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Tough Boots to Fill

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Times Staff Writer

The number seems to hang above their heads like the banners on the walls. It’s a big number, and they grimace when it’s mentioned, because it’s more than a number. It’s an order. By the end of the month, the seven soldiers who staff this U.S. Army recruiting station must put 14 new men or women in boots.

“This job will kill you,” one recruiter says under his breath. “This is the most stressful job I have ever had.”

For the record:

12:00 a.m. Dec. 4, 2004 For The Record
Los Angeles Times Saturday December 04, 2004 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 46 words Type of Material: Correction
Army recruiters -- An article Nov. 21 in Section A about Army recruiters in Westminster, Colo., did not give the recruiters’ full ranks. Randy Adams, Rodney Shivers and Chris Warth are sergeants first class; Jason Disponzio, Ernest Hill, Chris Hubbard and Kevin Matson are staff sergeants.

Because of the number, Adams has barely seen his kids all month, and Hubbard is sick. Hill is here on his day off, and Shivers is going in four directions at once. The number, the number. As much as the recruiters like each other, they hate that number, because it’s more than an order. It’s their mission, their burden and, in a funny way, it’s a source and a symbol of their pride.

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From outside, the recruiting station doesn’t look all that dramatic. The little door with the white star doesn’t stand out from any of the other doors in this sleepy strip mall 14 miles north of Denver. Just another storefront, another business trawling for customers, like the honey-baked ham shop and the martial arts school.

But a complex drama unfolds here each day: This is where young men and women come to sign daunting contracts, to trade their freedom for discipline and adventure, to engage the recruiters in deep conversations -- and sometimes negotiations -- about valor, duty and fear.

Also, every recruiting station right now is a critical staging area for America’s war in Iraq and its war on terrorism. With troops stretched thin, with rumors swirling about a return to the draft, the nation’s volunteer Army must reinforce itself -- and demonstrate its capacity to reinforce itself, quickly and robustly, come what may. If the Army can’t make do with volunteers, as it’s done for all but roughly 35 years of its 229-year existence, then it will need to conscript. And places like Westminster are where that question will be decided.

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When the Army recently announced its goal of adding 80,000 soldiers this year to a force of 1 million, that goal fell squarely on the shoulders of recruiters. Then, by some mysterious math practiced deep inside the Pentagon, the goal was divided among more than 1,685 recruiting stations worldwide, spread over the calendar year, and thus gave rise to October’s number in Westminster -- 14.

That’s roughly one-third of a platoon.

By the end of the month.

Which actually means by the end of today -- Nov. 15. Like its math, the Army’s calendar follows a unique internal logic, and the end of October falls on the Monday after the long Veterans Day weekend. And as the day begins, the seven Westminster recruiters are visibly aware of what day it is -- and of the fact that despite four straight 70-hour weeks, they are five soldiers short.

Most people assume that recruiting stations are desperate places nowadays. How could they be otherwise when more than 1,200 U.S. troops have been killed in Iraq, when grisly images from Fallouja overwhelm the Army’s sentimental new recruiting commercials?

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But while selling is part of recruiting, and while the Westminster recruiting station does feel at times like a military production of “Glengarry Glen Ross,” most people would be stunned to see how the selling goes both ways. At the same time recruiters are trying to sell young men and women on the Army, waves of young men and women are trying to sell themselves to the recruiters.

It’s a surprisingly tough sell. Tattoos, diseases, injuries, obesity, legal troubles, low test scores, lack of a high school diploma -- all sorts of defects can disqualify, or “hack,” a recruit. If there is any desperation, it’s felt by recruiters and recruits alike. The hard part of meeting that monthly number, recruiters say, isn’t selling people on the Army -- it’s selecting people who meet the Army’s standards.

The hopefuls come marching all day into the Westminster recruiting station, which looks something like a barracks -- one long, narrow room, clean and spartan. Instead of bunks there are desks: two rows of three, facing each other, a narrow passage in between, not much wider than an airplane aisle.

