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thedrifter
06-27-07, 07:12 AM
Army's Racial Makeup Sees Major Changes

June 26, 2007
Peter Bacque -- Richmond Times-Dispatch

America's Army is looking more like America.

While the percentage of black and white soldiers in the Army is declining, the proportion of Hispanic and Asian soldiers is climbing dramatically.

Some key figures tell the story:

-- Blacks decreased from 28.3 percent of the active-duty Army's soldiers in 1983 to 22 percent in 2005.

-- Whites declined from 64 percent in 1983 to 60.8 percent in 2005.

-- Hispanics on active-duty increased from 3.8 percent in 1983 to 10.5 percent in 2005.

-- Asians in the service grew from 1.3 percent in 1983 to 4 percent in 2005.

"We used to call it a melting pot," said Orlando Bridges, a black instructor at Fort Lee. "I look at it as a tossed salad," rich in different colors and qualities.

With the state's heavy military presence - particularly Fort Lee, Fort Eustis, Fort Belvoir and the Pentagon itself - Virginians will see the Army's new face on the streets of central Virginia, Hampton Roads and Northern Virginia.

Experts say the active-duty Army's composition reflects changes in America's population, though personal, economic, social and military factors also play major roles.

"I've never talked to a soldier who joined the military for one reason only," said military sociologist David Segal of the University of Maryland. "Generally their motivations contain a mix of something economic and something patriotic."

Soldiers at Fort Lee from different ethnic groups recently talked about their career choices:

-- Pvt. Jeffery Wong is a first-generation Chinese-American from San Francisco. He was first attracted to military life through his experiences in Junior ROTC in high school.

Currently in training at Fort Lee, the 20-year-old said he is finding the Army an institution that he can fit into and use to fulfill his plans to go on to college.

"There's a lot of respect, a lot of camaraderie," Wong said. "We're all soldiers here. Nobody's different than anybody else."

-- Sgt. Rebecca Biggs, of Seminole, Okla., enlisted because, "I wanted to make a better life for myself, and be a part of something big."

Married to a soldier and the mother of a 3 1/2-year-old daughter, the white 28-year-old said she intends to leave the Army at the end of her enlistment: "Now we're trying to let our daughter be our priority."

-- Second Lt. Aimee Lewis, 27, of Cleveland, joined the Army as an enlisted soldier. She won a college scholarship from the service and completed her degree.

"I want to go to law school now," and have a career as an Army lawyer, the black Fort Lee officer said.

Since the late 1990s, the Army has made a concerted effort to attract more Hispanics to enlist. It sees them as an untapped market, experts said. In little more than two decades, the percentage of Hispanic soldiers in the Army has nearly tripled.

And Asians, while still relatively small at 4 percent, have grown more than threefold since the early 1980s, closely approaching their 4.4 percent proportion of the total U.S. population.

The shifting picture of the Army's makeup "makes perfect sense," said demographer Qian Cai, of the University of Virginia's Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service. "As the public's getting more diverse, the military population will follow that pattern."

Nonetheless, the Army does not mirror American society in every demographic aspect.

Blacks continue to serve in the Army in far greater proportion - about double - than their presence in the U.S. population.

Additionally, America's lower middle economic class is over-represented in the Army, which has been a way for people to move up in society since World War II.

As a result, Texas A&M University sociologist James Burk said, the Army "looks more and more like the center of America."

And Segal pointed out that women, though they are half the U.S. population, make up only 14 percent of the Army's soldiers.

The fundamental reason for the shifting Army demographics is the better economic opportunities for black high-school graduates in the civilian sector, said Bernard D. Rostker, a senior fellow with the RAND Corp. in Washington and former undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness.

While the Army can make exceptions, as a rule "to get in the military, you have to be crime-free, you have to be drug-free, you have to be a high-school graduate and score in the upper half of the mental-capacity tests," Rostker said.

"There are many more opportunities for blacks who can fit that bill than there were 20 or 30 years ago when blacks flocked to the military because it was the one nondiscriminatory employer," Rostker said.

SOLDIERS' STORIES

"I wasn't really doing much in my life. Since high school ROTC, I always saw myself in the military."
- Pvt. Jeffrey Wong, 20, of San Francisco

"My family's been in it prior to the beginning of time. I was born into it, I married into it, so I decided to try it."
- Pfc. Tawanda Carter 28, of Winston-Salem, N.C.

"It was a dream I had when I was a teenager."
- Pvt. Myrna Perez 39, of Ponce, Puerto Rico.

Ellie