Folks don't want to see their sons and brothers, husbands unnecessarily sacrificed on the oil fields of Iraq. IMO And yet recruits line up in the least expected places...
Sucker for a uniform
Surprisingly, Northern California has become a hotbed for military recruitment
sfgate.com
Carl Nolte, Chronicle Staff Writer Friday, January 17, 2003
To the surprise of many military experts, long inured to the notion that Northern California is anti-military, recruiters for the Marine Corps, the Army and the Navy all say the numbers of new recruits from the region have exceeded expectations.
In fact, Northern California ranked second to Nashville in the Marine Corps' national recruiting last year, according to Maj. Mark Johnson, commanding officer of Marine Recruiting Station San Francisco, which covers the area from Monterey to Eureka and as far east as Solano County.
He said some of the hardest work for the military was in San Francisco high schools, which have a policy that bans on-campus recruitment by military services.
Nonetheless, said Capt. Tuan Pham, a Marine recruiting officer, the service has had good results in San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland, Santa Rosa, Alameda and Contra Costa County. Overall, he said, the Marines signed up 1,122 young men and women last year in the San Francisco district.
Army Lt. Col. Paul Woods, who runs the Northern California recruiting headquarters in Sacramento, said the region has "a positive environment" for recruiting. "We are doing well overall since Sept. 11," he said. Woods said that unlike the Marine Corps, the Army does not rank its recruiting districts' numbers. He said he has signed up about 300 new recruits a month for the active Army and the reserves.
The results were a bit of a surprise to some military officers, who share the national perception that Northern California in general and the Bay Area in particular have strong anti-military prejudices.
Woods said he had been told that Northern California did not look favorably on the military when he was transferred to the area after five years in Europe.
Recruiters have more success in rural areas and smaller cities than they do in large cities, Woods said. This is true over the rest of the country, and Northern California is no exception.
San Francisco is one of the toughest areas for the Army, said Staff Sgt. Kenneth Reines, who works at the Army's San Francisco recruiting station near the Financial District.
Many of his recruits, he said, are people who have come to the city from other areas and found it difficult to get the jobs they'd hoped for, then looked at the Army, which offers recruiting bonuses. While the average bonus is under $2,000, the Army recently paid a $15,000 bonus to a young female college graduate who signed up for language training.
'WE DID PRETTY WELL'
The Navy has met its recruiting goals in Northern California, said Petty Officer Kurt Riggs at the Navy's Northern California recruiting office. "Meeting our goals," he said, "means we did pretty well."
He would not offer numbers, and referred calls to the Navy's national recruiting center in Millington, Tenn. Navy Cmdr. Steve Lowry, public affairs officer for the Navy recruiting branch, said the Navy did not rank recruiting by region. He said the Navy's numbers -- about 1,000 new sailors a week nationwide -- has been good overall for 17 consecutive months, roughly since the summer of 2001.
Finding new recruits has been of critical importance since the draft ended in 1973 and the government created an all-volunteer military. Since the end of the Cold War, the military has been reduced -- the Army by about 40 percent -- but it has to depend on an extensive recruiting effort to get new personnel.
Most of them are teenagers fresh out of high school, but some -- like medical personnel -- are older and have more civilian training.
Many of the potential recruits are like a San Francisco man, who dropped by the Army recruiting station to talk to Sgt. Reines Tuesday and take some material home with him.
He didn't want his name used, because, he said, he is employed by the city and county of San Francisco. "I'm kicking the idea around," he said. "I'm interested in the Army special forces, which I've always liked. They have some new deals now, and I want to think about it."
This man is no kid: He is Latino, 27 years old, and had four years' service in the Navy.
The Pentagon said Monday that African Americans make up about 20 percent of new recruits in all the services, compared with about 12 percent of the recruit-age population.
The racial breakdown of minority recruits in Northern California is similar to the nationwide figures, except that California has higher numbers of recruits from other minority groups.
But lingering anti-military feelings, especially in cities like San Francisco, have caused the recruiters problems.
In 1991, the San Francisco school system banned military recruiters from campuses and barred schools from giving names, addresses, phone numbers or other information about students to recruiters.
NOT ALWAYS WELCOME
Pham said recruiters have been escorted off high school campuses in San Francisco and at three high schools in South San Francisco, which has a similar policy.
"I was told to leave George Washington High School (in San Francisco)," Pham said. He was especially put out, he said, because he is a graduate of the school. "It's my own school, but we were told we were not welcome."
However, Johnson, the top Marine recruiter in Northern California, has written a letter to San Francisco schools Superintendent Arlene Ackerman, pointing out that the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 2001 provides that each district receiving federal money under the act provide the military with the same access to students as is given to other prospective employers.
School board President Dan Kelly, one of the authors of the 1991 resolution banning recruiters, said restricting military recruiters "is still district policy" but that the school board is seeking a legal opinion on it in view of the federal law. "We are looking at it and will have to consider the realities of federal law," he said.
On Tuesday night, San Francisco's Board of Education voted unanimously to clamp down on recruiter access to district schools as much as possible while still staying within the confines of federal law.
The commissioners approved a resolution that would require parents to return a notice letting them know of their child's privacy rights rather than make the form optional. Too many parents would forget to turn in the form if it was optional, commissioners said, allowing the military to obtain student contact information for those who didn't exercise their right to privacy.
The situation of military recruiting in San Francisco has a touch of irony: Maj. Gen. Jan Huly, commanding officer of the Marine Recruit Depot in San Diego, where all new Marines are trained, is a graduate of Washington High, the same school that kicked Pham off campus. |