At the first desk on the left sits Sgt. Ernest Hill, 34, the tallest and brawniest of the recruiters, a former Golden Gloves middleweight who returned recently from a 14-month tour in Iraq. Although he’s only been recruiting since August, Hill shows signs of having The Gift. He can dazzle recruits with his combination of intensity and kindness, with his soothing voice and penetrating stare. The next thing those recruits know, they are picturing themselves in a dark-green uniform like Hill’s, with the gleaming patent leather shoes, the brightly colored ribbons across the chest, the Bronze Star.

With his laptop, Hill shows recruits the Army’s sexy new recruiting DVD: high-adrenaline rock music in sync with soldiers rappelling down mountains and parachuting out of planes. Most recruits are more interested in Hill’s screensaver, a photo of him storming into Baghdad with the first U.S. troops. Nearly every recruit asks, and sometimes Hill tells them his stories, describes what it was like to sleep on the floor of Saddam Hussein’s palace.

He doesn’t tell them what it was like to have his tank hit by a rocket-propelled grenade, and then to have the tank tumble into the Euphrates River. He doesn’t tell them about the shrapnel in both his legs, or the 38 friends he lost in battle -- including one who committed suicide, a man whose memory makes Hill’s eyes well with tears. He doesn’t tell them about the 30 rolls of film he took in Iraq, which he still can’t bring himself to develop. He doesn’t tell recruits about a day not long after he got home, when he was walking in the park with his 12-year-old son. A car backfired, and Hill dove into a ditch, where he lay cowering, suffering from tunnel vision and paralysis until his son phoned Hill’s wife and told her there was something wrong with Daddy.

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“I’m glad he didn’t touch me,” Hill says. “Because I might’ve hurt him if he had.”

Hill keeps those things to himself, not because he’s afraid of scaring off recruits, but because he doesn’t yet feel comfortable sharing them with strangers.

There is something contradictory about striving to put fresh-faced men and women into the inferno of Iraq, and Hill acknowledges it, but only barely, because he lives inside the contradiction: He longs to return to Iraq. Most of the soldiers with whom he came home are soon being redeployed, and Hill wishes he were going with them. But the Army, he says, needs him here.

Many of his soldiers didn’t have fathers, and looked to him to fill that role. Just this morning, as he drove to work, he got a phone call from one of them, and he’s still thinking about that call. “When you do something with a group of guys you hold dear,” he says, “when they depend on you, lean on you ... “ His voice trails off, and he has trouble completing the thought.

Since Hill can’t lead his soldiers, he’s determined to send them help by proxy in the form of backup. “I know what it’s like to be short-handed over there,” he says -- and for this reason he brings to the job of recruiting an obsessive zeal. The other day, he ducked out for a cheeseburger and came back with a phone number -- the janitor at the burger joint. Today, his day off, Hill is making phone calls, scheduling appointments, working as hard as anyone, and it has to do with more than that monthly number, he says.

Besides logging 15-hour days, besides prowling the streets and cruising the malls and canvassing the schools and working the phones, Hill swings by bus stops each morning on his way to work. He asks people if they need a ride, and those who say yes can expect to hear a fair bit about the Army. If they are lucky, they will hear how Hill came to join.

Born in East St. Louis, Ill., Hill grew up in a neighborhood that gave him a foretaste of urban street fighting. When Hill was 1, his father was killed near the family house, an innocent bystander in a gang shooting. As he grew up, Hill helped his brothers look after their mother and paid his way through college by working as a prison guard in Joliet, Ill. It was violent, surreal, but honest work, until the prisoners presented him with an ultimatum: Smuggle drugs into the prison or die.

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Hill quit. On his way home that day, he stopped at a Chinese restaurant for some takeout and met an Army recruiter. He told the recruiter what had just happened, and the recruiter told Hill about the Army. The Army saved his life, Hill says, and he hasn’t had a moment’s regret since, not even as his tank was tumbling into the Euphrates.

