Articles from the Sunday Times
Oct. 30th, 2005 10:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
A Lives article on medicating the author's 5 year old autistic son
The Vanishing Boy
By PAUL COLLINS
The moment I opened my eyes I knew something was wrong. The sun wasn't up yet, and a cry was forming in Morgan's throat. I padded over to his bed, puzzled.
"Morgan?"
His darkened room was filled with battered brass instruments, playing cards, thick reference books - the inscrutable fascinations of an autistic 5-year-old. Morgan had always been in his own world, but it was a fairly happy one. In his waking hours he'd hum "In the Hall of the Mountain King" while shuffling through mysterious sequences of pinochle cards; lately he had become engrossed in an illustrated encyclopedia of electric guitars, squinting and smiling at the old pictures and names: Danelectro, Rickenbacker, Gretsch. Sometimes he'd brush past his baby brother and march up to me with a lump of Play-Doh. "Gibson ES-350," he'd demand. As I'd gamely fashion a fretboard and tuners out of clay, he'd grab his tarnished French horn, skip outside to the tree swing and blast out wobbling notes at the neighbors: borp, brap, boorp.
I leaned farther over his bed.
"Morgan?"
Bam.
I staggered back, smacking away another punch, yelling in surprise, "Go to your room!" - which didn't mean much since he was already in it. I retreated across the hall and snapped on the bathroom light. Blood was flowing from my nose. Behind me Morgan thrashed on his bed, pounding and kicking the bedroom wall, screaming.
It hadn't always been like this. But lately Morgan had been reaching out into the world and forming full sentences. I want a peanut butter sandwich. Turn on the TV, please. Yet the more he understood the world outside himself, the more it infuriated him. He was noticing things. The slightest variation in his world - a broken cracker, a minute tear in a book - sent him into inconsolable tantrums over the very existence of disorder.
"Fix it," he'd roar. "Fix it fix it fix it.. . ." Sometimes I could; sometimes I couldn't. Sometimes it didn't matter: he'd flail at me anyway. Recently the tantrums started in bed, before he was fully awake. Nothing in particular was setting him off: just being conscious enraged him. Just existing. All the calming procedures from his special-ed class were flung aside by his anger and confusion. I studied my bloodied face, and for the first time in my life I was truly frightened.
I found my wife nursing our baby, woken up by his brother's tantrum. "Should we call the doctor?" she said. I felt as if I was losing my son: I feared for the baby, even for myself. "Yes," I said, nodding.
A few days later I held a prescription for liquid Prozac in my hand. It's often used with autistic children to moderate the floods of stimuli that send them into fits. But medicine always has one unavoidable side effect: doubt. I'm a historian and all too aware of how heavily drugs have been marketed to Americans, even in old sheet music and comics. In our house lay a 1935 Dr. Miles New Weather Almanac, alternating farm forecasts with patent remedy testimonials: "I get a bottle of Dr. Miles' Nervine, and after a few doses, it does the trick. Sleep - Oh boy! I'll say I can sleep." We laugh now, of course - and then take our own medicines. Yet what might that daily milliliter of mint-flavored solution do to Morgan? The F.D.A. warnings ranged from a dry mouth to a "black box" caution over suicidal thoughts in a few patients. And his young brain was still forming. But forming into. . .what, exactly?
We didn't know if treating him would work; we did know what would keep happening if we didn't try. We slipped it into his pudding each day and watched nervously for the ebb of his tantrums. After a week or two the familiar outlines of our son re-emerged from the depths: Morgan began to hum happily again, to sleep through the night, to crash away at our piano joyfully. Today, a year later, he swings on the front-porch glider, blowing glissando raspberries and then smiling at the reflection in his trombone. He still gets frustrated, but it no longer escalates so wildly. And yet.. . .
Really? You medicate your son? Our choice required no explanation to parents of disabled kids, but to others I almost had to apologize for. . .well, getting medicine for my child. The failures of the past and present - those old almanacs and new black-box notices - make us suspicious. But I don't have the luxury of distrust. I do not love that it came to this. I do not love drugs. I do not love the companies that sell them.
But I love my son.
On religion and football
Increasingly, Football's Playbooks Call for Prayer
By JOE DRAPE
Every preseason for 30 years, Coach Bobby Bowden has taken his Florida State football players to a church in a white community and a church in a black community in the Tallahassee area in an effort, he said, to build camaraderie. He writes to their parents in advance, explaining that the trips are voluntary, and that if they object, their sons can stay home without fear of retaliation. He remembers only one or two players ever skipping the outing.
Since becoming the football coach at Georgia in 2001, Mark Richt, too, has taken his team to churches in the preseason. A devotional service is conducted the night before each game, and a prayer service on game day. Both are voluntary, and Mr. Richt said he does not attend them.
On game days, Penn State players may choose between Catholic and Protestant services or not go at all. Coach Joe Paterno and the team say the Lord's Prayer in the locker room after games.
As in politics and culture in the United States, college football is increasingly becoming a more visible home for the Gospel. In the past year more than 2,000 college football coaches participated in events sponsored by the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, which said that more than 1.4 million athletes and coaches from youth to professional levels had attended in 2005, up from 500,000 in 1990.
Mr. Bowden believes that prayer and faith are part of the American way.
"Most parents want their boys to go to church," he said. "I've had atheists, Jews, Catholics and Muslims play for me, and I've never not started a boy because of his faith. I'm Christian, but all religions have some kind of commandments, and if kids would obey them, the world would be a better place."
But others raise concerns about separation of church and state.
"This is a lawsuit waiting to happen, and I believe university administrations are playing a game of chicken," the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, a lawyer and executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said. "But eventually, you got to believe that one kid is going to say, 'I've had enough,' and step forward."
The spiritual fervor of some coaches and athletes at public institutions, however, did not escape notice at the high school level this month. Marcus Borden, the football coach in East Brunswick, N.J., resigned rather than stop participating in a player-initiated pregame prayer, as he was ordered to do by the district after parents complained. He returned to his team after agreeing not to pray, but is considering a legal challenge.
Last June, in the wake of a Pentagon task force investigating broader allegations of religious intolerance at the Air Force Academy, Fisher DeBerry, the football coach, stopped leading pregame prayers and removed a banner in the Falcons' locker room. It bore the Fellowship of Christian Athletes' Competitors Creed, which begins "I am a Christian first and last."
