Dress for success: Navy recruiters compete in paratrooper country

All Hands, July, 2004 by James Pinsky

No one in Fayetteville, N.C., needs a television to be reminded about the war on terrorism.

In Fayetteville, a city that borders Fort Bragg--one of the largest Army bases in the world--it isn't just the family members of the Soldiers who worry, but the entire city. Fayetteville loves its Soldiers, and if a city could show its wounds, then Fayetteville would surely bleed Army green.

But Ft. Bragg is more than just your typical Army town. It's the home of one of the military's elite fighting elements--the paratrooper--and just about every kid in Fayetteville who ever thought about joining the military grows up wanting to be one. That is, until they talk to Gas Turbine Systems Technician (Electrical) (SW) 1st Class Harry Blackmore Jr.

Blackmore is a Navy recruiter stationed in Fayetteville's Eutaw Shopping Center in the heart of Army country, Despite facing David vs. Goliath-like odds in selling the Navy in an Army town, the Navy is doing quite well.

"Fayetteville has an enormous military population with Ft. Bragg and Pope Air Force Base," said Blackmore. "It's the home of more than 50,000 troops, the military retires here and if you aren't directly related to a Soldier then you know someone who is. Make no mistake; this is an Army town if there ever was one."

If you think a recruiter would dread selling the Navy to a bunch of kids in the Army's backyard, think again.

"There's nothing hard about recruiting Navy in an Army town," said Career Recruiter, Navy Counselor 1st Class (SW) Stacey Butler.

In fact, the Navy recruiters think having an Army base so close works to their advantage.

"Fayetteville is a patriotic town," said Machinist's Mate 2nd Class Keenan Ashworth, a Navy recruiter. "Here, the military sells itself. Everyone knows where Fayetteville is because of Ft. Bragg. People in general want to be a part of the military."

But with so many camouflaged Soldiers dominating the landscape of Fayetteville, marching to the beat of a different military drummer is just the thing the Navy needs to keep potential Sailors coming through their doors.

"Though they love their Soldiers here," said Blackmore, "they get tired of seeing green. I can't tell you the number of times I've gone to the mall of somewhere else to pay a bill in my Navy uniform and had the sales clerk say how nice it was to see something other than camouflage."

Some Soldiers apparently get tired of wearing green, as well.

Some of the Fayetteville office's most frequent visitors actually come from Ft. Bragg. Prior service and even active-duty Soldiers, many of them on their lunch break from Ft. Bragg and still in their Army uniforms, come to the Navy recruiting office looking for a different life.

"There's no better compliment to a branch of service than to have 'defectors' try to join your ranks," said Blackmore. "A lot of people have the misconception that the Navy is nothing but sitting on a ship in the middle of the ocean for six months, but there's so much more to us than deployments. Once other services reveal that they do long deployments too, doing six months on an air-conditioned ship with three square meals a day and a treadmill a few feet away sounds a lot more appealing than dumping sand out of your boots day in and day out."

The recruiters have also found that just wearing the Navy uniform draws people into Navy recruiting offices.

"Our uniforms are major recruiting tools," said Butler. "I get a lot of compliments about how professional I look in my whites and blues. People see that I look professional, and once they talk to me they see that I am professional, and that's an attractive combination in today's job market."

Uniforms aside, all of Fayetteville's recruiters sell the Navy using the belief that they have a superior product to the Army, Air Force and Marine Corps.

"We have the upper hand on the Army," said Butler. "We travel a lot more than the average Soldier, we have port calls, and for the few people who think they want to go into the Air Force, we have more planes, too."

In fact, the recruiters sometimes see the Navy as the biggest obstacle to recruiting more Sailors, not the Army.

"We can't ship recruits off fast enough," said Butler. "We don't have enough room at basic training and because of that, we're losing to the other services that can ship a recruit off in less than a week."

In addition to only having one boot camp, the recruiters cite dwindling numbers in popular career field quotas as another handicap. According to Ashworth, most of the people walking into their office want two fields--anything having to do with computers of the medical field. "And the rest all want to be SEALs," he added.

Not being able to give qualified candidates what they want when they want it is just one of the many heartaches of being a Navy recruiter.

"Being a recruiter is a lot of fun because I get people to join a service I'm a big fan of," said Ashworth. "But there's a lot about recruiting that makes this job not for the faint of heart. Selling the Navy is the easy part. The hard part begins after someone has joined the Navy."