It’s an adjustment for Hill, he admits, to make the mental switch from ordering people to selling them. “I used to tell somebody to do something -- it got done,” he says, laughing at himself. “Here you can be sitting there with somebody, and they’re nodding their head, saying yeah, yeah, and in the end they say, ‘ love what you guys do -- but it’s just not for me.’ ”

More discouraging is when a willing recruit gets hacked. Hill recently visited a woman who phoned the recruiting station to set up an appointment. When Hill knocked at the woman’s door, he found her bloodied and battered. My boyfriend, she told Hill. The Army was a way out for that woman, Hill says. A chance for her to regain some pride and control. But she flunked the aptitude test.

At the desk across from Hill sits Sgt. Randy Adams, 40, the senior recruiter in Westminster and the unofficial den mother. (Today, he brings a pot of chili for everyone so they won’t have to waste time going out for lunch.) Adams is the one the other recruiters come to with questions about rules and procedures. What’s a 979? Can we use blue ink or do we have to use black? In fact, here comes Hill now, sheepishly asking for help with a packet of complicated forms.

Adams doesn’t even bother to ask why Hill is here on his day off. All the recruiters work backbreaking hours, from dawn until late at night, six days a week, sometimes fielding calls from recruits at 4 a.m. Adams’ daughter asks all the time why she doesn’t see him, why Daddy has to always be finding new soldiers.

Blue-eyed, his brown hair worn slightly longer than his fellow recruiters’, Adams copes with the hours and stress of recruiting by making wisecracks under his breath, delivering the most pointed ones like asides in a Shakespeare play. Where Hill is direct, Adams is circumspect, which may owe to the four years he’s spent verbally fencing with recruits. Adams has heard it all, every self-aggrandizing lie to get in and every rationalization to stay out, and he’s always using what he’s heard to fine-tune his sales pitch. He’s put 81 men and women in boots, he says with much pride. Two full platoons in four years.

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“I don’t like to call this sales,” he says. “I don’t like to think of myself as a salesman.” But in the next breath he allows that he does feel a kinship with car salesmen, a kinship that seems to make him uncomfortable.

No matter how persuasive he tries to be, Adams prides himself on being brutally honest, as do all the recruiters. They boast that not one soldier has returned to complain about a gap between what they were told here and what they found out there.

For instance, Adams was working earlier this month with a man who said he’d like to blow stuff up. If he were to join, the man said, he’d want a job in demolition.

Adams said such a job would likely involve more than blowing stuff up. He’d have to locate enemy landmines, for instance.

The man frowned. “Would I have to mess with ‘em,” he asked, “or just find ‘em?”

Now it was Adams’ turn to frown. “Probably a little of both,” he answered.

The man wasn’t sure he liked the sound of that. He told Adams he’d have to get back to him.

Adams signed Westminster’s first recruit for this month -- Bradley Solomon, an 18-year-old who was digging ditches for a living when he walked in off the street. (He didn’t call or e-mail first, as most recruits do.) Adams’ was the first face Solomon saw, so Solomon came toward him and said he wanted to fight. He’d always dreamed of being a soldier, but recently he’d logged onto the Internet and read the name of every soldier who had died in Iraq. Every name. Aloud. Suddenly he’d found himself standing before his computer, tears in his eyes, saluting, promising the dead that he would take up their cause.

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Weeks later, on the night before Solomon shipped to Ft. Benning, Ga., he and his parents came by the recruiting station. They stood around Adams’ desk, chatting, like a parent-teacher conference, except that the parents looked traumatized. The teacher now had custody of their son. Solomon’s mother, Christine, was pale. “I’m still in denial,” she said. Solomon’s stepfather, Tom, said that in just the few days since Solomon joined, he’d seemed different. More like a man. “Brad and I didn’t used to talk a lot,” Tom said. “Now we’re closer than ever. And the word ‘love’ is part of our vocabulary.”

In honor of his stepson, Tom recently got a tattoo. He raised his shirt to display the bold red-white-and-blue “USA” between his shoulder blades. Solomon gazed at the tattoo. It was clear from his expression that the Army already had performed one miracle in his life. It had earned him the respect of his stepfather.