"The problem inherently is the hierarchal nature of the player-coach relationship, where the coach is all-powerful," Mr. Lynn said. "Team members want face time and playing time. And if they don't go along with what the coach offers, they fear that they will become second-stringers."
Peer pressure in a group dynamic, Mr. Lynn said, has prevented any college player from coming forward to mount a legal challenge. No one wants to alienate a coach, especially a popular one.
In 2000, the United States Supreme Court reaffirmed its decisions against officially sponsored prayer in public schools in a case involving a district in Santa Fe, Tex., where prayers preceded high school football games over the public-address system.
The 6-to-3 majority opinion by Justice John Paul Stevens said that even when attendance is voluntary and when the decision to pray is made by students, "the delivery of a pregame prayer has the improper effect of coercing those present to participate in an act of religious worship," which violates the establishment clause of the First Amendment.
That may be the law, but God has long played a prominent role in the game's mythology, from the postcards of the former Alabama Coach Bear Bryant walking on water, to the mosaic of Christ with raised arms on a Notre Dame library that looms above the football stadium and is known as Touchdown Jesus.
"It's an awkward issue to raise because much of these things are grounded in boosting team morale and building unity more than hard gospel," Leo Sandon, professor emeritus of religion and American studies at Florida State, said. "When you juxtapose it with the iconic status of some of these coaches, it becomes more daunting and doesn't get much comment. "
Mr. Richt, 45, was once Mr. Bowden's assistant at Florida State and has followed his successful ways on the field. Entering yesterday, the Bulldogs (7-0) were ranked No. 4, while the Seminoles (6-1) were No. 10 in the Associated Press news media poll. Mr. Richt has also followed his mentor's lead by making his private faith a matter of public record.
He has one supporter with a different perspective: Musa Smith, a rookie running back for the N.F.L. Baltimore Ravens, who played at Georgia. Smith was reared a Muslim and did not attend chapel services with his teammates. When he did pray with them, he stuck to his own prayers. Mr. Smith said he was inspired by the example set by Mr. Richt.
"At the end of the day, it was about strengthening your spiritual foundations and to walk in a righteous way in whatever you believe," Mr. Smith said. "It reminded me of my fundamentals and made me a better person."
Mr. Bowden, 75, who has been outspoken about his faith throughout his 50-year career, does not doubt that he has kept critics at bay because of his success and his popularity in north Florida, where the predominantly Christian population recognizes one of its own in his folksy ways.
"I win too many games," said Mr. Bowden, who is major college football's most successful coach, with 357 victories.
Neither Mr. Richt nor Mr. Bowden drinks alcohol or smokes, and both adhere to a spiritual regimen. Mr. Richt reads a chapter of Proverbs a day, and prays between meetings and before interviews; Mr. Bowden begins his day at 4 a.m. with an hour of reading the Bible and is known for offering fiery church sermons.
Each believes that by exemplifying his religious values he can develop not only better players, but also better students, sons, husbands and fathers.
Center David Castillo, who is in his final season at Florida State, said that Mr. Bowden has been sensitive to the diversity of his players. The pregame and postgame prayers Mr. Bowden leads are nondenominational and directed at the safety of both teams and those traveling to see them, Mr. Castillo said.
"He tells us that he doesn't care if we don't believe what he does, "Mr. Castillo, who is preparing for medical school, said. "But he wants us to believe in something."
Mr. Bowden, however, injected himself in the Air Force controversy when he told attendees of a Fellowship of Christian Athletes event in Colorado Springs, home of the academy, that Mr. DeBerry was in a "heck of a battle because he happens to be a Christian, and he wants his boys to be saved."
"I want my boys to be saved," Mr. Bowden added.
In fact, he said, when about 70 percent of his players come from single-parent homes, or are reared by an extended family, it is his right and responsibility to be candid about his faith. "You got 90 kids in a history or psychology classroom around here, and a professor can stand up and say anything he wants in creation," Mr. Bowden said recently in an interview at his office. "Why can't I tell my boys what I believe?"
Ron Riccio, who is representing Mr. Borden in New Jersey, said God and religion have not been swept away by the government: the Pledge of Allegiance, and the words In God We Trust remain on currency. Legislative bodies often begin sessions with a prayer, and "you have nearly every president in history saying, 'God bless America,' " Mr. Riccio, who teaches constitutional law at Seton Hall's law school, said.
Mr. Sandon, the retired Florida State professor, has had an amicable relationship with Mr. Bowden since serving as a member of the university's athletic board. But in his syndicated newspaper column, Religion in America, Mr. Sandon criticized Mr. Bowden's remarks regarding Mr. DeBerry and Air Force.
"Don't make any mistake - the biggest man around here is Bobby Bowden, and I have never seen any president or athletic director call him to heel," Mr. Sandon said. "If you have a strong religious dimension to your program, there is going to be church-and-state issues."
Despite the Santa Fe decision, T. K. Wetherell, the president of Florida State, said he did not believe Mr. Bowden had violated the Constitution, nor was he worried that Mr. Bowden would.
"Coach Bowden has the right and ability to speak his mind, as do all of our faculty," Mr. Wetherell said. "He doesn't push his views on his players. It gets back basically to the academic-freedom issue, and we give that some leeway for all our faculty and staff. He understands that he works for a public institution."
So does Mr. Richt. Yet in 2001 and 2003, Americans United for Separation of Church and State wrote to Georgia saying that Mr. Richt's program was in violation of the establishment clause. In both instances, Stephen M. Shewmaker, the executive director of legal affairs at Georgia, replied that because participation was voluntary the university had found no violations of the Constitution.
Mr. Richt has shown he is sensitive to both the threats to the Constitution and public opinion. In 2002, after Georgia clinched the Southeastern Conference East title, he began his news conference with religious comments. He was criticized by some fans and the news media, and subsequently apologized.
"My goal is not to cause somebody grief or to make anyone upset," Mr. Richt said. "My goal is to love these guys and put them in a situation where they can grow up to be the best men they can be. We are an authority over them, and I have influence over them, and I take that responsibility seriously."
On recruiting young people on NYC
Sergeant Guzman's War
By JENNIFER MASCIA
THE lanky 15-year-old with the velvety skin flashed a deceptive grin at the man in combat fatigues standing near the curb. "You ain't no good!" she shouted at the soldier. "You stealing these young people!"
