil, like so many days before, more black and brown young men would troop through the station’s doors and inquire about exchanging their blue jeans and sneakers for uniforms and combat boots. And as they crossed the station threshold, these would-be recruits lent flesh-and-blood context to a debate that has rumbled through the black community for generations: Should African-Americans fight for this country?

Some anti-war activists, mindful of the Vietnam experience, warn that they fear another foreign conflict in which a disproportionate number of people of color will die--while back home they still must fight for equal opportunity. They say that blacks constitute nearly 21% of the nation’s fighting forces, while making up 12.3% of the population. And they worry that, with a fourth of America’s young black men under control of the criminal justice system, a war would wreak more havoc on an already besieged community.

“The issue is what you fight for and where you fight for it,” said Makungu Akinyela, whose Malcolm X Grassroots Movement helped coordinate the candlelight vigil. “These same black soldiers, if they come home and take off their uniform, can be stopped for no reason and asked to get on their knees to be searched for drugs. The fight for Africans is here on American soil, not in some foreign land.”

You hear a different story on the other side of the door. There, the talk is of patriotism, of an absence of alternatives and of a home-grown indifference to violence.

“I almost want to go to the Persian Gulf,” said Robert Jackson, a 25-year-old father of one. “If I’ve got to go to war I might as well get paid for it, instead of going to war everyday on these streets.”

In fact, he said, his smile widening, “I think I’ll make a pretty good soldier. Dealing with the gangs, the police, I’ve been a soldier on the streets for a long time.”

Jackson had stopped by the Crenshaw office on a recent Monday to talk about his decision to join. An articulate man with an abundance of poise, Jackson had a confident smile and wore a black leather jacket that filled the air with the scent of cigarette smoke.

He signed up Dec. 6. On that day, Iraq decided to release hundreds of hostages, and President Bush said he still would not back down militarily. But none of this mattered to Jackson. He was a father without work, and that cold reality had ushered him through the recruiting office’s door.

While many of the people he ran with as a youngster now deal drugs, Jackson trained at Los Angeles Trade Technical College for a job as an air-conditioner repairman. It didn’t work out. “They don’t like you to leave them behind,” Jackson said of the gang members he had associated with as a youth. “They robbed me and took my pager, my tools, everything.”

Eventually he was fired and, Jackson said, he started carrying a pistol for protection.

“Then I realized, if I (use) this gun, I could go to jail,” he said. “That made me really consider going into the Army. It will keep you out of jail, keep you out of trouble.”

Jackson knows that many anti-war protesters say it is unfair that many young black men like him are forced into military service by economic concerns. He disagrees.

“People say we shouldn’t fight,” he said. “They have to realize blacks are a part of this country. Where else they gonna go? We don’t have our own country. If we did, I’d be there fighting for it. This is our country so we should defend it. . . . This is home. You just got to make it better. . . . Love it, or leave it.”

The protesters had chosen the night of their vigil with some care. It fell on the night of “Kujichagulia,” which means self-determination, part of a year-end celebration called Kwanzaa observed by many African-Americans. They marched in a circle in front of the recruitment station, the flames of their candles flickering with each stride.

“This recruitment station is a lie,” Akinyela yelled through a megaphone as he looked accusingly through the station windows. “It tricks young black men and women who have no hope for jobs in Los Angeles. They are told lies about all the money they are going to make. Then they continue the tradition of dying in white people’s battles, fighting for democracy when we don’t have democracy here at home.”

The protesters yelled back in agreement. Motorists honked as they drove by.

A recruiter drew the blinds.

As far back as the Revolutionary War, blacks have fought for America. From Crispus Attucks, a runaway slave-turned-seaman who was killed in the Boston Massacre in 1770, to the cavalry’s “buffalo soldiers” of the Indian campaigns, to the nearly 275,000 blacks who served in the military during the Vietnam War, black men have taken up arms with other Americans to defend the flag.

But often when they came back, they found the democracy they championed had failed them at home. After World War I, there were instances of black soldiers returning home to the South only to be lynched, said Rick Moss, program manager of history at the California Afro-American Museum. And black war veterans who fought Nazism and Communism on the battlefields of Europe and Korea were forced to deal with Jim Crow law in much of the United States. It was not until 1948 that blacks were allowed to serve in anything other than segregated units.

“We always thought if we fought on the side of America, we could make America love us, because they would know we loved America,” said Akinyela, who registered for the draft during Vietnam but never fought. “That’s insane.”

