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thedrifter
10-30-05, 08:30 AM
October 30, 2005
Sergeant Guzman's War
By JENNIFER MASCIA

THE lanky 15-year-old with the velvety skin flashed a deceptive grin at the man in combat fatigues standing near the curb. "You ain't no good!" she shouted at the soldier. "You stealing these young people!"

Staff Sgt. Richard Guzman looked up from the crowd of black and Hispanic students clustered near the entrance to the Manhattan Center for Science and Mathematics, a high school in East Harlem. Sidling over to the girl, he held out his hand. "Hey," he said, his voice a sleepy mix of fine Long Island sand and honey.

"It's nothing against you," she replied without extending a hand. "It's people like you." Then she scurried across East 116th Street, another battle lost in the war for New York's youth. But no matter. As far as Sergeant Guzman was concerned, the neighborhood remained ripe with possibilities. "Everybody's thought about the military," he said later as his dark eyes scanned the neighborhood's pedestrian-clogged streets. "I mean, look at all the people here."

Sergeant Guzman, 26, is station commander of the Army recruiting unit in the Armed Forces Career Center, known informally as the Harlem Knights recruiting center, on 125th Street and Lenox Avenue. A product of a hardscrabble upbringing in Richmond Hill, Queens, he joined the Army after high school largely to straighten himself out. Today, he presides over a warren of rooms across the street from Bill Clinton's office that is one of the more powerful of the engines that keep an increasingly unpopular war up and running.

With a monthly average of five recruits, the Harlem Knights center, which serves both Harlem and East Harlem, is ranked in the top three in its battalion, which includes much of the New York metropolitan region. Since his arrival 10 months ago, Sergeant Guzman has signed up 12 people.

This is not an easy time to be a military recruiter. Last week, fatalities from the war reached 2,000, and last month a New York Times/CBS News poll showed that the number of Americans who thought that the United States had made the right decision in taking military action against Iraq had fallen to 44 percent.

Much has been said about the efficacy of plying poor minority neighborhoods for recruits. But several factors make Sergeant Guzman's job easier.

Unlike the Marines, Army infantry and Special Forces, which send volunteers straight from boot camp to the front lines, the Harlem Knights Army unit signs potential recruits up for more than 200 noncombat jobs, everything from laundry and textile specialist to flute player to dental specialist. Sergeant Guzman cannot guarantee that his recruits will not go to Iraq; in fact, he acknowledges, about half of them will probably end up there, though not necessarily on the front lines. But the higher a recruit scores on the basic military aptitude test, the more noncombat specialties are available. "Pulling a trigger is not technically complicated," he said.

Sergeant Guzman also attributes the Army's relative success among the youth of Harlem and East Harlem to the problems that continue to plague those neighborhoods, notably poor schools and dismal job prospects. He has scoped out prospective recruits living in apartments with three people to a room and no bed.

"I can recruit two to three people a month," Sergeant Guzman said, "no matter if it's World War III or a recession."

Smooth Talker

Sergeant Guzman's skills of persuasion are not limited to sidewalk encounters. The other day, with the soothing, gravelly tones of a late-night disc jockey, he was on the phone, trying to lure an unsure 21-year-old girl into military service. "I'm gonna keep it real with you, and you gonna keep it real with me," he murmured into the receiver. "I'm setting you up for success. When you actually go to boot camp, you're gonna be well trained."

Then he tried another tack: "Imagine your wedding. I can see you in your uniform." He laughed a throaty laugh, his lips parted to reveal a full white smile. "An Army dress? Yeah, a camouflaged wedding dress."

Later, as the rhymes of Jay-Z poured out of a stereo perched on a bookshelf, Sergeant Guzman tapped away on his laptop, courting the 18-to-24 demographic via e-mail.

Near the entrance to the office, under a yellow banner that reads "An Army of One," a bulletin board presented photos of 50 young men and women, mostly black and Hispanic, with whom his approach had succeeded. Each photo listed the recruit's name, age, high school or college from which he or she had been recruited, and his or her enlistment bonus. Nearby was a postcard addressed to Sergeant Guzman from a recruit at boot camp. "Greetings from Henderson, Nevada!" it read. "Thank you for helping me enlist in the U.S. Army!"

Though so far only a few of Sergeant Guzman's recruits have been sent to Iraq, each time he receives a letter from the parents of a deployed soldier, he ships "his" recruit a care package that contains copies of Jet magazine and Sports Illustrated and homemade tapes of Hot 97 radio broadcasts.

