Generally Speaking by Claudia J. Kennedy Page B

my work as a WAC recruiter. I'd be twenty-six before my Army obligation ended. Would there be a life for me outside the Army? Driving my lonely rounds across the bleak tundra of northern New England, stretching my limited per diem at bargain motels to save money, I felt mounting unease. But I persisted. My parents had taught me to complete an obligation once I'd accepted it. And that was what I intended to do.
    Then one snowy January afternoon at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, I met with some seniors who seemed interested. They'd read all the official material, but obviously needed a kicker to clinch the deal.
    “If you join the Army,” I told them honestly, “you'll meet a lot of good-looking guys.” Then I looked out the stained glass windows of the student union at the drifting snow. “And we'll train you in a nice warm climate.”
    Eventually several enlisted. After this victory, my standard approach was not just to give facts, but also offer a glimpse of the type of
life
the Army created for women.
    Within a few months, persistence began to pay off. I recruited women at almost every campus I visited. Not only did I make mission, but I was recruiting so many that I was filling more training “seats” than my district was allocated and Branch gave me a ceiling. But I kept recruiting because so many women wanted to join the Army. Instead of turning them away, I called my colleagues in other districts and offered them my approved applicants for their credit and their seats. They were more than pleased to accept them on their books.
    One contributor to this success was Sara Zuretti, a runner-up in the Miss New Hampshire contest, whom I had recruited in her last year at a local university. She was a January graduate and had six months to wait before beginning the Basic Course. But I convinced Branch to swear her in as a second lieutenant and let her wear her uniform while accompanying me on my campus tours. Sara also was a real hit in a local TV publicity blitz we launched promoting the All-Volunteer Army. When she met the governor of New Hampshire in her well-tailored green uniform, the people in our public affairs office joked she'd gotten so much airtime that she'd land his job in the next election. I couldn't have been happier.
    I suppose this is the kind of pleasure a successful salesperson derives from a job well done. But for me, there was more. I had persisted for over two years, learning the apprenticeship of an entry-level officer under sometimes tedious conditions. But now I was perfectly happy to complete the recruiting assignment and I looked forward to my next Army job.
    In my last year of that assignment, our recruiting station at the Federal Building in Concord received an impossibly complex manpower survey, one of the bureaucratic legacies of some earlier Pentagon dynasty. The crux of the report was to document how all the civilians and soldiers had used their time during the previous year, divided into labyrinthine blocks of one-quarter hour. The survey would have been laughable had our future budget and allocation of people not depended on completing every box, subparagraph, and column of numbers in the multipage document. The task remained incomplete for several weeks, casting a pall like an unexploded bomb over all who wanted to avoid dealing with it. One morning when Sergeant Major Calais stopped by my cubicle to see me, he warned, “It may be you that has to do it, Captain.”
    “Oh no, Sergeant Major,” I said adamantly. “I've got to make mission, and I don't know a thing about manpower surveys.”
    He suggested he knew a civil servant who might help if I got stuck with the job.
    But about a week before the dreaded report was due, Major Smith reassigned the survey to me. “You're going to have to do this. We don't have much time. But we will give you all the help you need.”
    That amounted to three typists and two crusty civilian budget specialists from the Army Reserve center.