Staff Sgt. Richard Guzman looked up from the crowd of black and Hispanic students clustered near the entrance to the Manhattan Center for Science and Mathematics, a high school in East Harlem. Sidling over to the girl, he held out his hand. "Hey," he said, his voice a sleepy mix of fine Long Island sand and honey.
"It's nothing against you," she replied without extending a hand. "It's people like you." Then she scurried across East 116th Street, another battle lost in the war for New York's youth. But no matter. As far as Sergeant Guzman was concerned, the neighborhood remained ripe with possibilities. "Everybody's thought about the military," he said later as his dark eyes scanned the neighborhood's pedestrian-clogged streets. "I mean, look at all the people here."
Sergeant Guzman, 26, is station commander of the Army recruiting unit in the Armed Forces Career Center, known informally as the Harlem Knights recruiting center, on 125th Street and Lenox Avenue. A product of a hardscrabble upbringing in Richmond Hill, Queens, he joined the Army after high school largely to straighten himself out. Today, he presides over a warren of rooms across the street from Bill Clinton's office that is one of the more powerful of the engines that keep an increasingly unpopular war up and running.
With a monthly average of five recruits, the Harlem Knights center, which serves both Harlem and East Harlem, is ranked in the top three in its battalion, which includes much of the New York metropolitan region. Since his arrival 10 months ago, Sergeant Guzman has signed up 12 people.
This is not an easy time to be a military recruiter. Last week, fatalities from the war reached 2,000, and last month a New York Times/CBS News poll showed that the number of Americans who thought that the United States had made the right decision in taking military action against Iraq had fallen to 44 percent.
Much has been said about the efficacy of plying poor minority neighborhoods for recruits. But several factors make Sergeant Guzman's job easier.
Unlike the Marines, Army infantry and Special Forces, which send volunteers straight from boot camp to the front lines, the Harlem Knights Army unit signs potential recruits up for more than 200 noncombat jobs, everything from laundry and textile specialist to flute player to dental specialist. Sergeant Guzman cannot guarantee that his recruits will not go to Iraq; in fact, he acknowledges, about half of them will probably end up there, though not necessarily on the front lines. But the higher a recruit scores on the basic military aptitude test, the more noncombat specialties are available. "Pulling a trigger is not technically complicated," he said.
Sergeant Guzman also attributes the Army's relative success among the youth of Harlem and East Harlem to the problems that continue to plague those neighborhoods, notably poor schools and dismal job prospects. He has scoped out prospective recruits living in apartments with three people to a room and no bed.
"I can recruit two to three people a month," Sergeant Guzman said, "no matter if it's World War III or a recession."
Smooth Talker
Sergeant Guzman's skills of persuasion are not limited to sidewalk encounters. The other day, with the soothing, gravelly tones of a late-night disc jockey, he was on the phone, trying to lure an unsure 21-year-old girl into military service. "I'm gonna keep it real with you, and you gonna keep it real with me," he murmured into the receiver. "I'm setting you up for success. When you actually go to boot camp, you're gonna be well trained."
Then he tried another tack: "Imagine your wedding. I can see you in your uniform." He laughed a throaty laugh, his lips parted to reveal a full white smile. "An Army dress? Yeah, a camouflaged wedding dress."
Later, as the rhymes of Jay-Z poured out of a stereo perched on a bookshelf, Sergeant Guzman tapped away on his laptop, courting the 18-to-24 demographic via e-mail.
Near the entrance to the office, under a yellow banner that reads "An Army of One," a bulletin board presented photos of 50 young men and women, mostly black and Hispanic, with whom his approach had succeeded. Each photo listed the recruit's name, age, high school or college from which he or she had been recruited, and his or her enlistment bonus. Nearby was a postcard addressed to Sergeant Guzman from a recruit at boot camp. "Greetings from Henderson, Nevada!" it read. "Thank you for helping me enlist in the U.S. Army!"
Though so far only a few of Sergeant Guzman's recruits have been sent to Iraq, each time he receives a letter from the parents of a deployed soldier, he ships "his" recruit a care package that contains copies of Jet magazine and Sports Illustrated and homemade tapes of Hot 97 radio broadcasts.
Sergeant Guzman will not be going to Iraq himself. "Recruitment is very safe as far as deployment is concerned," he said. Nevertheless, he admits: "Half of me wants to go. The money is ridiculous."
While a dental assistant, for example, can net $1,400 a month, a young soldier in combat can net $2,000 to $2,500 a month, tax free. With enlistment bonuses and tuition assistance topping out at $40,000, it pays for Harlem recruits to be An Army of One.
It pays for Sergeant Guzman, too. Of $2,496 he receives as a monthly housing allowance, he pays $2,000 to live in a three-bedroom apartment in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and pockets the difference. He travels to work in a government-provided 2005 Dodge Stratus. With his $2,600 monthly income, plus the $425 monthly "special duty pay" that recruiters receive, he can indulge in his passion for diamond stud earrings, vintage X-Men comic books and sports jerseys that can cost up to $400 apiece.
On the advice of a colonel friend, Sergeant Guzman has begun to invest in the stock market; his portfolio includes G.E., Home Depot and Janus Funds. "I try to stay diversified," he explained.
Just recently, he bought his first Rolex. It cost $8,000. "Everything I've ever wanted in life, the Army's provided for me," he said, sipping a Capri Sun from its silver pouch.
In Search of a Calling
It was a different story for Sergeant Guzman 22 years ago, when his father was gunned down on a street in Richmond Hill "for being at the wrong place at the wrong time." The son, who was 4, suspects there is more to the story, but his mother, Carmen Guzman, a retired cosmetologist, would just say, "Your daddy's in a better place."
An only child, Richard Guzman was 15 and, as he put it, "hanging out with the wrong crowd" when a fellow he knew pointed a gun at his face and demanded his Nikes, a trendy pair of Bo Jacksons. "I kind of had lowlife friends," he admitted.
That year, 1994, two friends robbed a bodega and killed the cashier. "I was so close to being involved," Sergeant Guzman said. "I'm very lucky to be alive."
A couple of years later, with family and friends in the service and certain that "school really wasn't my thing," he enrolled in the Army's delayed-entry program, in which he participated in monthly drills and some basic training. After he scored well on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, the basic aptitude test for entrance to the military, a recruiter came calling.
What Sergeant Guzman calls the laid-back job choices appealed to him, and he decided to become an administration clerk. After nine weeks in boot camp and postings in Fort Bragg, N.C., Seattle and Alaska, he became attracted to the idea of career recruiting, and spent four years working at a recruiting station in Astoria, Queens, before moving to Harlem.