Not every recruit is like Solomon. Adams talks daily with recruits who dread going to Iraq. They ask if joining the Army -- for college, for money, for adventure -- means they will inevitably be sent there. Adams tells them all the same thing: “I can’t guarantee that you will go, and I can’t guarantee that you won’t.”

He points out, however, that he’s been in the Army 23 years and he’s never seen a day of combat. He tells recruits about traveling the world, about seeing the pyramids, about the skills he’s learned and the friends he’s made, and now he’s one year from retirement and all in one piece. He advises those who fear combat to choose a job that isn’t likely to be needed on the front lines -- food inspector, say, or animal care specialist. “I tell them [the Army] probably won’t kill them,” Adams says, “and it probably won’t hurt them -- but it will benefit them.”

Adams forges strong paternal bonds with recruits, which is the very thing they seek. They come through the door talking about fathers who are missing, dead or distant. “They’re starved for attention,” Adams says. “And if you just listen, they’ll open up, tell you everything, and I mean everything.”

One such recruit stands out. She was so skinny that Adams nicknamed her Bones. Before she shipped to basic training, she let it slip that her parents had done nothing for her recent 18th birthday. Adams and the other recruiters bought Bones a cake, and the tough, hardened men gathered round and sang “Happy Birthday.”

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At the desk to the right of Adams sits Sgt. Jason Disponzio, a loud, Brooklyn-born infantryman who until recently was leading supply convoys throughout Iraq. Disponzio believes, or hopes, that he fought elements of Al Qaeda in the streets of Baghdad so that he won’t have to fight them in the streets of the U.S., and he’s proud of the mettle he showed. “I found out a lot about myself,” he says.

Disponzio’s reason for joining the Army 10 years ago was simple. His parents couldn’t send him to college and the Army could. He takes great satisfaction, therefore, in offering high school students that same chance at college, and it stings when he visits a local high school and students make snide remarks. Some call him “murderer.” One asked recently if he shouldn’t be “out fighting a war somewhere.”

“Having been there,” Disponzio says, “having lost friends there, it hurts.”

Last month, Disponzio signed up 20-year-old Jesse Duffryn, who saw the Army as his last hope. Duffryn had tried to find work as a mechanic, but the best he could do was clerking at an auto parts store. After months of that, Duffryn handed himself over to Disponzio, who liked the young man’s attitude. Duffryn was a wiseguy -- like Disponzio. Signing Duffryn wasn’t just good for Duffryn, it was a boon to the Army. “I don’t put anybody in the Army who I don’t feel will be an asset,” Disponzio says.

He and the other recruiters laugh about the liabilities that walk in the door. There was the guy whose high school diploma was printed on a piece of animal hide. There was the colorblind guy who couldn’t tell red from green, and the guy so high he was seeing colors no one else could see. Then there was the woman who said she’d never been arrested, cross her heart, even after Adams did a background check and unearthed a slew of arrests. That ain’t me, she said, pointing at her own mug shot.

On the other hand, there was also the woman who met all the physical requirements and scored well on the tests. She was vague about why she wanted to join, and only after Disponzio put her in boots did she spill it. She had family aboard one of the planes that hit the World Trade Center.

They could use a few more like her today. Five more, to be exact.

Across from Disponzio sits the calm center of the recruiting station, 33-year-old Sgt. Chris Hubbard, as soft-spoken as Disponzio is loud. Thin, with dark eyes and an unexpectedly warm smile that transforms his otherwise stoic face, Hubbard is painfully shy and experiences something like vertigo when he has to walk up to strangers and pitch them on the Army. One reason Hubbard volunteered to leave his beloved tank and become a recruiter was his desire to conquer this fear of strangers.

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In recruiting school, Hubbard says, instructors ordered him to recruit a tree. Practice your sales pitch on a tree, they said. Put that tree in boots. Now, that unorthodox practice makes perfect sense, because so many potential recruits are as responsive as trees. They stare as Hubbard tells them about the bonus they can earn for joining -- as much as $20,000. They barely blink beneath their sideways baseball caps when Hubbard mentions the thousands more they can earn toward college.

