thedrifter
07-15-07, 08:47 AM
Pressure on the home front Timothy Walker is a Marine recruiter who can't let war deter him
Sunday, July 15, 2007
BY WAYNE WOOLLEY
Star-Ledger Staff
Marine Sgt. Timothy Walker made 1,176 telephone phone calls last month -- the number the computer at headquarters said the New Jersey recruiter needed to dial to find at least two young people willing to join "the few, the proud."
In between the calls, the eight-year veteran drove thousands of miles across southern Monmouth County and knocked on dozens of doors. Sometimes he literally chased groups of young people until they stopped long enough to hear his spiel and take his business card.
There were days when Walker, 26, left his wife and two young daughters sleeping in their beds at 4 a.m. and did not come home until midnight. Even on "short" days that run from 8 a.m. to past 8 p.m., Walker knows exactly how he will feel when it ends.
"Exhausted. When I get home at night, I just want to sit down, turn the tube on and pass out on the couch," Walker says. "If your feet hurt, that means you worked that day. If your brain hurts, you know you worked that day. Tough job. Tough times."
Spend a day with Walker as he works the phones and hits the streets in manic pursuit of new recruits and you see how the Iraq war and its growing casualty count take a toll on the men and women responsible for filling the ranks of an all-volunteer military. A strong economy and millions of young people made ineligible for military service by health or legal troubles only add to the strain.
The Marine Corps considers recruiters to be fighting the battle in Iraq, only on a different front. The tools at hand are slick television advertisements, sophisticated marketing databases and the most rudimentary of sales pitches: "Here's my card, call me."
Like the troops, the recruiters' battle gets harder every day.
There were 175,000 Marines on active duty when the war began in 2003 and 35,000 new enlistments that year. Since then, the required number of recruits has grown steadily under a Congressional mandate to increase the size of the Marine Corps by nearly 10 percent by the end of the decade. The Marines needed 38,000 active-duty recruits last year and 1,000 more than that this year. In 2010, the number will swell to 45,000.
Nearly 1,000 Marines have been killed in Iraq, accounting for more than a quarter of the war's combat deaths even though the Corps makes up only about 20 percent of the ground troops. Thousands more have been wounded.
Although the Marines have made every year-end quota since the war began, they missed several monthly targets in 2005. But June's recruiting numbers were good to the Marines -- they hit 110 percent of their monthly quota of 3,924. By contrast, the Army, which has suffered heavy losses associated with the recent troop surge, missed its goal of 8,400 recruits by nearly 20 percent.
When Walker started recruiting nearly three years ago, he struggled to meet his monthly quota of two "contracts" a month. He turned things around the past two years and now consistently lands three new Marines a month, putting his performance near the top of the state's 64 recruiters.
Along the way, Walker says he learned to balance the demands of his job with his roles as a husband and father. He says his job performance improved -- and the hours he was able to spend with his family grew -- as he learned to size up potential recruits.
"What is a kid looking for?" Walker says. "Is it discipline? Is it a challenge? It may just be money for school or a better life."
He boils his recruiting philosophy down to this: "You can't rush them to join. You can't force them to join. All you want is for the opportunity to sit down and talk with them and let them know what the Marine Corps is all about. The kids will come. They will join."
'BLUES AND A SWORD'
It's 10:40 a.m. on a Tuesday in late June and Walker is behind a desk In a cramped storefront office in Bradley Beach.
He's been working since 8, starting his day a few miles to the north at the Monmouth County recruiting headquarters in Tinton Falls, where he met his boss, Gunnery Sgt. Fabian Jimenez, to go over plans for the day. Now Walker is back in a satellite office where he's a one-man band, searching for future Marines in an area that runs from the public housing projects of Asbury Park to the manicured lawns of Deal. Walker studies a thick binder filled with the names and phone numbers of recent Neptune High School graduates.
Then he starts dialing, getting one answering machine after another, leaving variations of a 15-second pitch he'll repeat dozens of times today.
"This is a message for Dustin. Dustin, this is Sgt. Walker with the Marines. Just giving you a call to see what's been going on since you graduated, seeing if you're interested in sitting down with me to talk about some of the opportunities in the Marine Corps."
The daunting number of calls Walker was assigned for June is based on a computer-generated model that looked at the number of calls he made the previous month. The rule of thumb is 15 calls yields one appointment with a candidate. One in four kids who makes an appointment ultimately becomes a Marine.
As Walker dials, Leonard Peterson sits a few feet away, clicking away on a computer, taking a practice version of the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, a test known as the ASVAB.
Lanky and wearing a T-shirt with the words "Ten Commandments of Hustle" and a black Yankees cap, Peterson, 25, was standing on the sidewalk in front of the recruiting station when Walker arrived. He was ready to join. Immediately.
"Right now, in my life, things ain't going right," Peterson tells Walker. "I've made up my mind. I just need to know how soon I can start."
Walker slows him down. "I've got to ask you a couple of questions to see if you qualify."