He feels that he has found his perfect match. "I don't think you'll ever find a recruiter like myself," he said. "I love this business."
With its typical 8-a.m.-to-9-p.m. schedule, recruiting leaves him little time for a social life (although he keeps an updated black book, just in case). And around the office, he hears tales of recruiters in other jurisdictions who suffer nervous breakdowns while trying to reach their quotas. "That's where the improprieties come in," he said. "That's where you fake a diploma."
Though he won't be going to Iraq, he maintains that the Iraqi war was unavoidable. "I don't see how we couldn't have gone," he said. "The World Trade Center was attacked. The Pentagon was attacked. We had to do something."
And weapons of mass destruction?
"I'm thinking there are some there that we haven't found in the underground caves or whatever," he said. "I believe that something is there, maybe Russian artillery. We have Hussein in custody, we killed his sons. We need him to confess or something."
An Escape Route Out
Unlike Sergeant Guzman, Alanna Chataigne does not support the war and thinks the American troops should come home immediately.
"It's just causing more terrorist attacks, here and in London, us being over there," said Alanna, a 17-year-old of Haitian descent who wears clear-rimmed glasses and has braids pulled back into a ponytail. Still, Alanna, a senior enrolled in the R.O.T.C. program at the High School of Graphic Communication Arts in Midtown, participates in the Army's delayed-entry program, just as Sergeant Guzman did, and she is counting the days until she turns 18 so she can fly off to boot camp and leave Harlem behind. "I have no life," she explained. "With the knowledge I learn from the Army, I want to go around the world."
Precocious and poised, Alanna acts the way a teenager thinks that an adult should act. During one of her frequent visits to the Harlem recruiting station, she rattled off the chronology of the founding of the American armed forces - "I was born exactly 212 years after the Marine Corps," she announced proudly - before waxing rhapsodic, in equal measure, about Mozart and the reggaeton artist Daddy Yankee.
Showing up several times a week in her black and gold "Army of One" T-shirt, Alanna runs errands for the recruiters and banters with the officers. "Watch the language!" she scolded Sergeant Guzman one afternoon when he fired off an expletive. When he complained that his Snapple was too warm, she jumped up to get ice.
"The Army is in her blood," Sergeant Guzman said of Alanna's passion for the military, which is shared by a sister at Marine boot camp and a stepfather in the National Guard. But Sergeant Guzman also thinks that Alanna turned to the Army to escape a rough family life on West 130th Street - basically, as Sergeant Guzman described it, "that situation that any person has with a stepparent."
Alanna would agree that the Army offers an appealing escape route for her. "My mom just wants me to get out of the city," she said. "She wants me to see something different. She lived here all her life."
A Battle for Hearts and Minds
On a recent afternoon, Sergeant Guzman dropped by City College on Convent Avenue and 138th Street to obtain its "stop-out" list, a register of students who have dropped out of college midcareer and might be likely recruits.
Sergeant Guzman acknowledged that some high schools and colleges were resistant to his presence, and potential recruits often report back that their teachers try to dissuade them from military service. He finds this attitude downright unpatriotic.
"You'd think that given the times and needs of the country now, schools would be more understanding," he said, seeming perplexed by guidance counselors who encourage college over the military. "I've got a mission from the president of the United States. These schools are not going to tell me what to do."
After a quick chat with a City College receptionist, he emerged with a thick stack of papers containing the names of thousands of recent dropouts ripe for recruiting. Holding up the list as a proud father would his newborn child, he said: "All this is potential recruits. This gets me excited right here."
Heading back to his car, he elaborated on his approach.
"I don't like taking no for an answer," he said. "I've got a mission to accomplish each month. And it's not just recruiting. If I say no, I won't get anywhere in life, man." Placing the list safely in the trunk next to the boxes of key chains, stickers and yellow water bottles he gives to potential recruits, he added: "Like in the dating scene. Sometimes no means yes. She just says it to make you want her more, you know?"
Yo Soy El Army
Every Harlem recruiter has goals: to make two appointments a day with prospective recruits, to get four of those recruits interviewed that week, and to administer an aptitude test to two of them with the hope of a single passing grade.
Although curious teenagers sometimes make their way to the Harlem office, most of the recruiting is done in the street, which was why Sergeant Guzman was out in front of the Manhattan Center for Science and Mathematics that late summer day. He had set up his folding table, which is wallpapered with images of soldiers in combat, in a patch of shade provided by the scaffolding that surrounded the school. As he laid out pens, blank address cards and stickers that read "Yo Soy El Army," a small crowd of rowdy teenagers began peppering him with questions.
"If you go to the Army to play ball, you got to serve four years, man?"
"How many push-ups can you do?"
"Is it true they can kick you out?"
"You think they're gonna do that draft thing?"
Sergeant Guzman nodded to this one.
"Oh, I am running from that!" said a young man sporting a heavy gold chain.
"You might not have a choice," Sergeant Guzman replied dryly.
To each teenager he offered earnest eye contact and a spirited handshake. He opened by asking, "What year are you?" and closed with, "Do good in school." Some of the young people filled out the address cards, giving the Army their contact information; when they did, Sergeant Guzman watched over their shoulders like a hawk. Upon returning to the office, Sergeant Guzman would file the cards and call the young people who had filled them out. If a person sounded hesitant on the phone, Sergeant Guzman would send him or her information and phone once more in the hope of setting up an interview.
"Who's a senior?" he called into a crowd of teenagers outside the Manhattan Center school. Most were curious, but politely declined to volunteer their status.
"Hello, I like your T-shirt," he said to a girl wearing a camouflage tank top. Smiling, she moved on.
Sergeant Guzman greeted familiar faces by their first names. In his opinion, matching names to faces is part of the job. "It's like if you were buying a car and the sales rep didn't remember your name," he said. "You'd think it was funny."
While Sergeant Guzman followed one teenager down the street, a group of girls commandeered the folding table. "Buenas," one of them said, handing out T-shirts to her friends as if she were a staff sergeant herself. Her friends began taking Sergeant Guzman's pens and attaching his stickers to their stomachs.
On average, Sergeant Guzman estimates, each visit to a high school nets three or four interviews, two passing aptitude test scores and one recruit. This session would attract one teenager, who stopped by the recruiting center a few days later, failed the test, and was sent home by Sergeant Guzman to study.