Earlier this month, Hubbard had a young teenager who was refreshingly animated, chatty -- almost personable. Hubbard reacted to the teenager with wild joy. “This is going to be our next soldier!” he announced, slapping the teenager on the back. Hubbard ran through the standard questions, and the teenager answered them all briskly, forthrightly. Then Hubbard said something about high school.

“I was home-schooled,” the boy said.

Say what?

Hubbard looked at the boy’s application. “Says here you went to Pine Lake High School,” he said.

“Yeah,” the boy said. “My mother made that name up.”

Hubbard had the teenager take the aptitude test, and hours later Hubbard got the news he was half-expecting. The teenager scored a 6. Thirty was failing -- 6 was barely breathing. Hubbard put his hands over his face and rubbed his eyes.

To Hubbard’s left sits Sgt. Kevin Matson, blond, thickly built, 25. He is the newest of the Westminster recruiters, with barely two months on the job. Earlier this year, Matson was patrolling the blazing streets of Mosul; now he’s sitting in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains at the height of a glittering, deliciously cool fall. His life would seem to have taken a turn for the better, but Matson can sound homesick for Iraq. “The camaraderie I found over there,” he says, “I’d do it all over again. Those soldiers, when they get into that situation, they become some of the best men you could be around.”

He stops talking abruptly, as if he doesn’t trust his voice.

Days ago, Hubbard found himself juggling several recruits, so he passed one to the left, to Matson. The bald, muscle-bound recruit sat tentatively on the chair beside Matson’s desk, as if the seat were scalding, and began to sweat profusely from the top of his head. Matson, who can guzzle Mountain Dew and smoke cigarettes all day without showing the slightest edge, was suddenly very anxious as the imposing recruit glared at him.

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Matson began with the standard questions, and the recruit answered in a voice impossibly raspy, like Wolfman Jack’s. Matson learned that Wolfman, who was in his early 30s, had served time years ago for armed robbery. Not an automatic disqualifier if Wolfman had kept his nose clean since.

“Do you mind if I ask why you want to join the Army?” Matson asked.

“Help the boys out,” Wolfman rasped.

Matson nodded.

“And were you aware that the Army has over 200 jobs to choose from?” Matson asked.

Wolfman answered flatly that he wanted to be a “shooter.”

Matson’s Adam’s apple toggled up and down. He asked if Wolfman knew about the GI Bill. Wolfman nodded. Matson asked whether Wolfman had given any thought to what he might like to study in college.

“Mortuary science,” Wolfman said.

“Really?” Matson said. “Do you mind if I ask why -- mortuary science?”

Wolfman leaned forward. “No complaints.”

Across from Matson, at the desk farthest from the front door, sits Sgt. Rodney Shivers, 35. Handsome, upbeat, always standing straight as if awaiting inspection, Shivers fought in Afghanistan and so many other conflicts that he’s lost count.

All the recruiters can be funny, but Shivers is the constant comic relief to the pressure of the monthly number. He keeps the mood loose by bellowing all day in his Texas twang, by calling everyone “dude,” by trying to put the FedEx guy in boots, by saying things like: “I’m Sgt. Shivers, that’s Shivers, like you’re cold,” and, “I need a break, dude; I need some me time. I need to sit and have a lollipop and have no one bother me until the last lick.”

And yet Shivers can be more reflective than any of the others about the rewards of recruiting. “I don’t look at this as selling the Army,” he says. “I don’t look at this as a job. I look at this as helping people out. Even if I won the lottery, I’d have my wife go pick up the check and I’d stay right here, doing what I’m doing.”

Having been shot at many times, Shivers worries about the safety of his recruits, but consoles himself with the thought that they will be superbly trained. “I know if they learned what they are supposed to learn,” he says, “they’ll come home.”

