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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Thinking like a kid helps him connect with the kids. When they meet him in the station, they find a remarkably likable guy, so friendly that when you sit with him, you hope he likes you. He gives off the confidence and loyalty of someone who’s fulfilled a difficult duty. He has his recruits flip through a scrapbook of photos of him and his buddies going into combat in Afghanistan and Iraq. And then the recruits look at him, healthy and here. They start to believe that they can pull it off too. When the process works, the Army ends up with a recruit who sounds like he’s already a soldier.
Robert Pedraza, a 29-year-old husband and father of two girls, was interested in enlisting when he called the recruiting station in December and happened to reach Sergeant Schwope. Within a week, he had qualified for a $20,000 signing bonus and was preparing to ship to basic training in February. He stopped by the station in mid-January and, while he was there, explained why he had enlisted.
“I feel now’s the time to help defend the United States,” said Pedraza. “There’s not enough recruits out there, and I know how it feels sometimes at work when there’s a guy missing and everyone has to step up. I can relate to our soldiers in the field being shorthanded that way.”
Pedraza said that his father was in the Air Force and his brother the Navy, and he himself, a quiet, short, slightly built San Antonio Judson High School alum, had spent the past six years working for an eyeglasses manufacturing lab. “I noticed the job where I was wasn’t really getting anywhere. But now I’m going to be serving in the U.S. Army for three years and seven months. I’ll get to experience what the military life is like and get to see the world.
“I know I will most likely wind up in Iraq, but I’m not really afraid. I know the dangers involved and everything. But I also have some faith too, and that basically is the foundation for my courage that I have.”
ON A TUESDAY TWO WEEKS LATER, Schwope took me with him to a cookie-cutter suburb on the northwest side of town to meet with a seventeen-year-old recruit named T. J. Burrow. Fidgety, wiry, and freckled, with short dark-brown hair and an adolescently thin brown goatee, Burrow answered the door in a long white T-shirt and baggy red basketball shorts hanging from well below his haunches. But the first thing I noticed was what looked to be a tattoo, a purple line that ran from behind his right ear along the bottom of his jaw to the tip of his chin. Inked above the shoulders like that, the tattoo would require a waiver. But it turned out to be a surgical scar. Burrow said he’d recently been caught in gang-fight crossfire while driving with some friends on Loop 410. Now he had a titanium jawbone. That would require a waiver too.
Burrow never finished high school. During the week, he lives with his cousin and babysits her three young kids. He was cleaning the house when Schwope brought a laptop by so he could take the practice test. They hadn’t met in person before, and though Burrow had explained the incident to Schwope on the phone, Schwope looked curious when he saw the scar.
“Any brain damage?” Schwope asked.
“Nope,” said Burrow, vigorously shaking his head while pacing around.
“Any hearing damage?”
“Nope,” he said, still shaking his head.
“Can you chew okay?”
“Yes, sir,” said Burrow, now nodding.
“Any false teeth?”
“Nah. These are all mine.” He opened his mouth and snapped it shut quickly three times, keeping his lips apart so Schwope could hear his teeth knocking against one another.
“Well, then, let’s take the test,” said Schwope. While Schwope waited outside in the driveway, calling other recruits on his cell phone, Burrow sat with the laptop at the kitchen table. He took his time, constantly tapping his fingers on the table and his heels on the floor. At one point he asked me, “What does ‘unison’ mean again?” I told him I couldn’t tell him and looked around the room. There were piles of laundry on the black leather couch nearby and a vacuum cleaner next to some toys on the ground. Finally he finished, scoring a 34. One hurdle cleared.
When Schwope told him his score, Burrow exploded. He jumped from the table, pumped his fist in the air, and bounced on his toes through the kitchen like a boxer who’d just won a fight. “F— yeah!” he screamed. “That’s what I’m talking about!” Then Schwope told him he could take the real test as early as the next day, and if he scored that well again and everything else worked out right, he could be signed up in a week.
“But we’ll need medical records on your jaw immediately,” said Schwope. “I’m ninety-nine percent sure they’re going to want you to see a specialist. Anytime they hear ‘gunshot’ and ‘head,’ they’re going to want to know more. Do you have any tattoos?”
“I’ve got none right now, but I was thinking of getting three on my back,” said Burrow. “Like the three my brother wanted. It’d be ‘Death Before Dishonor,’ ‘Revenge Before Retreat,’ and ‘Land of the Free and Home of the Brave.’ He was going to go to the Army, but then he got his chick pregnant and had to get married.”
“Maybe you ought to wait until you’re in to get the tattoos,” said Schwope. Then he asked Burrow what job he wanted in the Army.
“EOD,” said Burrow. “Explosive ordnance disposal.”
“I can guarantee you won’t get that,” said Schwope. “You’ve got an assault on your record, and that job requires top secret clearance. You won’t get that clearance with that on your record. But once you’ve been in for three years, then you can apply for that clearance.”
Burrow nodded his head and kept walking around. I asked Burrow why he wanted to join the Army.
“Because I want to shoot people,” he said. He started walking around faster, and words started flying out of his mouth. “I want to go to war with China, Japan. I hate Japan. And France. I’ve hated the French for, like, four years. That’s why I want to go.”
I asked him about his assault, and he started to slow down. “My brother and I got in this fight,” he started, and I pictured the pair of them fighting two other guys. I was mistaken. “And I had my brother by the nose and mouth like this”—he put his hands to his face—“and he was starting to bleed, so my mom came in to break it up, and she got in between us. And when I’m fighting, dude, I kind of leave my head. I just get in there and go at it.” He lowered his head and threw a series of punches. “And I hit my mom, like, four or five times.
“So they said”—he didn’t identify “they”—“that if she didn’t press charges, the state would and that it would be a lot worse for me if the state did. So she had to. I was on probation for, like, nine months. I just got off. And the DA said my record would be closed if I enlisted.”
At that point Schwope jumped in. He promised to pick Burrow up the next day at noon to drive him to the processing station to take the real entrance exam. Then Schwope stood up, and the two of us left.
Back in the Stratus, I asked Schwope about Burrow. “I know a lot of people would be offended by the way that kid was. But isn’t that kind of aggression exactly what you want in some soldiers?”
“Absolutely not,” answered Schwope, sounding not flustered but flat, as if he believed what he was saying but not the fact that he was having to say it. “You can’t have loose cannons under you over there. If I’m a squad leader, I’ve got to have guys I can count on, a guy with his shit wired to the T. He has to know the rules, understand the rules, and follow the rules, you know what I mean?
“But everyone you meet, before they go, is ‘civilianized,’ if that makes sense. That’s what basic training is for. The drill sergeant will break him down and build him back up, develop that level of discipline and maturity.”
It was suddenly clear why Schwope is so good at selling his faith. He’d purchased it whole when he was signed up.
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