The crowd at Manhattan Center High had dispersed into the bright summer day. But before leaving, Sergeant Guzman plastered "Yo Soy El Army" stickers onto the scaffolding poles. Just in case.
On the best view on the city
Knockin' on Heaven's Door
By NEAL BASCOMB
IT is one of the most unforgettable moments in the history of movies.
Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr, star-crossed lovers returning to New York after a long journey abroad, are reluctantly parting, but planning to reunite six months hence. "You name the place, and I'll obey," Kerr says excitedly as their ship steams up the Hudson. Behind her, the Empire State Building passes into the frame, an elegant giant in the city's skyline. Grant suggests the building's observation deck. "Oh, yes, that's perfect!" Kerr replies. "It's the nearest thing to heaven we have in New York."
When I first arrived in New York over a decade ago, I had no such life-altering reason to ascend to the Empire State Building's top, as Grant and Kerr had in the 1957 three-hankie movie "An Affair to Remember." Yet a few days after I had dropped my bags, there I was. In a way I found difficult to articulate, I felt that I could not fully appreciate the city's grandeur without first climbing its loftiest heights and reveling in the view.
Starting Tuesday, Top of the Rock, a restored observatory at Rockefeller Center, will begin doing battle with the Empire State Building for the admiration of newly arrived visitors like me. To reach Top of the Rock, visitors will shoot 67 stories high aboard an elevator with a glass ceiling. They will emerge into a "Grand Viewing Room" that offers north and south perspectives on the city.
From there, they can ascend to the 70th-floor deck, a narrow, 190-foot long promenade whose original design in the 1930's resembled a ship's deck, complete with Adirondack chairs and vents resembling smoke stacks, according to Daniel Okrent's history of Rockefeller Center, "Great Fortune." The restoration promises luxurious surroundings and the same jaw-dropping, 360-degree views that once drew huge crowds to the space before it was closed in 1986, when the Rainbow Room was expanded.
As with the many skirmishes to claim the title of New York's tallest building, the quest for the city's finest view also comes steeped in a history of competition. In the 19th century, sightseers paid a few pennies to climb a creaking wooden staircase inside the steeple of the 284-foot-high Trinity Church for a bird's-eye view of the city, at the time a low, flat landscape of five-story mud-brown buildings. The small platform within the Statue of Liberty's torch trumped this observation point by about 30 feet, but it closed for structural reasons about the time that New York's first great observation deck opened on the 58th floor of the 792-foot Woolworth Tower, in 1913.
Frank Woolworth, the five-and-dime king, realized the advantage of his skyscraper's aerie perch and set the trend for attracting visitors to its top. In the overwrought brochure promoting his "Cathedral of Commerce," Woolworth boasted: "The thrilling sensation which comes over the sightseer that is never to be forgotten. It is indeed the most remarkable if not the most wonderful view in all the world."
More than 100,000 visitors a year doubtless agreed. "You'll be bewildered," he promised with less decorum, at the sight of the "multitudes of people scurrying about the busy streets" who "resemble an aggregation of pygmies." His skyscraper maintained its pre-eminence until the Roaring Twenties duel that gave rise to the Chrysler and Empire State towers.
The story of the height race between these buildings is widely known. The secret spires and last-minute design changes to seize the crown of world's tallest is part of the city's legend. But these skyscrapers also competed for visitors.
On the Chrysler Building observation deck, 71 stories high, one entered a fantastic chamber with vaulted ceilings painted with celestial motifs and hanging glass Saturns. In news releases and brochures, Chrysler promised a "magnificent vista" of a hundred miles from its triangular windows.
As in the height race, however, Chrysler lost to the Empire State when that building's open-air observation decks on the 86th and 102nd floors opened a year later in 1931, attracting a couple of thousand visitors a day. John J. Raskob, the skyscraper's chief financier, relished the monthly reports detailing how much business he had taken away from his competitor. Good thing, since the rest of his building was largely empty of tenants.
The Empire State's deck ruled without peer until the opening of the deck atop Rockefeller Center. Then, in the 1970's, the World Trade Center towers laid claim to the highest observatory with a deck above the 110th floor of the South Tower. The Sept. 11 attacks returned the Empire State to its unrivaled position. Only after a recent trip there was I reminded of the great absence in the skyline created by the loss of the twin towers. From the observation deck's south side, I kept looking downtown in search of something I would never see again.
My visit made me wonder, not for the first time, why these aeries have such a powerful allure. The benefit to a building owner's coffers is obvious, but what is it about observation decks that make them such a compelling draw, luring hundreds of thousands of out-of-towners and playing starring roles as meeting places for fictional lovers on film?
The answer, of course, has to do with point of view. At the base of the city's canyons, we can look up at the leap of steel and stone of a skyscraper, but this hardly does justice to the buildings' magnificence. Their height can be truly appreciated only from a distance, as part of the skyline, or, more significant, as a vantage point from which to gaze down on the city and the expanse beyond. Much like a mountaintop, they beg to be surmounted.
After the Eiffel Tower was completed in 1889, its observation deck not only became an instant attraction, it also revolutionized the way Parisians looked at their landscape. The art critic Robert Hughes likened the experience of viewing the city from the tower to seeing the first photograph of Earth from space. Parisian artists who up to that point had focused on perspective and depth began to look at landscapes in terms of patterns and planes - part of the influence that brought about the Cubist movement. The views from the Empire State Building have amazed and reshaped people's views of New York in a similar manner for years. No doubt the view from the Top of the Rock will do the same.
Looking toward my Greenwich Village neighborhood from the observation deck of the Empire State Building, I realized that given the broad sweep of the city, my life was a small affair. But on this trip, as on so many others, I also felt exhilaration. From this height, New York revealed its beautiful secrets: the gridiron pattern of the streets, the scale of each building to those around it, the waters that first brought the city to life, the hustle and flow of the people who sustained it now. For a moment, I felt alone with the city at my feet.
Later, speaking with a few of the sightseers crowded around the observation deck, I realized they felt some of the same things. An English couple, who were making their second trip to the Empire State's observation deck, spoke of understanding the city's massiveness only after seeing it from so high an elevation.
A visitor from Oregon added: "All my life, I've wanted to come here. Now I'm 74, and I finally made it."
Finally, an article about evangelicals trying to help soldiers stay "sexually pure" (a far more worthy endeavour, clearly, than stopping them from killing people....)