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Last year Shivers put more people in boots than any recruiter in Westminster. He enjoys being the best -- doesn’t hesitate to call himself The Best -- and vows to defend his recruiting title this year. At the start of the month he was on his typical roll. He had Jerod Burnett, a 23-year-old cook at a local sports bar, sitting in the chair beside his desk, saying he wanted to join. Burnett had two reasons. The first was 9/11. The second was a lack of meaning and purpose in his life. He was weary of his routine -- work hard, drink hard. He wanted to fight for something, be something. “A lot of times I think about when people ask, ‘What do you do?’ -- I think about actually being proud of what comes out of your mouth. ‘What do you do?’ ‘I’m a soldier.’ ”

He had no fear, he said. He was far more afraid of remaining in the suburbs of Denver than deploying to the suburbs of Fallouja. “I figure I can either die slow here,” he said, “or die fast over there.”

Shivers talked with Burnett about things that might keep him out, like his weight, and his criminal record -- a drunken-driving conviction two years ago. Shivers explained that the Army normally required a one-year waiting period after a drunken-driving conviction, but even after two years the Army might balk at Burnett because someone was badly injured in his accident. We’ll see, Shivers said, sending Burnett downtown for his physical.

Days later, the Army hacked Burnett. There was no detailed explanation, but it had something to do with Burnett’s criminal record. “Sad,” Shivers said. “Real sad. I’d like to have seen that guy after basic training.”

Thereafter, Shivers’ luck started drifting south. He heard through the grapevine that one of his other prospects -- a part-time bull-rider, full-time hay-baler -- had dropped out of high school. He struggled to close the deal with a waffling high school girl. It was a few Saturdays ago. The girl was dressed inexplicably for a slumber party, in plaid sweatpants and a sweatshirt to her thighs. She looked as if she were expecting to be put in slippers rather than boots. When she continued waffling, Shivers called in the artillery, his station commander, Sgt. Chris Warth.

Thin as a rifle, an unlit cigarette always dangling from his lips, Warth occupies a small office in the back of the recruiting station. When he emerges, it’s generally to ask the recruiters what they have in the hopper, or else to help them close. Warth talked that day with the girl in the sweatpants, his tone so gentle, so blandly patient, she could have never guessed at his combat experience, including a dicey stint in Somalia just before the famous shooting-down of the Black Hawk.

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“I really want discipline,” the girl told Warth. “There’s no place I can get that unless I’m a troubled teen on a daytime talk show!”

Don’t worry, Warth said, chuckling, you’ll get discipline in the Army.

“So,” the girl said, embarrassed, “if I sign, I won’t necessarily be -- put in war?”

“There are enough of us messed up in the head like me and [Shivers] who want the infantry, that you probably won’t be used at the front line,” Warth said.

Shivers thought he and Warth had the girl convinced, but she later phoned Shivers and said her mother had begged her not to join.

Another recruiter might have lost his confidence, but such disappointments seem to bounce off Shivers. He rebounded from the girl in sweatpants, from Burnett, from several other letdowns, and put three people in boots over the next few weeks, including the lanky young man now breezing through the door, Tory Lipsey, who scored high on his test and wants to do intelligence work. He ships off to basic the day after tomorrow.

Lipsey slides into the chair beside Shivers’ desk and jokes with Shivers while looking over his final papers. He could sit and talk to Shivers all day, clearly, but Shivers has to run to a meeting with the parents of a 17-year-old. (Recruits younger than 18 need parental consent.) An hour later, Shivers returns, triumphant, a signed contract in hand. He barely has time to gloat before running off to his next meeting -- a single mother who phoned the recruiting station days ago and told Shivers that if she didn’t join the Army, right now, “she was going to end up hooked on drugs or having a lot more babies.”

The woman said she’d meet Shivers at the library in downtown Denver, but when Shivers arrives, she’s not there. He waits, and waits, drinking coffee, doing some “P3ing,” recruiter-speak for prospecting. Watching the mass of humanity that pools before the library, Shivers is like a fisherman discovering a new trout stream. Now he wades in. He flops on a bench beside a kid in baggy pants, strolls up to a girl waiting for the bus, thrusts his card at a scruffy guy smoking a cigarette. He gets them all smiling, giggling at his twang and his buoyant energy, then asks: “Hey dude -- you ever think about the Army?”