Walker asks Peterson a standard series of questions that runs for about 30 minutes and is designed to cover the basics of an applicant's life, from education to health to past drug use and brushes with the law.
Master Sgt. Alex Rodriguez, the Marine responsible for training and evaluating recruiters in New Jersey, says many applicants are disqualified in the initial screening, most often for having offensive tattoos, piercings or serious criminal records.
"There's a lot of young men and women who are interested, but for a variety of reasons, you can't put them in the Marine Corps," says Rodriguez, who is following Walker on this morning to reacquaint himself with the sergeant's territory. Rodriguez will need to pick Walker's replacement when his three-year tour ends in December.
The Marine Corps is the smallest branch of the armed forces, and bills itself as the most elite. Recruiters say the image has helped the Marines to make their annual quotas the past few years even as the Army -- which needs 80,000 recruits each year to fill its ranks -- has occasionally missed the mark.
Rodriguez says his recruiters are making quota despite the fact they generally cannot match the signing bonuses the Army offers, which can run as high as $40,000.
"What does our advertisement say," he asks. "It's a guy climbing a mountain to slay a dragon to get his dress blues and a sword. You don't see cash bulging out of his pockets."
Bonuses do not even come up as Walker and Peterson talk.
And while nothing Peterson says in his initial screening would automatically disqualify him from serving, he has some hurdles to clear.
First, he has a general equivalency diploma. The Marines say that even in a tough recruiting environment last year, they were able to reach their goal of filling 95 percent of their slots with high school graduates.
Peterson also describes several brushes with the law, including a charge for driving without insurance and disorderly conduct. Although the charges themselves won't keep him out of the Marines, they will require a myriad of extra background checks, paperwork and approval from Walker's supervisors.
Then Walker asks about past drug use.
"Marijuana and liquor, that's about it," Peterson says.
"How many times have you used marijuana?" Walker asks.
"A lot of times," comes the reply.
The recruiter's shoulders sag. The frequent marijuana use will require extra paperwork and most certainly special approval from a high-ranking officer, a process known as a waiver. More than half of the new recruits last year received waivers for various problems, ranging from past drug use to minor criminal matters.
The final bit of bad news for Peterson comes at the end of his test. He misses the minimum required score by three points.
Walker tells Peterson he must raise his score on the practice test before he gets further consideration. He ticks off several local libraries that have ASVAB practice materials.
Peterson promises to study. "I'm trying to change my life."
Walker sees him to the door.
"He's got issues," Walker says. "But I'm willing to work with him down the road if he's willing to work."
Walker considers tutoring part of his job. He's helped other candidates study for the ASVAB, which is heavy on math. A dry-erase board in his office is covered in algebra equations, remnants from an earlier lesson for a potential recruit.
THE MEAN SEASON
Summer is the toughest season for recruiters. Schools are closed and most recent graduates already have plans for the coming year. So recruiters focus on kids who graduated last year or the year before. Maybe college isn't working out. Or they hate their job. Maybe both.
Walker just needs to find them.
After two hours of dialing without reaching a single prospect, he decides to hit the streets. He climbs into a red Hummer H3, his ride for the month, a reward for being the New Jersey recruiter of the month in May. He figures that Pier Village, an upscale shopping area on the Long Branch boardwalk, would be the best place to start looking for candidates.
He's a few blocks from his destination when he spots two young men carrying lunch pails. The H3 screeches to the curb and Walker hops out, breaking into a trot down the sidewalk after them. He hands them his cards and they start talking. It's clear one of the men, who has gang tattoos and a felony conviction, is ineligible. So Walker turns his attention to his partner, Jesus Reyes, whose eyes keep shifting from Walker's face to his business card.
"I'm not asking you for a commitment. I'm not asking you to join. I'm not asking you to sign anything," Walker tells Reyes, who is 19. "I'm asking you to afford me the opportunity to sit down with you, look at your plans, look at your goals, match them up and show you some of the ways we can help you out."
Reyes gives Walker his home phone number and asks him to call in a few days.
This is what Marines call "canvass recruiting." Its about shaking hands, handing out business cards and trying to hold someone's attention long enough for him to give up a phone number or agree to visit the recruiting office.
Even though Marines are trained to be aggressive, the thought of approaching complete strangers terrifies many new recruiters.
Rodriguez, the recruiter instructor, says he overcame the fear by watching Jehovah's Witnesses and noticing they always held out a piece of literature when they approached people.
So Rodriguez, 34, started approaching people with his business card extended. "Do you know what this is? It's the key to your future," he'd tell them. To his surprise, it worked.
Walker says he's never had a problem with strangers.
"I'm from South Carolina. We talk to people down there. So I know how to talk to people, put them at ease," he says.
This is how Walker found more than half of the 48 people he has put in the Marine Corps. Walker's recruits include a teenager who wanted money to help support his infant son and a rich kid from Rumson who wanted adventure instead of college.
One of Walker's most recent recruits, Sean McHeffey, was an A student at Monmouth Regional High School last year but chose Parris Island instead of college. He left for boot camp three days after graduating last month.