Sex and the Faithful Soldier
By JOHN LELAND
ADD another item to the well-equipped soldier's duffel. An evangelical radio ministry has developed a book kit meant to help soldiers protect their sexual purity, and is raising money to send 6,000 kits to chaplains who have requested them.
The kits, from New Life Ministries, which broadcasts on 150 stations nationally, is intended to promote Bible-based abstinence from pornography, adultery, nonmarital sex and masturbation. "Your goal is sexual purity," the authors write. "You are sexually pure when no sexual gratification comes from anyone or anything but your wife."
The five-book "Every Soldier's Battle" kit, boxed in camouflage, arrives at a time of "increased underlying tension in military chaplaincy," as more chaplains come from evangelical Christian traditions, said David Segal, director of the Center for Research on Military Organization at the University of Maryland. These chaplains often bring a culture of proselytizing, Mr. Segal said, that is "not in consonance with the way the military defines chaplaincy."
"Every Soldier's Battle" began with a call earlier this year to New Life from Michael Music, a chaplain's assistant (official rank: religious program specialist first class), with a Navy unit then in Iraq.
"There was a big problem as far as sexual incidents, harassment, some diseases and unplanned pregnancies," Mr. Music said, speaking from Millington, Tenn., where he is now stationed. His chaplain, Brian Keel, mentioned "Every Man's Battle," by the founder of New Life, Stephen Arterburn, and Fred Stoeker, which the ministry calls "a practical, detailed plan to help men find freedom from sexual temptation God's way." It has sold 701,000 copies, according to Mr. Arterburn's assistant. (There's a popular spinoff, "Every Woman's Battle.")
Mr. Music asked: Could they get copies to run a soldiers' group?
"You've got really good guys over there who are trying to keep their act together," said Mr. Arterburn, host of a daily radio program of Christian counseling. Mr. Arterburn said he was particularly concerned about pornography, which he said "has actually neutered men," because it has replaced real women with images.
The ministry assembled the kits as part of a study program, including either "Every Man's Battle" or "Every Woman's Battle," and asked for donations. So far it has raised $69,645. The kits, which cost about $50, have not been shipped yet, Mr. Arterburn said.
Sgt. First Class Daniel L. Roberts, a chaplain's assistant at Fort Jackson in South Carolina, requested 200 kits for troops in basic combat training. "Overseas, they'll have to battle temptations," said Sergeant Roberts, who added that he approaches sexual matters from a "commitment standpoint" as well as a "biblical standpoint."
He said he thought the kits would be helpful, but added that he was dubious about treating masturbation as a sin. "When you're deployed, away from family, it happens," Sergeant Roberts said. "I don't think that equates to sexual impurity."
Mr. Segal of the University of Maryland said the war in Iraq had created unusually high sexual and marital tensions, because troops are deployed more often and for longer stints than in other recent wars, and because more soldiers are married. Divorce rates have risen, especially in the Army, where the number of divorces nearly doubled from 2001 to 2004, to 4 percent of all married personnel.
Sgt. Rowe Stayton, a former Air Force pilot who served in Iraq in the National Guard, said about a quarter of the soldiers in his platoon ended their marriages while in Iraq. At the same time, he said, troops in Iraq "indulge in sexual fantasies more than they ever would in the U.S.," because there was so little to do most of the time.
Mr. Music said that 100 soldiers participated in his groups using "Every Man's Battle," openly discussing their temptations and lapses. "Us as men, we need to be accountable," he said.
The Vanishing Boy
By PAUL COLLINS
The moment I opened my eyes I knew something was wrong. The sun wasn't up yet, and a cry was forming in Morgan's throat. I padded over to his bed, puzzled.
"Morgan?"
His darkened room was filled with battered brass instruments, playing cards, thick reference books - the inscrutable fascinations of an autistic 5-year-old. Morgan had always been in his own world, but it was a fairly happy one. In his waking hours he'd hum "In the Hall of the Mountain King" while shuffling through mysterious sequences of pinochle cards; lately he had become engrossed in an illustrated encyclopedia of electric guitars, squinting and smiling at the old pictures and names: Danelectro, Rickenbacker, Gretsch. Sometimes he'd brush past his baby brother and march up to me with a lump of Play-Doh. "Gibson ES-350," he'd demand. As I'd gamely fashion a fretboard and tuners out of clay, he'd grab his tarnished French horn, skip outside to the tree swing and blast out wobbling notes at the neighbors: borp, brap, boorp.
I leaned farther over his bed.
"Morgan?"
Bam.
I staggered back, smacking away another punch, yelling in surprise, "Go to your room!" - which didn't mean much since he was already in it. I retreated across the hall and snapped on the bathroom light. Blood was flowing from my nose. Behind me Morgan thrashed on his bed, pounding and kicking the bedroom wall, screaming.
It hadn't always been like this. But lately Morgan had been reaching out into the world and forming full sentences. I want a peanut butter sandwich. Turn on the TV, please. Yet the more he understood the world outside himself, the more it infuriated him. He was noticing things. The slightest variation in his world - a broken cracker, a minute tear in a book - sent him into inconsolable tantrums over the very existence of disorder.
"Fix it," he'd roar. "Fix it fix it fix it.. . ." Sometimes I could; sometimes I couldn't. Sometimes it didn't matter: he'd flail at me anyway. Recently the tantrums started in bed, before he was fully awake. Nothing in particular was setting him off: just being conscious enraged him. Just existing. All the calming procedures from his special-ed class were flung aside by his anger and confusion. I studied my bloodied face, and for the first time in my life I was truly frightened.
I found my wife nursing our baby, woken up by his brother's tantrum. "Should we call the doctor?" she said. I felt as if I was losing my son: I feared for the baby, even for myself. "Yes," I said, nodding.
A few days later I held a prescription for liquid Prozac in my hand. It's often used with autistic children to moderate the floods of stimuli that send them into fits. But medicine always has one unavoidable side effect: doubt. I'm a historian and all too aware of how heavily drugs have been marketed to Americans, even in old sheet music and comics. In our house lay a 1935 Dr. Miles New Weather Almanac, alternating farm forecasts with patent remedy testimonials: "I get a bottle of Dr. Miles' Nervine, and after a few doses, it does the trick. Sleep - Oh boy! I'll say I can sleep." We laugh now, of course - and then take our own medicines. Yet what might that daily milliliter of mint-flavored solution do to Morgan? The F.D.A. warnings ranged from a dry mouth to a "black box" caution over suicidal thoughts in a few patients. And his young brain was still forming. But forming into. . .what, exactly?
