Home of the Brave 
Would You Buy What This Man Is Selling?
The U.S. military sure hopes so. At a time when support for the war is plummeting and our forces are stretched dangerously thin, by-the-book Army recruiters like San Antonio Staff Sergeant Christopher Schwope may be its only hope to succeed.
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David Knox, the principal at Clemens’s center for at-risk students, says Schwope is successful because he’s laid-back. Unlike a lot of other teachers and administrators in San Antonio, Knox never served, and he admits that philosophically he’d be more at home in Austin than in the middle of San Antonio’s military installations. But he keeps photos of his former students who joined the armed forces tacked up on his wall, and he welcomes Schwope onto his campus whenever Schwope wants. “His presentation is low-key, experiential,” says Knox. “It’s ‘Here’s what I’ve been through. Here’s what the service has done for me.’ It’s not aggressive, which is interesting, because you hear stories to the contrary. But I haven’t had one kid come back to me and say, ‘Those sons of bitches lied to me.’”
The Army has in fact done everything it can to make the Schwope approach an easier sell. In addition to the signing bonus increases, the college fund available to GIs after they’ve served is now up to $71,000. There’s also an array of other benefits, like housing allowances, hazardous duty pay, and bonuses for accepting assignment to critical units. Watching Schwope factor everything in is like watching a car salesman calculate various incentives and trade-in value on the purchase of a new car. It can be hard to follow, but it always ends with an easily grasped bottom-line figure for monthly payments.
And Schwope instructs the kids that there’s more to the decision. Free medical and dental care. Free food. Free gyms. Job training. He describes the chance to grow up fast, develop leadership skills, and belong to something that’s bigger than yourself, an institution that expects things from you but gives back in return. “You know, somebody might want to join for one reason,” he says. “What we call the dominant buying motive. But I try to show them the whole pizza, not just one slice, because there’s so much more to the Army than just the bonus or money for college. It’s a great place—the camaraderie, the teamwork. It’s like being on a high school basketball team, a winning high school basketball team, for the rest of your life.”
Once the recruit is on board, he then has to qualify. He needs to be a U.S. citizen or a resident alien. Physically, he has to be able to do thirteen push-ups and seventeen sit-ups (three push-ups and seventeen sit-ups for female recruits), each set in one minute, and run an eight-and-a-half-minute mile (ten and a half minutes for females). He cannot have had asthma since he was age twelve or have been on Ritalin in the past two years. He has to be a high school graduate or have a GED and score above the thirtieth percentile on the entrance exam. (Sample question: “‘Turmoil’ most closely means: a) smelling, b) commotion, c) grease, d) anger.”) And he can’t have any criminal charges pending or serious crimes on his record.
Schwope helps make that happen. He’ll take out-of-shape kids with him to the gym and to jog. He’ll direct kids who can’t pass the practice exam to the tutorial on the Army’s Web site. And he’ll request waivers for recruits who still can’t quite qualify because of things like felonies on their record or substandard exam scores. He treats them not like younger siblings but like fellow soldiers, working with them to get the job done. He even gave one of Knox’s students regular rides to his TAKS test tutorials. The kid was ready to join but needed to graduate first.
CHARMED. IT’S A WEIRD WORD to stick on an airborne infantry grunt, but it fits the view Schwope takes of his life in the Army. He says he was floundering before he enlisted, in 2000, a GED holder chiefly concerned with getting better on his X-Box. “I had just been kinda bored with school, really,” he says now. “And I was working a go-nowhere job changing filters for an air-conditioning company. It wasn’t something I wanted to be doing for twenty years, you know what I mean?” He told a recruiter that what he wanted was to jump out of planes, and he scored well enough on his entrance exam to qualify for airborne training. He was slated for Ranger School but opted to use that time for Lasik surgery instead, a $5,000 procedure that was paid for by the Army. “That surgery was the greatest thing I’ve ever done in my life. And I paid nothing. Not a dime.”
Then he survived tours in two wars. First, there were nine months in Afghanistan as a gunner on a patrol unit that conducted raids on small villages and acted as a quick reaction force in the mountains. Though he jokingly calls it a walk in the park, obviously it was anything but. When a Chinook helicopter was shot down, he and his unit would fly immediately to the site in a second Chinook—think about that, because he certainly had to—to collect the survivors and secure the machine. Then he was an infantry squad team leader during a year in Iraq. His unit, in the 4th Infantry Division, secured the spider hole where Saddam Hussein was finally captured and lived for a while in the palace where Saddam’s sons Uday and Kusay were killed. The months around those events had him in plenty of firefights in Iraq’s city streets, and the action could get, to use Schwope’s words, “crazy and gory.” But he won’t discuss it with a civilian much more than that. “It’s not that it’s a bad memory. It’s just that what happens over there needs to stay over there,” he says, shrugging. “I mean, there were definitely some deaths, but it’s war, you know? And luckily, I didn’t lose any close buddies.”
For a soldier in love with running and gunning, the kind of GI Schwope calls a “hard charger,” the next development initially looked bad. In late 2004 he blew out his knee. Stepped in a Tikrit pothole and partially tore his ACL. Ninety days later, he returned to the States, putting him at home with his wife, Jennifer, and their 23-month-old son, Cody, whom Schwope had gotten to know for only four short months between trips to the wars. He was reclassified for administrative duty and in March of last year received his recruiting assignment.
As luck would have it, the Army had started to increase the number of recruiters. For Schwope, who grew up in Boerne, that meant there was an opening in the San Antonio Recruiting Battalion, a significant opportunity. San Antonio was the most successful of the Army’s 41 recruiting battalions last year and one of only 2 that would sign up as much as three quarters of their projected recruits in 2005. (The San Antonio region, which stretches from Round Rock to the Valley, enlisted 2,178, or 87 percent.) Schwope had friends who’d drawn recruiting detail before him and been assigned to blue-state recruiting graveyards like New York. They told him stories about having to shut down their offices because anti-war protesters were lying like war dead on the ground in front of the station. Rather than protesters, Schwope would encounter a fair number of Army and Air Force brats who’d approach him before he could even pull out a business card. “It makes it easier to find them when they’re wearing an Army T-shirt,” he says.
He gets to live just ten minutes from the station, and he drives to work in a spotless, white, jacked-up diesel Ford F250, sipping Big Red and checking out the marquee on Cowboys Dancehall to see who’s playing each weekend. Frequently enough, it’s a favorite like Pat Green or Charlie Robison. These are the kinds of interests he shares with the kids he recruits. “You can always tell a GI whose unit was deployed, because when he comes back, and you go into his room, there’s a brand-new sixty-inch HD LCD TV with a thousand-dollar surround-sound system. And then you go out to his brand-new Escalade on rims.” In fact, one of the few drags of recruiting that Schwope will admit to is that he has to drive a government-issued Dodge Stratus to make house calls. “Not that my truck is anything special, but if you’ve got rims, a stereo, and tinted windows, people are going to be interested.”
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