In Washington: Missionary

(3 of 4)

Yasenak was a mortarman in Viet Nam. But, as he says, "not every mother wants her son to grow up to be John Wayne." Most of the sons and daughters want the Army to train them for civilian work. Some—but not all—seek adventure, which usually means a couple of years in West Germany or South Korea. "About half want to be stationed as close to home as possible," he says. "The other half don't care where they're sent as long as they get the hell out of Walla Walla."

Cooper's stepbrother and fellow enlistee, Jeff Dirks, puts himself in the restless half. He is a fan of wild, anarchic rock music. He says he "works with a lot of liberals" at Walla Walla's Left Bank restaurant, but he is an articulate believer in U.S. intervention abroad. With a score of 96% on the most important part of the aptitude test, he is also a great catch for Yasenak. "I don't spend time thinking about combat," says Dirks, who was in second grade when U.S. troops left Viet Nam. "But I'm ready to go." He glances at his recruiter. "I'm really interested in the situation in El Salvador."

Walla Walla (pop. 25,618) is a pretty insular place. "When I got here three years ago," Yasenak says, "I was told I wouldn't do well, that this was a Navy town." An I-told-them-so grin sneaks across his face. The Navy ("squids," he calls sailors) and the Air Force have offices on either side of his, both locked and empty one recent Monday. He denies any competitive ill will. "It doesn't amount to competition; in 1983 I took in more enlistments than all of the others combined." Yasenak despises big cities and their pace, but he has the salesman's instinct for hustling. Last year, he remembers, "I had a very qualified female from Columbia County, a farm girl. She said, 'I climb down off the combine at 10 p.m. Can you be at my house then?' " He was out at the wheat farm late that night. "Three weeks after that," he says, his tight grin again showing, "the girl enlisted."

He has done best in winter, when there is no work planting or harvesting. "I'm supposed to call a prospect back every three days, but if he tells me to bug off, it'll be months before I think of him again." Yasenak, pressed to "get production up," has continued in his chaplain-esque way instead. "I don't pull people off street corners." With three local colleges, the town has plenty of young people on corners. At Whitman College, there is an oddly generic poster in a dorm window—WRITE YOUR CONGRESSMAN ABOUT AN ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUE—that seems to typify Walla Walla's citizen earnestness. How a recruiter recruits, Yasenak explains, "all depends on the market you're working in." Patriotism is robust in Walla Walla, he says. But his young recruits are a little uncomfortable talking in such abstractions. "They may not say they're enlisting to serve their country. They talk around the question and mention the financial benefits," he says, reaching for the day's second pack of Marlboro Lights, "but I believe if we just gave them the chance to serve and nothing else, most of them would still enlist."