We didn't know if treating him would work; we did know what would keep happening if we didn't try. We slipped it into his pudding each day and watched nervously for the ebb of his tantrums. After a week or two the familiar outlines of our son re-emerged from the depths: Morgan began to hum happily again, to sleep through the night, to crash away at our piano joyfully. Today, a year later, he swings on the front-porch glider, blowing glissando raspberries and then smiling at the reflection in his trombone. He still gets frustrated, but it no longer escalates so wildly. And yet.. . .
Really? You medicate your son? Our choice required no explanation to parents of disabled kids, but to others I almost had to apologize for. . .well, getting medicine for my child. The failures of the past and present - those old almanacs and new black-box notices - make us suspicious. But I don't have the luxury of distrust. I do not love that it came to this. I do not love drugs. I do not love the companies that sell them.
But I love my son.
On religion and football
Increasingly, Football's Playbooks Call for Prayer
By JOE DRAPE
Every preseason for 30 years, Coach Bobby Bowden has taken his Florida State football players to a church in a white community and a church in a black community in the Tallahassee area in an effort, he said, to build camaraderie. He writes to their parents in advance, explaining that the trips are voluntary, and that if they object, their sons can stay home without fear of retaliation. He remembers only one or two players ever skipping the outing.
Since becoming the football coach at Georgia in 2001, Mark Richt, too, has taken his team to churches in the preseason. A devotional service is conducted the night before each game, and a prayer service on game day. Both are voluntary, and Mr. Richt said he does not attend them.
On game days, Penn State players may choose between Catholic and Protestant services or not go at all. Coach Joe Paterno and the team say the Lord's Prayer in the locker room after games.
As in politics and culture in the United States, college football is increasingly becoming a more visible home for the Gospel. In the past year more than 2,000 college football coaches participated in events sponsored by the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, which said that more than 1.4 million athletes and coaches from youth to professional levels had attended in 2005, up from 500,000 in 1990.
Mr. Bowden believes that prayer and faith are part of the American way.
"Most parents want their boys to go to church," he said. "I've had atheists, Jews, Catholics and Muslims play for me, and I've never not started a boy because of his faith. I'm Christian, but all religions have some kind of commandments, and if kids would obey them, the world would be a better place."
But others raise concerns about separation of church and state.
"This is a lawsuit waiting to happen, and I believe university administrations are playing a game of chicken," the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, a lawyer and executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said. "But eventually, you got to believe that one kid is going to say, 'I've had enough,' and step forward."
The spiritual fervor of some coaches and athletes at public institutions, however, did not escape notice at the high school level this month. Marcus Borden, the football coach in East Brunswick, N.J., resigned rather than stop participating in a player-initiated pregame prayer, as he was ordered to do by the district after parents complained. He returned to his team after agreeing not to pray, but is considering a legal challenge.
Last June, in the wake of a Pentagon task force investigating broader allegations of religious intolerance at the Air Force Academy, Fisher DeBerry, the football coach, stopped leading pregame prayers and removed a banner in the Falcons' locker room. It bore the Fellowship of Christian Athletes' Competitors Creed, which begins "I am a Christian first and last."
"The problem inherently is the hierarchal nature of the player-coach relationship, where the coach is all-powerful," Mr. Lynn said. "Team members want face time and playing time. And if they don't go along with what the coach offers, they fear that they will become second-stringers."
Peer pressure in a group dynamic, Mr. Lynn said, has prevented any college player from coming forward to mount a legal challenge. No one wants to alienate a coach, especially a popular one.
In 2000, the United States Supreme Court reaffirmed its decisions against officially sponsored prayer in public schools in a case involving a district in Santa Fe, Tex., where prayers preceded high school football games over the public-address system.
The 6-to-3 majority opinion by Justice John Paul Stevens said that even when attendance is voluntary and when the decision to pray is made by students, "the delivery of a pregame prayer has the improper effect of coercing those present to participate in an act of religious worship," which violates the establishment clause of the First Amendment.
That may be the law, but God has long played a prominent role in the game's mythology, from the postcards of the former Alabama Coach Bear Bryant walking on water, to the mosaic of Christ with raised arms on a Notre Dame library that looms above the football stadium and is known as Touchdown Jesus.
"It's an awkward issue to raise because much of these things are grounded in boosting team morale and building unity more than hard gospel," Leo Sandon, professor emeritus of religion and American studies at Florida State, said. "When you juxtapose it with the iconic status of some of these coaches, it becomes more daunting and doesn't get much comment. "
Mr. Richt, 45, was once Mr. Bowden's assistant at Florida State and has followed his successful ways on the field. Entering yesterday, the Bulldogs (7-0) were ranked No. 4, while the Seminoles (6-1) were No. 10 in the Associated Press news media poll. Mr. Richt has also followed his mentor's lead by making his private faith a matter of public record.
He has one supporter with a different perspective: Musa Smith, a rookie running back for the N.F.L. Baltimore Ravens, who played at Georgia. Smith was reared a Muslim and did not attend chapel services with his teammates. When he did pray with them, he stuck to his own prayers. Mr. Smith said he was inspired by the example set by Mr. Richt.
"At the end of the day, it was about strengthening your spiritual foundations and to walk in a righteous way in whatever you believe," Mr. Smith said. "It reminded me of my fundamentals and made me a better person."
Mr. Bowden, 75, who has been outspoken about his faith throughout his 50-year career, does not doubt that he has kept critics at bay because of his success and his popularity in north Florida, where the predominantly Christian population recognizes one of its own in his folksy ways.
"I win too many games," said Mr. Bowden, who is major college football's most successful coach, with 357 victories.
Neither Mr. Richt nor Mr. Bowden drinks alcohol or smokes, and both adhere to a spiritual regimen. Mr. Richt reads a chapter of Proverbs a day, and prays between meetings and before interviews; Mr. Bowden begins his day at 4 a.m. with an hour of reading the Bible and is known for offering fiery church sermons.
Each believes that by exemplifying his religious values he can develop not only better players, but also better students, sons, husbands and fathers.
