Mining for Marine Material : Recruiter Looks Among the Aimless to Find Diamonds in the Rough

Marine Staff Sgt. Kelly Newman is halfway through his toughest tour of duty in the Corps.

This one is even more challenging than breaking down doors in Somalia or storming the desert in Saudi Arabia. “This is a whole different war,” Newman says. “They don’t prepare you for this in boot camp.”

Newman, 36, is a recruiter in Reseda, one of eight in the San Fernando Valley. A Marine for nearly two decades, he has spent the past 18 months visiting local high schools and shopping centers in search of the few and the proud. More often than not, he finds the many and the aimless.

“I’m looking for the diamond in the rough,” he says. “We are literally picking the future.”

He was once a diamond in the rough himself. It was 1976, and he was graduating from Chatsworth High School. Although the military had a shaky reputation in his household--his siblings sympathized with the anti-war movement--Newman knew he needed something to straighten out his life. “I didn’t want life to choose me,” Newman says. “I was drifting. A lot of people end up with the job they’ve got, not the job they want. I didn’t want that happening to me.”

So he signed up, went to boot camp and became a man. The Marines took him all over the world, and now he’s back home. It’s time, he says, to let others live the adventure.

If it were only that easy. The Marines used to be less selective, even willing to take high school dropouts, Newman says. Not anymore. Out of every 300 prospective male and female candidates he encounters, only about three actually reach boot camp. Most of the others are booted almost immediately or are not interested in pursuing the service.

“I just trashed five today,” he said after a recent staff meeting. “For one reason or another, it’s not worth it to waste more time and money on them. They’re not qualified.”

A lot of times, it’s a physical problem--heck, swimmer’s ear may keep you out of the service.

A lot of other times it’s a psychological problem. He says many teen-agers, frankly, don’t have the right stuff. Either they can’t pass a standard aptitude test or they’ve had a run-in with the law. The Marines don’t believe in taking chances.

Newman doesn’t just make a few phone calls, schedule a few office appointments, and go home for the night. These kids call him at any hour, asking for a ride or sharing a secret. Last summer, one recruit tracked Newman down to proudly say he had just lost his virginity.

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Newman has even put some of his recruits up at his house when they’ve had nowhere else to go. “If a kid isn’t making it in high school,” he says, “they’ll call me before they’ll call their mom.”

If they need a surrogate father, he’ll listen to their personal problems. If they need a physical trainer, he’ll go jogging with them at 6 in the morning. If they need help to take care of a parking ticket, he’ll make sure they pay it. He will do just about anything to get them ready for the Corps. “I can get very attached to them,” he confesses.

“I think it has turned into a way of life for him,” said Gunnery Sgt. Sherry L. Suhosky, a career Marine who has worked closely with Newman. “I don’t think that is something that is taught. It’s deeply ingrained in him.”

Of course, there’s a danger in getting that close. Often, after Newman has invested so much time in a potential recruit, the youngster will find a way to mess it all up. It happened just last month.

“This was a high school dropout,” he says. “I put him back into high school, and I thought he was reforming, but he disappeared one month before boot camp. He was heavy into drugs.”

For every kid like that, there’s a kid like Bill Norris. Norris, 18, doesn’t look like a Marine when he’s hanging with his buddies at Birmingham High School. He wears baggy, plaid shorts. He’s got an earring.

But Newman saw something else in Norris. He saw a Marine.

And, of all things, he saw this when Norris was fooling around with a friend.

“I was wrestling someone in the rain at school,” Norris said, “and he said, ‘You’re the Marine Corps type.’ I was scared, but I need career options. He was real helpful.”

As Newman patrols school grounds, he must deal with the occasional mock salute or a menacing sneer. Even teachers may give him a cold shoulder. One recently walked out on one of his presentations.

It doesn’t bother him. He knows the sophomore who put him down will be the senior who calls him up. So he engages in friendly chatter, adopting the hip, teen-age lingo in order to act like one of the guys. “Hey, man, how ya doin?” he says to one Birmingham teen-ager.

The act may work on the job, but it doesn’t at home. Newman said his wife can get upset with him when he tries to be the friend to his own three kids, instead of the father. “Divorce rate is real high for recruiters,” he says. “In Somalia and Saudi Arabia, it was a question of ‘Will I see my family again?’ Now it’s a question of having time to see my family. On Sunday night, my youngest will say, in a half-kidding manner, ‘See you next Sunday.’ ”

On the other hand, he is a Marine, which means he believes in doing his best at whatever job they give him--whether it’s in Somalia, Saudi Arabia or Reseda.

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In the early 1980s, after his first four-year term, he quit the Corps to take a job with the state of Missouri as a waste-water inspector. But he soon realized that “the things I didn’t like in the Marine world, like having a boss, were in the civilian world too. And I missed the challenge and the training schedule. I missed being able to rappel off a mountain and get paid for it.”

One day he was listening to the radio--”one of those bad civilian days going to work”--when the Marine Corps hymn came on the air. It was the Corps’ birthday. Instantly, he knew it was time to go back home. “I got a certain little tingle,” Newman says. “It reminded me of what it’s all about, and there was no stopping me at that point.”

But he’s not a commercial for the Corps. He tells teen-agers that it’s not one big, romantic adventure, that the first few weeks of boot camp will be mentally and physically draining, and they’ll question why they made the decision in the first place. “I want them to know what they’re getting into,” he says.

After 18 months as a recruiter, Newman is a quick judge of talent. “You can tell by the type of words they’ll use,” he says, “or what their weight is. Does this person have the drive to lose 20 pounds, or is this person just talking the talk?”

Many parents are reluctant to have their kids in the Corps, and frequently Newman will call them to put them at ease. “It’s one of the great rewards of this job,” he says, “when the mom who was totally against it walks into the office and there’s such a beaming pride in her face.”

The best reward, though, comes when he watches the aimless youth transform into the confident Marine.

On his wall, he posts letters from dozens of his success stories, and they all sound alike: “You would not know how much I hated you and reproached you,” one recruit wrote from boot camp. “Maybe you do know. Now it is not as hard as it was. I see myself changing. I thank you now.”

Newman smiles. He does know. He was in boot camp once.