"This will calm me down, keep me in line," McHeffey says.
Walker found these recruits and others in places like the parking lot of a Home Depot, the sidewalk in front of a Chucky Cheese and on the boardwalk in Long Branch.
He loves the boardwalk on summer days because it's full of people with at least a few minutes to chat. Walker makes his way down the boardwalk with a stiff-legged gait and holds a business card in his left hand. He sizes people up before making his introduction.
He starts with a man who is wearing a muscle shirt and sitting on a bench. In three minutes, he's told Walker he's 20, is waiting for his girlfriend, works as a mechanic and would be open to at least hearing the full recruiting spiel in a few days. Walker takes down his phone number.
A half dozen others refuse the cards. One man says he'd love to be a Marine, but has already been told a conviction for armed robbery makes him ineligible.
Walker approaches a pair of auxiliary bicycle police officers. They tell him they are college students with an interest in criminal justice. The police gig is only for the summer.
Walker tells them the Marines have military police officers -- and money for college. They're not interested. But after a few minutes, both agree to let Walker call them in a few months. He takes down their numbers.
"You never know what might happen in a few months," Walker says. "People's circumstances change."
CHECKING ON THE 'POOLEES'
The afternoon sun drives people off the streets, so Walker heads back to the office and make more phone calls.
First, he checks on a recruit who is leaving for boot camp at Parris Island in a few days. The recruiters refer to recruits who have signed the enlistment paperwork as "poolees."
From the day a poolee signs the enlistment contract until the day he or she arrives at boot camp, he is the recruiter's responsibility. That means the recruiter gets the blame if a poolee arrives at basic training out of shape or unable to tell a gunnery sergeant from a lance corporal with a quick glance at the collar. Walker says he takes this responsibility seriously. If a recruit calls him in the middle of the night and needs a ride, he gets out of bed.
Jeff Bernal, 18, is waiting for Walker when he arrives at his house on the edge of Asbury Park. Soft-spoken and bookish, Bernal graduated from Neptune High School in early June and was slated to head to Parris Island in a few days. The Marines have promised to train him as a computer specialist after he finishes boot camp.
Bernal tells Walker he's ready to go. Bernal decided early in high school that joining the military offered the best chance to earn money for college and learn a technical skill. He just didn't know what branch.
Walker sold him on the Marines, he says, by answering his hardest question: Will I go to war?
"Other recruiters circled around that. The war was a sensitive subject when I asked questions about it," Bernal said. "(Walker) pretty much gave me the only straight answer. He said, 'Look, it's going to be hard no matter what. You might, you might not. It certainly could happen.'"
Walker says soft-pedaling the war would just backfire.
"I would never tell a kid he's not going to Iraq," Walker says. "You're just hurting your rapport in the community if you lie. It will come back to you."
There have been 21 Marines with ties to New Jersey killed since the war began. None was a Walker recruit.
Walker, who has not served in Iraq, says he tries not to think about what he would do if someone he recruited were to die or be gravely injured at war. But he knows he'd take it very hard.
"They are not bodies to me," he says, his voice growing soft.
MOM'S BASIC INSTINCT
By 3:15, Walker is back in the office, dialing for candidates.
He's been working his way through a list of Brookdale Community College students, one of his favorite resources. Ten of Walker's recruits have come from the college. Most joined the reserves, which allows for part-time service, unless the unit is called up for war, which has happened to all three of New Jersey's reserve units.
By this point in the day, Walker has left so many messages on answering machines he seems stunned when a woman answers, the mother of the student on Walker's list.
He asks the woman if she'll leave a message for her son. She won't.
"Not to be rude ma'am, but may I ask why?"
The woman's voice practically jumps out of the phone: "Because there's a war going on."
Walker smiles. "Yes ma'am. I'm aware of that. Thank you for your time."
He scribbles a note next to the name. He isn't giving up. He just wants to try again in a few days at a different time. Maybe the son will answer.
12-HOUR DAYS, $30,000 A YEAR
It's dinner time and 3-year-old Amari Walker and her 7-year-old sister, Zaria, have arrived at the Bradley Beach recruiting office, chasing each other around the base of a chin-up bar their father uses to whip poolees into shape.
Walker's wife, Shatia, tries to get the entire family together at least once a day when everyone is awake. The girls are often asleep when their father leaves for work and when he gets home. The family lives on Naval Weapons Station Earle in Colts Neck.
"We try to get our time with him," Shatia Walker says, laughing. "Because we know the Marines are going to get their time with him."
No one in the Marine Corps disputes that recruiting duty is particularly hard on families.
Those pressures were the focus of an unprecedented court-martial last month at Parris Island for Staff Sgt. Chris Cassese, a New Jersey recruiter who quit because he said the hours he was spending away from his 10-year-old son made the boy suicidal.
A three-member military jury found Cassese guilty of disobeying a superior officer. Although the punishment could have included a year in jail, the jury voted to demote Cassese one rank, a lighter penalty than the prosecution sought.
