Hunt for Bin Laden Begins at Manhattan Recruiting Center

The posters hang all over town, as if Manhattan were Dodge City.

Wanted

Dead or Alive

Osama bin Laden

At the military recruiting center in Times Square, the posse is saddling up.

A 76-year-old Korean War vet called to ask if he could reenlist. Citizens of Northern Ireland, Haiti, Israel and Russia have come by to see if they were eligible to lock and load, but their papers were not in order.

On Tuesday, a woman steered her niece to the Air Force cubicle inside the center and listened as the teen was interviewed by a recruiter. Two Latino delivery boys, who wore work aprons and didn’t speak a word of English, stopped at the Army table outside the center and picked up a brochure. Inside, a kid wearing a Beastie Boys shirt penciled in the answers on a math and English exam to see if he could make the cut and join the Army.

“Before Sept. 11, people used to come in here because they wanted the training, the education or the money. It was always me, me, me, what do I get for me?” says Army Sgt. 1st Class James D. Freeman. “Now, with all of them, it’s what can I do for my country?”

“I’m a citizen,” Thomas Liquori, 22, said when I asked the Army veteran why he was eager to go back in. He wore his dog tags to come find out about reenlisting.

He scowled at the mention of prime suspect Osama bin Laden, and said he’d gladly march across foreign soil to get the dog who did this.

“If that’s what it takes, I’ll do it.”

The recruiting center is about the size of a subway car and sits on a median island in the epicenter of Times Square, surrounded by the towering walls of a neon canyon. Craning skyward, you feel like an ant at the drive-in movies, with the latest news of a nation on the brink swirling overhead on Orwellian message boards.

Across the street, a humongous screen on the face of the ABC building broadcasts whatever’s on television, and by Tuesday it had gone from America Under Attack to “Days of Our Lives.” Accordingly, the number of recruits had dropped off after doubling in the first days following the attack on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. Business is now slightly above normal, but a different crowd has been coming in since Sept. 11.

“It’s gone from blue collar to white collar,” Sgt. Freeman said. It used to be only people with entry-level service or entertainment jobs around Times Square. “But now we’ve got professionals coming in, including stockbrokers.”

Erika Page, 26, is one of the ones who doesn’t fit the profile of the traditional recruit. She graduated from Harvard Law School in June and enrolled in a doctoral program at John Jay University in New York, where she’s studying criminal justice.

On Tuesday, Page took the subway from her East Greenwich Village apartment to the recruiting center in Times Square, where she said she was prepared to drop out of school and join the Army.

“I’d been thinking about doing it at some point anyway, and this hardened my resolve to join immediately and take a proactive role instead of sitting in New York waiting to get attacked again,” she said.

One sentence, and she filled me with respect for her bravery and sorrow at the cold reality of the new world. How many people, and how many resources, will we have to expend in a war against fear?

Page filled out a form, and they scheduled an appointment for her to meet with a recruiter today. She’d been interested in doing some kind of intelligence work after school anyway, she said, so maybe she can steer her military career in that direction.

“If they’ll take me, I’ll do it,” she said with uncommon poise.

Page said it was the innocence of the victims that makes the horrific assault on New York so utterly intolerable. She said she doesn’t want war, but if it comes to that, and if Bin Laden is the target, “I’m prepared to do whatever it takes to get him.”

When Page walked off down the street, someone took her place at the recruiting table. In New York, which has lost nearly 6,000 people, smoke rises over the city like a call to battle, soldiers walk the streets dusty with fatigue, and military aircraft crease the sky.

Osama bin Laden is wanted, dead or alive.

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Steve Lopez can be reached at steve.lopez@latimes.com