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| Home Front: WoT |
| 40-Year Old Recruit Makes Good |
| 2007-11-18 |
| The Army and Beaver have turned to each other out of mutual desperation. Beaver, who had never seriously considered military service as a young man, needed a steady job, income, health benefits. An already strained Army, fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan while maintaining its presence elsewhere in the world, is struggling to make recruiting quotas. Lots of family banter, the obligatory lines about how the Army can't meet recruiting goals without lowering standards, raising ages, and big bonuses. Payoff is on page 5: FIVE WEEKS LATER AND 25 POUNDS LIGHTER, Beaver stands at rigid attention with other recruits at Fort Jackson. A drill sergeant pins medals on the seven soldiers among the 54 in Beaver's platoon who have won sharpshooter awards for above-average shooting proficiency with their M-16 rifles. Beaver -- who, other than hunting a few times as a child, had never handled guns before his training here -- is one of the sharpshooters; he hit a distant target on 30 of 40 shots. "Congratulations, Beaver," drill Sgt. David Snyder says to him, shaking his hand. About midway through the nine weeks of basic training, Snyder says, "Private Beaver is squared away," which is Army talk for attentive, determined, skilled, worthy of respect and capable of leading. Snyder has given Beaver one of two leadership positions in the platoon, designating him as the 1st Platoon's assistant platoon guide, or the APG. Beaver helps Snyder with everything from maintaining platoon discipline to resolving personality conflicts among his fellow recruits. If Snyder needs someone to monitor calisthenics, Beaver -- whose 70 pushups during a two-minute test placed him above the 90th percentile of recruits in his age group -- can do that, too. At 32, Snyder has dealt with recruits younger and older than himself, and he prefers the latter. "By the second week of training, I saw that he was going to have leadership stripes and be the APG," Snyder says. "He talked to other soldiers. He was helpful to them. He openly expressed his opinions about things they were doing. He led in his own kind of quiet way . . . He's getting fitter -- you can see that. The run is a challenge for him, but he's going hard." (In the days ahead, Beaver will pass his running test.) "He won't allow age to hold him back," Snyder adds. "The younger soldiers see that. Some of those guys, even the faster ones, quit if they feel pain. Beaver just keeps pushing." It took oim a while to get there, but I think Beaver is going to be one of America's best. |
| Posted by:Bobby |