Several fellow recruiters testified that job stress had them talking about quitting every day. Most said they were joking. But Sgt. Maj. Ray Centeno, who retired earlier this year, testified that during his three years he served as the top enlisted man in New Jersey, at least 14 recruiters made formal requests to leave the duty before their tours were up. Only three requests were granted.
Shatia Walker says her older daughter occasionally gets angry with her father for working so many hours.
"I tell her: 'This is what is supporting you. You can't be like that toward your daddy. He's doing a very hard job and he's helping a lot of young people,'" she says.
The couple met in the band at Union High School in Union, S.C. He was on the drum line, she played clarinet. They married after graduation and Walker enlisted.
Shatia Walker says one of the ways she copes with her husband's job, which pays just over $31,000 a year, has been to learn everything about it. She hands out his business cards in grocery stores, gets on his case if he hasn't made enough cold calls and has helped him tutor candidates. She's gotten used to the phone calls at 3 a.m. from recruits calling to say they've arrived at boot camp.
The Marines encourage their best performers to volunteer for recruiting duty after they've served for at least four years. A recruiting tour lasts three years. Although a Marine Corps spokesman says recruiters are relieved before their tour is up if they perform poorly, he refused to provide numbers beyond saying it happens infrequently.
For recruiters who do well there are plum assignments and promotions. Some are asked to consider becoming career recruiters, known as 8412s, the numerical designator for the specialty. Nationally, about 30 percent of recruiters have made that choice. It's an offer Walker refused.
"I miss being around other Marines all the time," says Walker, who is trained as a supply sergeant.
Shatia Walker says she's looking forward to the end of her husband's recruiting duty.
"We have to do it together," she says. "He couldn't do it if I was always nagging at him. He's got enough stress. He doesn't need extra stress from me."
'MARINES, WE'RE CLOSE'
The state recruiting headquarters is on Naval Weapons Station Earle. That's where the commander, a major and several top advisers, including Rodriguez, work.
But the action takes place in the field, at the 15 recruiting stations across the state. Headquarters calls the recruiting territory "the battlefield. "
Every afternoon, the fax machine at each station spits out the "battlefield update," a list of each station's performance against the quota for the month. It's expressed like a sports score.
On this day, June 19, the Monmouth Station is five-for-11. Every other station is also short of the goal. One station is one-for-nine. Scrawled next to this grim statistic are the words: "We Need You!!!"
Gunnery Sgt. Jimenez, the station commander, is holding this update in his hand as his seven recruiters gather around for their nightly 7 o'clock meeting, a requirement for every station until the monthly goal is met. No recruiter leaves for vacation or goes home early until the target is reached.
Jimenez, a 35-year-old Californian with a shaved head, doesn't look worried.
"Marines, we're close. A few more bodies to make mission and get you guys some time off," Jimenez says.
Some of the recruiters are lounging on couches in the center of the office, or sitting on the desks. They all look tired.
Jimenez goes around the room, asking each recruiter about his day. Walker's only news is that a potential recruit he was to meet at 4 p.m. stood him up. He hasn't landed a contract this month.
Jimenez turns his attention to another recruiter, Staff Sgt. Kerry Lalchan. He wants to know how a meeting with a promising prospect went. Lalchan tells him the prospect is losing luster quickly.
"I went to the kid's house," he says. "The Dad told me he'd just smoked pot," Lalchan says with a roll of his eyes. "In fact, Dad says the kid hasn't done anything but smoke pot since he graduated."
Jimenez asks a few more questions of his recruiters and closes the meeting with words of encouragement.
"Let's make this happen. Let's hit the phones, go do area canvassing," he says. "Let's do what we've got to do."
The meeting is over. It's 7:30 p.m. and nobody heads home. Most of the recruiters pick up the phones.
At 8 p.m., Jimenez looks over at two recruiters who are still dialing away. They aren't making much headway.
"Guys, you aren't getting answers. Go to the mall," he says. After they leave, he says he'll call them on their cell phones to send them home in a little while.
One has to be up at 3 the next morning to drive a recruit to Fort Dix for a medical exam. The other has been on recruiting duty less than two weeks and appears shell shocked.
Jimenez looks over at Walker, who is leaning on a desk, going over paperwork.
"Hey, Walker, you wanna go for a run with me?" Jimenez asks. Walker nods and comes back in a few minutes wearing shorts and a T-shirt.
Jimenez looks up again.
"Dude, can you give me five minutes? Wait, make that 15," he says, looking back at the pile of paperwork. "Go stretch or something."
Walker gets up. He's moving a bit stiffly. It's 8:15 p.m.
"Get to do it all over again tomorrow,"' he says as he walks into the parking lot, searching for a place to stretch.
Walker arrived home that night after 10. His family was already asleep.
Over the next 10 days, in a manic flurry of handshakes and phone calls, hunches and street skills he would land three recruits. His three helped Monmouth Station make its monthly quota just one day before the month ended.
Everyone took a few extra days off.
Then the mad scramble started all over again.
As of Friday, Leonard Peterson had yet to return to the recruiting center.