During the Vietnam War, 12.1% of U.S. service personnel killed in action were African-American, slightly higher than the size of the black population in the United States at the time, according to the Vietnam War Almanac. In 1966 alone, 16% of those killed were black.

Akinyela, whose small, Jackson, Miss.-based group has joined with other black and Latino organizations to coordinate protests and meetings on the Persian Gulf crisis, recalled a moment in his childhood when the horror of those numbers came into focus. Police, for reasons now lost in time, had killed a black soldier returning from Vietnam who was still in uniform.

“That made it real clear to me,” he said.

After an hour of marching and chanting, the protesters lifted their candles high above their heads. “This is for the brothers and sisters in Saudi Arabia,” said Thandi Chimurenga. “We understand why you’re there. But you need to understand that when you come home, you’re still going to find the same conditions that sent you there in the first place.”

The green and yellow banner in the Crenshaw recruiting station window greets would-be soldiers with a familiar slogan.

“ARMY,” it seems to shout. “Be All You Can Be.”

Mostly white faces look out from the pamphlets arranged out front. But inside, the walls are lined with pictures of new black and brown soldiers--most of them smiling, all of them young.

The office is one of 52 Army recruitment centers in a region that stretches from Paso Robles to Orange County. On the coffee table behind a partition lies a copy of “Soldier’s” magazine, featuring an article on an Army show at Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry, and five stories on Operation Desert Shield.

Recruiters concede that desperate circumstances sometimes drive black youth through the doors of the small office staffed by a station commander and six recruiters.

“A lot of people join the military because they’re trying to avoid a crisis, either jail or the streets,” said Staff Sgt. Frank Gloster Jr., a black man who joined the Army 15 years ago to help finance his education and now runs the Crenshaw station. “Some say it’s better to deal with the conflict over there (in the Middle East) than to deal with what they have to here.”

The most recent figures show national unemployment for blacks at 12.2%, compared to 6.1% for the general population, and Gloster said such bleak economic conditions spur many young African-Americans to join the military.

The station’s front window is filled with paper cut-outs offering enlistment incentives from an $8,000 cash bonus to a $10,000 New G.I. Bill. Even the black type stamped on the back of Gloster’s business card reads like a want ad. “Call me about a $17,000 to $25,000 educational benefit, call me if you would like to learn a skill or trade, call me . . . “

It is not easy being black and an Army recruiter in these times. People sometimes come angrily into the office, Gloster said. “They say we should help our race rather than have another brother go over there and fight for oil,” said Gloster, a slender, affable man who is spirited about his mission. “They feel we should take care of things here first.”

They don’t understand, he said, that that is exactly what he is trying to do. What better way to help his community, he asks, than by offering its young people alternatives and hope? “A young man comes in without a high school diploma, you (encourage) him to get it,” Gloster said. “Young ladies come in who have gotten off track as far as education. We can help them back. We take them off the streets.”

Above all, he adds, it is an honor to serve one’s nation.

“I’m here in America with the red, white and blue and I feel I have an obligation to my country,” Gloster said. “I feel like, hey, freedom is not free.”

The recruiting incentives seem to be working. Pentagon officials said that, while recruitment after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait has been behind pace by some standards, the forces are maintaining full strength through deferred recruits and new enlistees. And back on Crenshaw, Gloster said that his station had reached its goal of gaining five new enlistees in December.

Dale Jacobs, 19, could be found at the Crenshaw station one afternoon shortly before Christmas, taking a test required of all potential recruits. He said he wanted to enlist and eventually learn a trade in the communications field that would help him support his girlfriend and the baby they are expecting in March.

“It’s nothing out there in the streets for you but trouble,” said Jacobs, who lives in a Long Beach neighborhood marred by violence. “I don’t want to die at a young age getting caught up in the gang thing.”

It does not faze him that 29% of the Army’s enlisted personnel are African-American, or that the Army will do much of the fighting and dying if war breaks out.

“At least I’d know what I’m dying for,” said Jacobs. “I’m dying for my country, not for a (gang) color. You’re going to have to die someday.”

And so, even on the brink of war, the young black men and women come to the Crenshaw recruiting station, each with their reasons. They come for money, for love of country, for escape--and some become willing recipients of Gloster’s well-practiced pitch.

The pitch?

“ ‘This is what you’ve got going for yourself,’ ” he said he tells them, “ ‘and this is what the Army can do for you. Hop on.’

“And most of them do.”