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Hubbard loves P3ing with Shivers. Because of his shyness, Hubbard regards P3ing with Shivers as a grand holiday and an invaluable tutorial. He watches in awe as Shivers stops at a pastry shop to praise the bakers on the cinnamon smell, pauses at the phone kiosk to ask the clerks about the new technology, darts into the Goth shop to ask about the latest styles. Only when the Goth teens are guffawing at something ridiculous that Shivers said about heavy metal does he ask if they wouldn’t rather be doing something more with their life than selling nose rings.

Cruising the mall with Shivers weeks ago, Hubbard noticed that the security guards weren’t enjoying Shivers’ performance quite as much as he was. The mall doesn’t want its customers being harassed, Hubbard said, so recruiters have to be discreet. As he and Shivers ducked around a corner, trying to shake the guards, Shivers spotted something in a store window. A suit of armor. He pressed his face to the window and said he’d like to buy one of those someday. Have it on display in his house. Better yet, he’d like to come back in his next life as a knight.

“People had more respect for soldiers back then,” Shivers said, his tone suddenly wistful, almost shy. He sounded, for half a second, like Hubbard.

After dark, Christopher Hamilton arrives. He ships tomorrow to Ft. Leonard Wood, Mo., but first he must sit in the chair beside Adams’ desk and wait while Adams fills out his final paperwork. Hamilton wears a grin on his face and three rings in his right ear, which he’ll soon be removing for good, Adams says under his breath.

Hamilton is the ninth -- and, apparently, the last -- recruit to be signed this month. He joins Solomon and Lipsey and Gill, a willowy, red-haired woman who may have trouble in basic training, since she passed out doing practice push-ups at the recruiting station the other night. Then there was Flood, who went in as a computer technician, and Dodson, a radar specialist, and Fisk, a tanker. Also, there was Martino -- the young man who wanted to blow stuff up. (Adams got him over his squeamishness about landmines.) Finally there was Geisler, a doughy teenager who returned to the recruiting station after the swearing-in ceremony downtown and bragged to the recruiters about joining the infantry. He preened. He swaggered back and forth. He looked as if he might strike his own chest and proclaim himself a man. Then he phoned his mom and asked her to please come pick him up at the recruiting station.

Adams stows his pens and papers, puts on his beret and looks at the clock above the door. The day, the month, is finally over.

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Nine, he says. Nine is the final number. Except it’s really 10, because Hill has a contract waiting to be signed by McCarthy, a young man whose fiancee is forcing him to join because she wants to travel.

Adams sounds disappointed about not meeting the number, but not defeated. Some months are slower than others, he says. Also, there were mitigating factors. Disponzio missed two weeks, away at an Army training school, and Matson had his wisdom teeth out.

On your feet, Adams tells Hamilton. Time to go to the hotel, where the Army lodges all recruits the night before they ship. Hamilton stands. Hubbard stands and shuts off his computer. Hill stands and checks the fax one last time. Shivers stands and collects his tins of chewing tobacco.

As they change into their civilian clothes, the recruiters talk about things other than recruiting -- movies, kids, football -- and the air crackles with new numbers, benign numbers, wonderfully meaningless numbers.

“Shrek 2.” Eagles 28, Cowboys 7. The fact that it’s already 8:40. It will take Hill 90 minutes to get home on I-25. He doesn’t mind. He likes the long drive. Longer the better. He likes to put Kenny G on the stereo, he says, and think about absolutely nothing.

As everyone drifts toward the door, as Hubbard shuts off the lights, someone mentions next month, which arrives in a few hours.

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“Hey dudes,” Shivers says. “What’s next month’s number?”

“Twelve,” Adams says.

“Twelve?” Shivers says.

“But it’s really 16,” Adams says.

Shivers takes a step back, aghast.

“Dude!” he says. “Why?”

Adams smiles.

“Because of the four we didn’t have this month.”

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