Wayne Woolley may be reached at wwoolley@starledger.com or (973)-392-1559.
Ellie
Sunday, July 15, 2007
BY WAYNE WOOLLEY
Star-Ledger Staff
Marine Sgt. Timothy Walker made 1,176 telephone phone calls last month -- the number the computer at headquarters said the New Jersey recruiter needed to dial to find at least two young people willing to join "the few, the proud."
In between the calls, the eight-year veteran drove thousands of miles across southern Monmouth County and knocked on dozens of doors. Sometimes he literally chased groups of young people until they stopped long enough to hear his spiel and take his business card.
There were days when Walker, 26, left his wife and two young daughters sleeping in their beds at 4 a.m. and did not come home until midnight. Even on "short" days that run from 8 a.m. to past 8 p.m., Walker knows exactly how he will feel when it ends.
"Exhausted. When I get home at night, I just want to sit down, turn the tube on and pass out on the couch," Walker says. "If your feet hurt, that means you worked that day. If your brain hurts, you know you worked that day. Tough job. Tough times."
Spend a day with Walker as he works the phones and hits the streets in manic pursuit of new recruits and you see how the Iraq war and its growing casualty count take a toll on the men and women responsible for filling the ranks of an all-volunteer military. A strong economy and millions of young people made ineligible for military service by health or legal troubles only add to the strain.
The Marine Corps considers recruiters to be fighting the battle in Iraq, only on a different front. The tools at hand are slick television advertisements, sophisticated marketing databases and the most rudimentary of sales pitches: "Here's my card, call me."
Like the troops, the recruiters' battle gets harder every day.
There were 175,000 Marines on active duty when the war began in 2003 and 35,000 new enlistments that year. Since then, the required number of recruits has grown steadily under a Congressional mandate to increase the size of the Marine Corps by nearly 10 percent by the end of the decade. The Marines needed 38,000 active-duty recruits last year and 1,000 more than that this year. In 2010, the number will swell to 45,000.
Nearly 1,000 Marines have been killed in Iraq, accounting for more than a quarter of the war's combat deaths even though the Corps makes up only about 20 percent of the ground troops. Thousands more have been wounded.
Although the Marines have made every year-end quota since the war began, they missed several monthly targets in 2005. But June's recruiting numbers were good to the Marines -- they hit 110 percent of their monthly quota of 3,924. By contrast, the Army, which has suffered heavy losses associated with the recent troop surge, missed its goal of 8,400 recruits by nearly 20 percent.
When Walker started recruiting nearly three years ago, he struggled to meet his monthly quota of two "contracts" a month. He turned things around the past two years and now consistently lands three new Marines a month, putting his performance near the top of the state's 64 recruiters.
Along the way, Walker says he learned to balance the demands of his job with his roles as a husband and father. He says his job performance improved -- and the hours he was able to spend with his family grew -- as he learned to size up potential recruits.
"What is a kid looking for?" Walker says. "Is it discipline? Is it a challenge? It may just be money for school or a better life."
He boils his recruiting philosophy down to this: "You can't rush them to join. You can't force them to join. All you want is for the opportunity to sit down and talk with them and let them know what the Marine Corps is all about. The kids will come. They will join."
'BLUES AND A SWORD'
It's 10:40 a.m. on a Tuesday in late June and Walker is behind a desk In a cramped storefront office in Bradley Beach.
He's been working since 8, starting his day a few miles to the north at the Monmouth County recruiting headquarters in Tinton Falls, where he met his boss, Gunnery Sgt. Fabian Jimenez, to go over plans for the day. Now Walker is back in a satellite office where he's a one-man band, searching for future Marines in an area that runs from the public housing projects of Asbury Park to the manicured lawns of Deal. Walker studies a thick binder filled with the names and phone numbers of recent Neptune High School graduates.
Then he starts dialing, getting one answering machine after another, leaving variations of a 15-second pitch he'll repeat dozens of times today.
"This is a message for Dustin. Dustin, this is Sgt. Walker with the Marines. Just giving you a call to see what's been going on since you graduated, seeing if you're interested in sitting down with me to talk about some of the opportunities in the Marine Corps."
The daunting number of calls Walker was assigned for June is based on a computer-generated model that looked at the number of calls he made the previous month. The rule of thumb is 15 calls yields one appointment with a candidate. One in four kids who makes an appointment ultimately becomes a Marine.
As Walker dials, Leonard Peterson sits a few feet away, clicking away on a computer, taking a practice version of the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, a test known as the ASVAB.
Lanky and wearing a T-shirt with the words "Ten Commandments of Hustle" and a black Yankees cap, Peterson, 25, was standing on the sidewalk in front of the recruiting station when Walker arrived. He was ready to join. Immediately.
"Right now, in my life, things ain't going right," Peterson tells Walker. "I've made up my mind. I just need to know how soon I can start."
Walker slows him down. "I've got to ask you a couple of questions to see if you qualify."
Walker asks Peterson a standard series of questions that runs for about 30 minutes and is designed to cover the basics of an applicant's life, from education to health to past drug use and brushes with the law.