Sergeant Guzman will not be going to Iraq himself. "Recruitment is very safe as far as deployment is concerned," he said. Nevertheless, he admits: "Half of me wants to go. The money is ridiculous."

While a dental assistant, for example, can net $1,400 a month, a young soldier in combat can net $2,000 to $2,500 a month, tax free. With enlistment bonuses and tuition assistance topping out at $40,000, it pays for Harlem recruits to be An Army of One.

It pays for Sergeant Guzman, too. Of $2,496 he receives as a monthly housing allowance, he pays $2,000 to live in a three-bedroom apartment in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and pockets the difference. He travels to work in a government-provided 2005 Dodge Stratus. With his $2,600 monthly income, plus the $425 monthly "special duty pay" that recruiters receive, he can indulge in his passion for diamond stud earrings, vintage X-Men comic books and sports jerseys that can cost up to $400 apiece.

On the advice of a colonel friend, Sergeant Guzman has begun to invest in the stock market; his portfolio includes G.E., Home Depot and Janus Funds. "I try to stay diversified," he explained.

Just recently, he bought his first Rolex. It cost $8,000. "Everything I've ever wanted in life, the Army's provided for me," he said, sipping a Capri Sun from its silver pouch.

In Search of a Calling

It was a different story for Sergeant Guzman 22 years ago, when his father was gunned down on a street in Richmond Hill "for being at the wrong place at the wrong time." The son, who was 4, suspects there is more to the story, but his mother, Carmen Guzman, a retired cosmetologist, would just say, "Your daddy's in a better place."

An only child, Richard Guzman was 15 and, as he put it, "hanging out with the wrong crowd" when a fellow he knew pointed a gun at his face and demanded his Nikes, a trendy pair of Bo Jacksons. "I kind of had lowlife friends," he admitted.

That year, 1994, two friends robbed a bodega and killed the cashier. "I was so close to being involved," Sergeant Guzman said. "I'm very lucky to be alive."

A couple of years later, with family and friends in the service and certain that "school really wasn't my thing," he enrolled in the Army's delayed-entry program, in which he participated in monthly drills and some basic training. After he scored well on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, the basic aptitude test for entrance to the military, a recruiter came calling.

What Sergeant Guzman calls the laid-back job choices appealed to him, and he decided to become an administration clerk. After nine weeks in boot camp and postings in Fort Bragg, N.C., Seattle and Alaska, he became attracted to the idea of career recruiting, and spent four years working at a recruiting station in Astoria, Queens, before moving to Harlem.

He feels that he has found his perfect match. "I don't think you'll ever find a recruiter like myself," he said. "I love this business."

With its typical 8-a.m.-to-9-p.m. schedule, recruiting leaves him little time for a social life (although he keeps an updated black book, just in case). And around the office, he hears tales of recruiters in other jurisdictions who suffer nervous breakdowns while trying to reach their quotas. "That's where the improprieties come in," he said. "That's where you fake a diploma."

Though he won't be going to Iraq, he maintains that the Iraqi war was unavoidable. "I don't see how we couldn't have gone," he said. "The World Trade Center was attacked. The Pentagon was attacked. We had to do something."

And weapons of mass destruction?

"I'm thinking there are some there that we haven't found in the underground caves or whatever," he said. "I believe that something is there, maybe Russian artillery. We have Hussein in custody, we killed his sons. We need him to confess or something."

An Escape Route Out

Unlike Sergeant Guzman, Alanna Chataigne does not support the war and thinks the American troops should come home immediately.

"It's just causing more terrorist attacks, here and in London, us being over there," said Alanna, a 17-year-old of Haitian descent who wears clear-rimmed glasses and has braids pulled back into a ponytail. Still, Alanna, a senior enrolled in the R.O.T.C. program at the High School of Graphic Communication Arts in Midtown, participates in the Army's delayed-entry program, just as Sergeant Guzman did, and she is counting the days until she turns 18 so she can fly off to boot camp and leave Harlem behind. "I have no life," she explained. "With the knowledge I learn from the Army, I want to go around the world."

Precocious and poised, Alanna acts the way a teenager thinks that an adult should act. During one of her frequent visits to the Harlem recruiting station, she rattled off the chronology of the founding of the American armed forces - "I was born exactly 212 years after the Marine Corps," she announced proudly - before waxing rhapsodic, in equal measure, about Mozart and the reggaeton artist Daddy Yankee.

Showing up several times a week in her black and gold "Army of One" T-shirt, Alanna runs errands for the recruiters and banters with the officers. "Watch the language!" she scolded Sergeant Guzman one afternoon when he fired off an expletive. When he complained that his Snapple was too warm, she jumped up to get ice.

