Marine recruiter faces court martial [Archive] - Marine Corps Community for USMC Veterans

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06-04-07, 06:19 AM

N.J. Marine facing fight of his life at court-martial
Sunday, June 03, 2007
BY WAYNE WOOLLEY
Star-Ledger Staff

Next to combat, recruiting duty is considered the toughest job in the military. The hours are grueling, the paperwork never ending and the pressure to find a steady stream of young people willing to go to war is unyielding.

Marine Staff Sgt. Chris Cassese knew all that when he volunteered for the duty in 2004. The 11-year veteran figured a stint on recruiting duty would boost his chances for promotion and allow him to spend three years with his wife and two young sons in his native New Jersey. It would be one more stop in a career Cassese hoped would end with his retirement as a top enlisted man.

It didn't work out that way.

Instead, Cassese, 35, faces a court-martial tomorrow at Parris Island, S.C., and the possibility of a year in military prison or other punishments including a bad conduct discharge -- a virtual death sentence in the civilian job market.

Cassese is charged with "willful disobedience of a superior commissioned officer" for abandoning his duties as a recruiter in October -- 10 months before his assignment was supposed to end.

Cassese does not dispute the charge, but says he had no choice. He says he was unable to continue with a job that demanded a 90-hour work week at a time when his family desperately needed his attention. Among the family troubles facing Cassese was a threat by his 10-year-old son to commit suicide, according to Cassese.

"I never thought my whole career would come down in shambles like this," Cassese said recently. "What's all this I've been hearing for years about the Marines taking care of their own?"

The Marine Corps has declined to discuss most aspects of Cassese's case, citing Privacy Act issues. The Marines, however, have said that Cassese disobeyed a direct order to schedule interviews with potential recruits.

Cassese's attorney acknowledges that his client left his post and that the reason for doing so may end up being immaterial in court.

For Cassese, it all comes down to putting family before the job. To the Marines, the case simply comes down to honoring the commitment he made.

Recruiters from the Army and Marines -- the forces suffering the heaviest losses in Iraq -- are under intense pressure to make their monthly quota to fill the ranks of an all-volunteer force. The increased pressure has led some recruiters to cut corners.

"It's the toughest duty in the military. It's particularly tough in the middle of the war," said Eugene Fidell, the executive director of the National Institute of Military Justice, an organization of former military lawyers who now represent troops in their private practices. "And it's particularly, particularly tough in a war that's losing popular support."

More than a dozen soldiers and Marines have been court-martialed over the past five years for attempting to enlist unqualified applicants by helping them cheat on drug tests, or by forging high school diplomas, or by doctoring aptitude test scores.

There are no such allegations in Cassese's case. In a written response to questions, Sgt. Kevin Hayner, a Marine spokesman in New Jersey, said Cassese allegedly violated Article 90 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the federal law that governs the behavior of members of the armed forces. Article 90 views assaults of superior officers with the same gravity as willfully disobeying their orders.

In Cassese's case, the order he refused to follow came from his commanding officer, Maj. Kevin Norton. The officer, who signed the paperwork that began the court-martial proceedings against Cassese, declined comment.

'I'D TAKE IRAQ OVER THIS'
Cassese said he tried to dig himself out of his legal trouble and salvage his career by making an offer to join another unit, but was rebuffed by his superiors.

"If they could just say, 'Let's forget all this and you need to go to Iraq,' I'd go tomorrow," Cassese said. "I'd take Iraq over this in a heartbeat."

After Cassese left his post, he was temporarily assigned to work in a warehouse at the state recruiting headquarters at Naval Weapons Station Earle in Colts Neck, a 150-mile round trip from his home. After Lt. Christopher Kannady, one of Cassese's military lawyers, objected, Cassese was reassigned in March to a Marine Reserve center in Dover.

"There's nothing about him that would lead us to believe he's a bad person or bad Marine," Kannady said in a telephone interview from Parris Island.

Part of the reason Cassese says he became a recruiter was to repay a debt to the Marines for giving him direction in life.

He graduated from Bergenfield High School in 1989 and then from Bergen Community College before heading to William Paterson University in Wayne. He quit after two years. Drinking beer and playing on the school's hockey team had become more important than his grades, he said.

So he enlisted, trained as a transportation specialist and spent the next decade winning steady promotions and assignments with greater responsibilities. Early in his Marine career, he married and had two sons, Cameron, now 11, and Tyler, now 10. He was stationed in Okinawa, Japan, when the chance to become a recruiter came up -- a job generally offered to Marines considered the strongest performers.

Janine Cassese saw the assignment in New Jersey as a chance for her and her husband to be closer to family. Chris Cassese saw it as a chance to gain a promotion edge over the 400 other staff sergeants in his military specialty.

OFF TO A GOOD START
After seven weeks at recruiter school in San Diego, Cassese was assigned to the Clifton station in August 2004 and given a territory that included Paterson.