Master Sgt. Alex Rodriguez, the Marine responsible for training and evaluating recruiters in New Jersey, says many applicants are disqualified in the initial screening, most often for having offensive tattoos, piercings or serious criminal records.
"There's a lot of young men and women who are interested, but for a variety of reasons, you can't put them in the Marine Corps," says Rodriguez, who is following Walker on this morning to reacquaint himself with the sergeant's territory. Rodriguez will need to pick Walker's replacement when his three-year tour ends in December.
The Marine Corps is the smallest branch of the armed forces, and bills itself as the most elite. Recruiters say the image has helped the Marines to make their annual quotas the past few years even as the Army -- which needs 80,000 recruits each year to fill its ranks -- has occasionally missed the mark.
Rodriguez says his recruiters are making quota despite the fact they generally cannot match the signing bonuses the Army offers, which can run as high as $40,000.
"What does our advertisement say," he asks. "It's a guy climbing a mountain to slay a dragon to get his dress blues and a sword. You don't see cash bulging out of his pockets."
Bonuses do not even come up as Walker and Peterson talk.
And while nothing Peterson says in his initial screening would automatically disqualify him from serving, he has some hurdles to clear.
First, he has a general equivalency diploma. The Marines say that even in a tough recruiting environment last year, they were able to reach their goal of filling 95 percent of their slots with high school graduates.
Peterson also describes several brushes with the law, including a charge for driving without insurance and disorderly conduct. Although the charges themselves won't keep him out of the Marines, they will require a myriad of extra background checks, paperwork and approval from Walker's supervisors.
Then Walker asks about past drug use.
"Marijuana and liquor, that's about it," Peterson says.
"How many times have you used marijuana?" Walker asks.
"A lot of times," comes the reply.
The recruiter's shoulders sag. The frequent marijuana use will require extra paperwork and most certainly special approval from a high-ranking officer, a process known as a waiver. More than half of the new recruits last year received waivers for various problems, ranging from past drug use to minor criminal matters.
The final bit of bad news for Peterson comes at the end of his test. He misses the minimum required score by three points.
Walker tells Peterson he must raise his score on the practice test before he gets further consideration. He ticks off several local libraries that have ASVAB practice materials.
Peterson promises to study. "I'm trying to change my life."
Walker sees him to the door.
"He's got issues," Walker says. "But I'm willing to work with him down the road if he's willing to work."
Walker considers tutoring part of his job. He's helped other candidates study for the ASVAB, which is heavy on math. A dry-erase board in his office is covered in algebra equations, remnants from an earlier lesson for a potential recruit.
THE MEAN SEASON
Summer is the toughest season for recruiters. Schools are closed and most recent graduates already have plans for the coming year. So recruiters focus on kids who graduated last year or the year before. Maybe college isn't working out. Or they hate their job. Maybe both.
Walker just needs to find them.
After two hours of dialing without reaching a single prospect, he decides to hit the streets. He climbs into a red Hummer H3, his ride for the month, a reward for being the New Jersey recruiter of the month in May. He figures that Pier Village, an upscale shopping area on the Long Branch boardwalk, would be the best place to start looking for candidates.
He's a few blocks from his destination when he spots two young men carrying lunch pails. The H3 screeches to the curb and Walker hops out, breaking into a trot down the sidewalk after them. He hands them his cards and they start talking. It's clear one of the men, who has gang tattoos and a felony conviction, is ineligible. So Walker turns his attention to his partner, Jesus Reyes, whose eyes keep shifting from Walker's face to his business card.
"I'm not asking you for a commitment. I'm not asking you to join. I'm not asking you to sign anything," Walker tells Reyes, who is 19. "I'm asking you to afford me the opportunity to sit down with you, look at your plans, look at your goals, match them up and show you some of the ways we can help you out."
Reyes gives Walker his home phone number and asks him to call in a few days.
This is what Marines call "canvass recruiting." Its about shaking hands, handing out business cards and trying to hold someone's attention long enough for him to give up a phone number or agree to visit the recruiting office.
Even though Marines are trained to be aggressive, the thought of approaching complete strangers terrifies many new recruiters.
Rodriguez, the recruiter instructor, says he overcame the fear by watching Jehovah's Witnesses and noticing they always held out a piece of literature when they approached people.
So Rodriguez, 34, started approaching people with his business card extended. "Do you know what this is? It's the key to your future," he'd tell them. To his surprise, it worked.
Walker says he's never had a problem with strangers.
"I'm from South Carolina. We talk to people down there. So I know how to talk to people, put them at ease," he says.
This is how Walker found more than half of the 48 people he has put in the Marine Corps. Walker's recruits include a teenager who wanted money to help support his infant son and a rich kid from Rumson who wanted adventure instead of college.
One of Walker's most recent recruits, Sean McHeffey, was an A student at Monmouth Regional High School last year but chose Parris Island instead of college. He left for boot camp three days after graduating last month.
"This will calm me down, keep me in line," McHeffey says.