"The Army is in her blood," Sergeant Guzman said of Alanna's passion for the military, which is shared by a sister at Marine boot camp and a stepfather in the National Guard. But Sergeant Guzman also thinks that Alanna turned to the Army to escape a rough family life on West 130th Street - basically, as Sergeant Guzman described it, "that situation that any person has with a stepparent."

Alanna would agree that the Army offers an appealing escape route for her. "My mom just wants me to get out of the city," she said. "She wants me to see something different. She lived here all her life."

A Battle for Hearts and Minds

On a recent afternoon, Sergeant Guzman dropped by City College on Convent Avenue and 138th Street to obtain its "stop-out" list, a register of students who have dropped out of college midcareer and might be likely recruits.

Sergeant Guzman acknowledged that some high schools and colleges were resistant to his presence, and potential recruits often report back that their teachers try to dissuade them from military service. He finds this attitude downright unpatriotic.

"You'd think that given the times and needs of the country now, schools would be more understanding," he said, seeming perplexed by guidance counselors who encourage college over the military. "I've got a mission from the president of the United States. These schools are not going to tell me what to do."

After a quick chat with a City College receptionist, he emerged with a thick stack of papers containing the names of thousands of recent dropouts ripe for recruiting. Holding up the list as a proud father would his newborn child, he said: "All this is potential recruits. This gets me excited right here."

Heading back to his car, he elaborated on his approach.

"I don't like taking no for an answer," he said. "I've got a mission to accomplish each month. And it's not just recruiting. If I say no, I won't get anywhere in life, man." Placing the list safely in the trunk next to the boxes of key chains, stickers and yellow water bottles he gives to potential recruits, he added: "Like in the dating scene. Sometimes no means yes. She just says it to make you want her more, you know?"

Yo Soy El Army

Every Harlem recruiter has goals: to make two appointments a day with prospective recruits, to get four of those recruits interviewed that week, and to administer an aptitude test to two of them with the hope of a single passing grade.

Although curious teenagers sometimes make their way to the Harlem office, most of the recruiting is done in the street, which was why Sergeant Guzman was out in front of the Manhattan Center for Science and Mathematics that late summer day. He had set up his folding table, which is wallpapered with images of soldiers in combat, in a patch of shade provided by the scaffolding that surrounded the school. As he laid out pens, blank address cards and stickers that read "Yo Soy El Army," a small crowd of rowdy teenagers began peppering him with questions.

"If you go to the Army to play ball, you got to serve four years, man?"

"How many push-ups can you do?"

"Is it true they can kick you out?"

"You think they're gonna do that draft thing?"

Sergeant Guzman nodded to this one.

"Oh, I am running from that!" said a young man sporting a heavy gold chain.

"You might not have a choice," Sergeant Guzman replied dryly.

To each teenager he offered earnest eye contact and a spirited handshake. He opened by asking, "What year are you?" and closed with, "Do good in school." Some of the young people filled out the address cards, giving the Army their contact information; when they did, Sergeant Guzman watched over their shoulders like a hawk. Upon returning to the office, Sergeant Guzman would file the cards and call the young people who had filled them out. If a person sounded hesitant on the phone, Sergeant Guzman would send him or her information and phone once more in the hope of setting up an interview.

"Who's a senior?" he called into a crowd of teenagers outside the Manhattan Center school. Most were curious, but politely declined to volunteer their status.

"Hello, I like your T-shirt," he said to a girl wearing a camouflage tank top. Smiling, she moved on.

Sergeant Guzman greeted familiar faces by their first names. In his opinion, matching names to faces is part of the job. "It's like if you were buying a car and the sales rep didn't remember your name," he said. "You'd think it was funny."

While Sergeant Guzman followed one teenager down the street, a group of girls commandeered the folding table. "Buenas," one of them said, handing out T-shirts to her friends as if she were a staff sergeant herself. Her friends began taking Sergeant Guzman's pens and attaching his stickers to their stomachs.

On average, Sergeant Guzman estimates, each visit to a high school nets three or four interviews, two passing aptitude test scores and one recruit. This session would attract one teenager, who stopped by the recruiting center a few days later, failed the test, and was sent home by Sergeant Guzman to study.

The crowd at Manhattan Center High had dispersed into the bright summer day. But before leaving, Sergeant Guzman plastered "Yo Soy El Army" stickers onto the scaffolding poles. Just in case.

Ellie