Life was good at first. The family moved into a house on Lake Hopatcong and Cassese started making the rounds at high schools, shopping malls and any other place where young people gather.

In order to keep a steady stream of recruits headed to basic training, the Marines set monthly targets for new enlistments, called "the mission." The workload drops considerably for the rest of the month if the goal is reached early. "Make mission, go fishin'," is the motto.

Cassese got a warm reception in Paterson. More than 100 students would routinely show up to take the military aptitude tests. When Cassese was around recruiters from the other armed services, he said the kids tended to gravitate to his dress blue uniform.

Still, bridging the gap between kids who wanted to be Marines and kids qualified to be Marines was a challenge. The Department of Defense says only three in 10 people age 17 to 24 are qualified to join the military, and perhaps only one of the three wants to enlist. The rest suffer from medical conditions or have criminal records or score too poorly on aptitude tests.

Cassese said he wasn't afraid to steer kids away who might have been otherwise qualified if he thought leaving New Jersey would be a hardship or if he did not think they could hack it in the Corps.

He concedes he wasn't setting the world on fire in Paterson, landing an average of just under two recruits a month. Top recruiters sometimes bring in four or five "contracts" a month.

"I had good days and I had bad days," Cassese said. "But at the end of the month I always had my numbers."

UNFAMILIAR TERRITORY
That changed last spring, when Cassese was reassigned to Bloomingdale in northwestern Passaic County. He was unfamiliar with the area. High school administrators were far less welcoming than in Paterson. Most students Cassese met were headed for college.

Cassese said he tried harder. If he was working an average of 12 hours a day, six days a week in Paterson, it stretched to 15 hours a day in Bloomingdale.

A month passed without Cassese landing a single contract. Then two. He said his superiors started scrutinizing his "scheduling and results book," a thick black log recruiters use to document how every minute of their time is spent, with detailed information about their efforts to land recruits.

They also started hounding him about his weight, which had ballooned to 260 pounds, a result, he said, of long hours and too much eating on the run. At 6-foot-1, Cassese should weigh 208 pounds under Corps guidelines.

Shedding the extra pounds weren't his priority at that point. "I was fighting for my life, trying to make numbers," he said.

Things only got worse over the summer. Cassese's older son started acting out in school and became moody and withdrawn. Then his father, Harry Cassese, a Marine veteran of Korea, landed in a hospital intensive care unit with a life-threatening respiratory ailment.

AS BAD AS IT GETS
Cassese said he tried to quit recruiting duty in June, hoping for a new assignment that would allow more time with his family, but his superiors told him he couldn't. So he stayed.

Then, on Oct. 19, Janine Cassese called her husband in a panic. She needed him home immediately. Their son had threatened suicide.

Janine Cassese said a decade as a Marine's wife prepared her to handle most emergencies on her own. But not this.

"My 10-year-old son telling me he wants to kill himself was not something I could handle myself," Janine Cassese said. "If he were anyplace else, I'm sure he would have gotten a Red Cross message and (been) sent home."

After Cassese got the call, he told his superiors he was finished with recruiting. He said he knew the implication of what he was doing. He had already been warned once he needed to finish his obligation.

"In the end, I made a choice," he said. "I wasn't going to come home to find my son in a box. I'll go down swinging before I'd ever let that happen."

Tomorrow, Cassese will have his day in court.

Meanwhile, Chris and Janine Cassese said their son's mental health improved under a regimen of counseling, medication and more time with his father.

READY FOR BATTLE
Members of his defense team, Kannady and Capt. Joel Maxson, declined to discuss their defense strategy. Janine Cassese, however, said last week that the defense lawyers have told her to be prepared to testify and that they may put her son on the stand. The court-martial Cassese faces will be held before a military judge and the possibility of a jury of three fellow Marines.

Kannady said that if Cassese is found guilty, chances of a military prison term would be remote, a bad conduct discharge more likely.

Kenneth Bruce Martin, a retired Marine attorney now in private practice in Florida, said a bad conduct discharge following a court-martial is a black mark for any service member looking for a job.

"It's a federal criminal conviction. ... It's definitely a negative," Martin said. "'Especially for someone who was in for awhile. It's not like being a 19-year-old kid who got in and changed his mind and then refused orders to get out."

Cassese knows this well.

"How would I care for a family of four with a bad conduct discharge and a gas-pumping job?" he said.

Instead, he's hoping for acquittal at court-martial or some kind of plea agreement that would get him out of the Marine Corps with discharge papers that won't raise red flags for prospective employers.

Besides being a Marine, law enforcement is the only job Cassese can imagine doing. He hopes he gets the chance.

No matter what happens, he says his time as a Marine made him a better person. He'd even steer young people to the Marines if he thought it would help them.

"I'll still recruit when I get out," he said. "'If I could be a cop, I'd be in a good position to reach a lot of kids."

Wayne Woolley covers the military. He may be reached at wwoolley@starledger.com or (973) 392-1559.

Ellie