Walker found these recruits and others in places like the parking lot of a Home Depot, the sidewalk in front of a Chucky Cheese and on the boardwalk in Long Branch.
He loves the boardwalk on summer days because it's full of people with at least a few minutes to chat. Walker makes his way down the boardwalk with a stiff-legged gait and holds a business card in his left hand. He sizes people up before making his introduction.
He starts with a man who is wearing a muscle shirt and sitting on a bench. In three minutes, he's told Walker he's 20, is waiting for his girlfriend, works as a mechanic and would be open to at least hearing the full recruiting spiel in a few days. Walker takes down his phone number.
A half dozen others refuse the cards. One man says he'd love to be a Marine, but has already been told a conviction for armed robbery makes him ineligible.
Walker approaches a pair of auxiliary bicycle police officers. They tell him they are college students with an interest in criminal justice. The police gig is only for the summer.
Walker tells them the Marines have military police officers -- and money for college. They're not interested. But after a few minutes, both agree to let Walker call them in a few months. He takes down their numbers.
"You never know what might happen in a few months," Walker says. "People's circumstances change."
CHECKING ON THE 'POOLEES'
The afternoon sun drives people off the streets, so Walker heads back to the office and make more phone calls.
First, he checks on a recruit who is leaving for boot camp at Parris Island in a few days. The recruiters refer to recruits who have signed the enlistment paperwork as "poolees."
From the day a poolee signs the enlistment contract until the day he or she arrives at boot camp, he is the recruiter's responsibility. That means the recruiter gets the blame if a poolee arrives at basic training out of shape or unable to tell a gunnery sergeant from a lance corporal with a quick glance at the collar. Walker says he takes this responsibility seriously. If a recruit calls him in the middle of the night and needs a ride, he gets out of bed.
Jeff Bernal, 18, is waiting for Walker when he arrives at his house on the edge of Asbury Park. Soft-spoken and bookish, Bernal graduated from Neptune High School in early June and was slated to head to Parris Island in a few days. The Marines have promised to train him as a computer specialist after he finishes boot camp.
Bernal tells Walker he's ready to go. Bernal decided early in high school that joining the military offered the best chance to earn money for college and learn a technical skill. He just didn't know what branch.
Walker sold him on the Marines, he says, by answering his hardest question: Will I go to war?
"Other recruiters circled around that. The war was a sensitive subject when I asked questions about it," Bernal said. "(Walker) pretty much gave me the only straight answer. He said, 'Look, it's going to be hard no matter what. You might, you might not. It certainly could happen.'"
Walker says soft-pedaling the war would just backfire.
"I would never tell a kid he's not going to Iraq," Walker says. "You're just hurting your rapport in the community if you lie. It will come back to you."
There have been 21 Marines with ties to New Jersey killed since the war began. None was a Walker recruit.
Walker, who has not served in Iraq, says he tries not to think about what he would do if someone he recruited were to die or be gravely injured at war. But he knows he'd take it very hard.
"They are not bodies to me," he says, his voice growing soft.
MOM'S BASIC INSTINCT
By 3:15, Walker is back in the office, dialing for candidates.
He's been working his way through a list of Brookdale Community College students, one of his favorite resources. Ten of Walker's recruits have come from the college. Most joined the reserves, which allows for part-time service, unless the unit is called up for war, which has happened to all three of New Jersey's reserve units.
By this point in the day, Walker has left so many messages on answering machines he seems stunned when a woman answers, the mother of the student on Walker's list.
He asks the woman if she'll leave a message for her son. She won't.
"Not to be rude ma'am, but may I ask why?"
The woman's voice practically jumps out of the phone: "Because there's a war going on."
Walker smiles. "Yes ma'am. I'm aware of that. Thank you for your time."
He scribbles a note next to the name. He isn't giving up. He just wants to try again in a few days at a different time. Maybe the son will answer.
12-HOUR DAYS, $30,000 A YEAR
It's dinner time and 3-year-old Amari Walker and her 7-year-old sister, Zaria, have arrived at the Bradley Beach recruiting office, chasing each other around the base of a chin-up bar their father uses to whip poolees into shape.
Walker's wife, Shatia, tries to get the entire family together at least once a day when everyone is awake. The girls are often asleep when their father leaves for work and when he gets home. The family lives on Naval Weapons Station Earle in Colts Neck.
"We try to get our time with him," Shatia Walker says, laughing. "Because we know the Marines are going to get their time with him."
No one in the Marine Corps disputes that recruiting duty is particularly hard on families.
Those pressures were the focus of an unprecedented court-martial last month at Parris Island for Staff Sgt. Chris Cassese, a New Jersey recruiter who quit because he said the hours he was spending away from his 10-year-old son made the boy suicidal.
A three-member military jury found Cassese guilty of disobeying a superior officer. Although the punishment could have included a year in jail, the jury voted to demote Cassese one rank, a lighter penalty than the prosecution sought.
