Recruiters Go To School

By: Christine Lagorio

And Kelly tells Acosta he's already seen recruiters pull out the heavy artillery … right in his school.

"They had a hummer that was playing live music and they had a high-definition TV in the back of it showing what were essentially commercials you'd see on TV for the military," Kelly said.

At Seattle's Garfield High School, the P.T.A held a symbolic vote last month — against recruiting on school grounds.

Access to educational institutions is increasingly a federal ordeal. Not only does the No Child provision deal explicitly with it, but the Supreme Court said earlier this month it will consider whether colleges and universities may bar military recruiters from their campuses without fear of losing federal funds. Justices will review a lower court ruling in favor of 25 law schools that restricted recruiters in protest of the Pentagon's policy of excluding openly gay people from military service.

But the military can attract teens effectively away from school. Take the Army National Guard's Recruit Sustainment Program, which offers hundreds of dollars in cash incentives.

Many teenagers in the program are not even out of high school but they are already getting paid one weekend a month for this taste of basic training, At this point they still have a chance to back out. But most of them won't.

That's because they want what 17-year-old Dustin Guice wants: Money for college and a chance to serve.

"My college will have to come second," Guice said. "Because my country will always come first."

Critics call this program an economic draft. Dustin's mother calls it something else.

"This is his dream," Donna Luthi, Dustin's mother, said.

A teen who still sees the military as a dream, nowadays, is a recruiter's dream come true.