Selling the army in wartime: for many recruits, enlisting used to mean cash for college and few risks. But 9/11 and the war in Iraq have made signing up a more complicated decision.

• Author: Davey, Monica
• Position: National

Last June, Katherine Jordan was filling her scrapbook with memories of her high-school years. By the end of August, she was set to graduate from U.S. Army basic training in South Carolina. Jordan, 18, says she joined the Army because she wanted to be part of something bigger than herself, bigger than her hometown of Lyndon, Kan., pop. 1,000.

Thirty miles from Lyndon, in Topeka, James Nelson, 19, got the idea of enlisting from his probation officer. Slated to start basic training this month, he hopes the Army will help him to straighten out his life and to stop, as his mother says, doing nothing all day aside from playing CD's and smoking cigarettes.

And down the road, in Lawrence, Julie Reese, 23, recently laid off from her job mowing lawns, feels the Army will help her find her way. She is hoping the Army will overlook her low scores on her entrance exam and allow her to enlist.

Jordan, Nelson, and Reese are a few of the people being recruited in an unremarkable office building in an anonymous strip mall in Kansas, one of more than 1,600 Army recruitment stations across the country.

THE IMPACT OF IRAQ

The world of recruiting has shifted significantly. Gone, recruiters say, are the people looking mainly for easy cash to pay for college. Gone also, they say, are those who covet signing bonuses of up to $20,000 but hope never to leave their base. And gone are those who think enlisting in the Reserve or the National Guard will mean a few weekends of training in a park.

The war in Iraq has changed the implications of signing up, and some potential soldiers' families have tougher questions when recruiters call--or do not want to hear the pitch at all.

"Parents will tell us all the time that 'Johnny's not joining!' and just hang up on us," says Sgt. First Class John J. Stover, a recruiter at the station in Topeka. "The difference," Stover says, "is that no one has ever recruited during a sustained war."

Officials at Army Recruiting Command at Fort Knox, Ky., have said the Army is on pace to bring in nearly 100,000 soldiers for active duty and the Reserves by October, but military officials worry about meeting recruitment goals in the years ahead, with the Army's continuing presence in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere in the world (see chart, p. 7).

NEW PITCHES

To attract candidates, recruiters are pitching shorter enlistments, of 15 months instead of 2 years; a buddy option, which lets enlistees serve alongside a friend; and a reminder that many of the Army's 211 jobs are far from the front lines (euphonium player in the band, for instance).

For some recruits, the prospects of war and the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, have become powerful motivators to sign up. "I didn't sign up to sit behind a desk," says Andrew Limbocker, 18, of Eskridge, Kan., who reported to the Topeka office not long ago.

But...