Several fellow recruiters testified that job stress had them talking about quitting every day. Most said they were joking. But Sgt. Maj. Ray Centeno, who retired earlier this year, testified that during his three years he served as the top enlisted man in New Jersey, at least 14 recruiters made formal requests to leave the duty before their tours were up. Only three requests were granted.
Shatia Walker says her older daughter occasionally gets angry with her father for working so many hours.
"I tell her: 'This is what is supporting you. You can't be like that toward your daddy. He's doing a very hard job and he's helping a lot of young people,'" she says.
The couple met in the band at Union High School in Union, S.C. He was on the drum line, she played clarinet. They married after graduation and Walker enlisted.
Shatia Walker says one of the ways she copes with her husband's job, which pays just over $31,000 a year, has been to learn everything about it. She hands out his business cards in grocery stores, gets on his case if he hasn't made enough cold calls and has helped him tutor candidates. She's gotten used to the phone calls at 3 a.m. from recruits calling to say they've arrived at boot camp.
The Marines encourage their best performers to volunteer for recruiting duty after they've served for at least four years. A recruiting tour lasts three years. Although a Marine Corps spokesman says recruiters are relieved before their tour is up if they perform poorly, he refused to provide numbers beyond saying it happens infrequently.
For recruiters who do well there are plum assignments and promotions. Some are asked to consider becoming career recruiters, known as 8412s, the numerical designator for the specialty. Nationally, about 30 percent of recruiters have made that choice. It's an offer Walker refused.
"I miss being around other Marines all the time," says Walker, who is trained as a supply sergeant.
Shatia Walker says she's looking forward to the end of her husband's recruiting duty.
"We have to do it together," she says. "He couldn't do it if I was always nagging at him. He's got enough stress. He doesn't need extra stress from me."
'MARINES, WE'RE CLOSE'
The state recruiting headquarters is on Naval Weapons Station Earle. That's where the commander, a major and several top advisers, including Rodriguez, work.
But the action takes place in the field, at the 15 recruiting stations across the state. Headquarters calls the recruiting territory "the battlefield. "
Every afternoon, the fax machine at each station spits out the "battlefield update," a list of each station's performance against the quota for the month. It's expressed like a sports score.
On this day, June 19, the Monmouth Station is five-for-11. Every other station is also short of the goal. One station is one-for-nine. Scrawled next to this grim statistic are the words: "We Need You!!!"
Gunnery Sgt. Jimenez, the station commander, is holding this update in his hand as his seven recruiters gather around for their nightly 7 o'clock meeting, a requirement for every station until the monthly goal is met. No recruiter leaves for vacation or goes home early until the target is reached.
Jimenez, a 35-year-old Californian with a shaved head, doesn't look worried.
"Marines, we're close. A few more bodies to make mission and get you guys some time off," Jimenez says.
Some of the recruiters are lounging on couches in the center of the office, or sitting on the desks. They all look tired.
Jimenez goes around the room, asking each recruiter about his day. Walker's only news is that a potential recruit he was to meet at 4 p.m. stood him up. He hasn't landed a contract this month.
Jimenez turns his attention to another recruiter, Staff Sgt. Kerry Lalchan. He wants to know how a meeting with a promising prospect went. Lalchan tells him the prospect is losing luster quickly.
"I went to the kid's house," he says. "The Dad told me he'd just smoked pot," Lalchan says with a roll of his eyes. "In fact, Dad says the kid hasn't done anything but smoke pot since he graduated."
Jimenez asks a few more questions of his recruiters and closes the meeting with words of encouragement.
"Let's make this happen. Let's hit the phones, go do area canvassing," he says. "Let's do what we've got to do."
The meeting is over. It's 7:30 p.m. and nobody heads home. Most of the recruiters pick up the phones.
At 8 p.m., Jimenez looks over at two recruiters who are still dialing away. They aren't making much headway.
"Guys, you aren't getting answers. Go to the mall," he says. After they leave, he says he'll call them on their cell phones to send them home in a little while.
One has to be up at 3 the next morning to drive a recruit to Fort Dix for a medical exam. The other has been on recruiting duty less than two weeks and appears shell shocked.
Jimenez looks over at Walker, who is leaning on a desk, going over paperwork.
"Hey, Walker, you wanna go for a run with me?" Jimenez asks. Walker nods and comes back in a few minutes wearing shorts and a T-shirt.
Jimenez looks up again.
"Dude, can you give me five minutes? Wait, make that 15," he says, looking back at the pile of paperwork. "Go stretch or something."
Walker gets up. He's moving a bit stiffly. It's 8:15 p.m.
"Get to do it all over again tomorrow,"' he says as he walks into the parking lot, searching for a place to stretch.
Walker arrived home that night after 10. His family was already asleep.
Over the next 10 days, in a manic flurry of handshakes and phone calls, hunches and street skills he would land three recruits. His three helped Monmouth Station make its monthly quota just one day before the month ended.
Everyone took a few extra days off.
Then the mad scramble started all over again.
As of Friday, Leonard Peterson had yet to return to the recruiting center.
Wayne Woolley may be reached at wwoolley@starledger.com or (973)-392-1559.
Ellie