Center David Castillo, who is in his final season at Florida State, said that Mr. Bowden has been sensitive to the diversity of his players. The pregame and postgame prayers Mr. Bowden leads are nondenominational and directed at the safety of both teams and those traveling to see them, Mr. Castillo said.
"He tells us that he doesn't care if we don't believe what he does, "Mr. Castillo, who is preparing for medical school, said. "But he wants us to believe in something."
Mr. Bowden, however, injected himself in the Air Force controversy when he told attendees of a Fellowship of Christian Athletes event in Colorado Springs, home of the academy, that Mr. DeBerry was in a "heck of a battle because he happens to be a Christian, and he wants his boys to be saved."
"I want my boys to be saved," Mr. Bowden added.
In fact, he said, when about 70 percent of his players come from single-parent homes, or are reared by an extended family, it is his right and responsibility to be candid about his faith. "You got 90 kids in a history or psychology classroom around here, and a professor can stand up and say anything he wants in creation," Mr. Bowden said recently in an interview at his office. "Why can't I tell my boys what I believe?"
Ron Riccio, who is representing Mr. Borden in New Jersey, said God and religion have not been swept away by the government: the Pledge of Allegiance, and the words In God We Trust remain on currency. Legislative bodies often begin sessions with a prayer, and "you have nearly every president in history saying, 'God bless America,' " Mr. Riccio, who teaches constitutional law at Seton Hall's law school, said.
Mr. Sandon, the retired Florida State professor, has had an amicable relationship with Mr. Bowden since serving as a member of the university's athletic board. But in his syndicated newspaper column, Religion in America, Mr. Sandon criticized Mr. Bowden's remarks regarding Mr. DeBerry and Air Force.
"Don't make any mistake - the biggest man around here is Bobby Bowden, and I have never seen any president or athletic director call him to heel," Mr. Sandon said. "If you have a strong religious dimension to your program, there is going to be church-and-state issues."
Despite the Santa Fe decision, T. K. Wetherell, the president of Florida State, said he did not believe Mr. Bowden had violated the Constitution, nor was he worried that Mr. Bowden would.
"Coach Bowden has the right and ability to speak his mind, as do all of our faculty," Mr. Wetherell said. "He doesn't push his views on his players. It gets back basically to the academic-freedom issue, and we give that some leeway for all our faculty and staff. He understands that he works for a public institution."
So does Mr. Richt. Yet in 2001 and 2003, Americans United for Separation of Church and State wrote to Georgia saying that Mr. Richt's program was in violation of the establishment clause. In both instances, Stephen M. Shewmaker, the executive director of legal affairs at Georgia, replied that because participation was voluntary the university had found no violations of the Constitution.
Mr. Richt has shown he is sensitive to both the threats to the Constitution and public opinion. In 2002, after Georgia clinched the Southeastern Conference East title, he began his news conference with religious comments. He was criticized by some fans and the news media, and subsequently apologized.
"My goal is not to cause somebody grief or to make anyone upset," Mr. Richt said. "My goal is to love these guys and put them in a situation where they can grow up to be the best men they can be. We are an authority over them, and I have influence over them, and I take that responsibility seriously."
On recruiting young people on NYC
Sergeant Guzman's War
By JENNIFER MASCIA
THE lanky 15-year-old with the velvety skin flashed a deceptive grin at the man in combat fatigues standing near the curb. "You ain't no good!" she shouted at the soldier. "You stealing these young people!"
Staff Sgt. Richard Guzman looked up from the crowd of black and Hispanic students clustered near the entrance to the Manhattan Center for Science and Mathematics, a high school in East Harlem. Sidling over to the girl, he held out his hand. "Hey," he said, his voice a sleepy mix of fine Long Island sand and honey.
"It's nothing against you," she replied without extending a hand. "It's people like you." Then she scurried across East 116th Street, another battle lost in the war for New York's youth. But no matter. As far as Sergeant Guzman was concerned, the neighborhood remained ripe with possibilities. "Everybody's thought about the military," he said later as his dark eyes scanned the neighborhood's pedestrian-clogged streets. "I mean, look at all the people here."
Sergeant Guzman, 26, is station commander of the Army recruiting unit in the Armed Forces Career Center, known informally as the Harlem Knights recruiting center, on 125th Street and Lenox Avenue. A product of a hardscrabble upbringing in Richmond Hill, Queens, he joined the Army after high school largely to straighten himself out. Today, he presides over a warren of rooms across the street from Bill Clinton's office that is one of the more powerful of the engines that keep an increasingly unpopular war up and running.
With a monthly average of five recruits, the Harlem Knights center, which serves both Harlem and East Harlem, is ranked in the top three in its battalion, which includes much of the New York metropolitan region. Since his arrival 10 months ago, Sergeant Guzman has signed up 12 people.
This is not an easy time to be a military recruiter. Last week, fatalities from the war reached 2,000, and last month a New York Times/CBS News poll showed that the number of Americans who thought that the United States had made the right decision in taking military action against Iraq had fallen to 44 percent.
Much has been said about the efficacy of plying poor minority neighborhoods for recruits. But several factors make Sergeant Guzman's job easier.
Unlike the Marines, Army infantry and Special Forces, which send volunteers straight from boot camp to the front lines, the Harlem Knights Army unit signs potential recruits up for more than 200 noncombat jobs, everything from laundry and textile specialist to flute player to dental specialist. Sergeant Guzman cannot guarantee that his recruits will not go to Iraq; in fact, he acknowledges, about half of them will probably end up there, though not necessarily on the front lines. But the higher a recruit scores on the basic military aptitude test, the more noncombat specialties are available. "Pulling a trigger is not technically complicated," he said.
Sergeant Guzman also attributes the Army's relative success among the youth of Harlem and East Harlem to the problems that continue to plague those neighborhoods, notably poor schools and dismal job prospects. He has scoped out prospective recruits living in apartments with three people to a room and no bed.
"I can recruit two to three people a month," Sergeant Guzman said, "no matter if it's World War III or a recession."
Smooth Talker
Sergeant Guzman's skills of persuasion are not limited to sidewalk encounters. The other day, with the soothing, gravelly tones of a late-night disc jockey, he was on the phone, trying to lure an unsure 21-year-old girl into military service. "I'm gonna keep it real with you, and you gonna keep it real with me," he murmured into the receiver. "I'm setting you up for success. When you actually go to boot camp, you're gonna be well trained."
Then he tried another tack: "Imagine your wedding. I can see you in your uniform." He laughed a throaty laugh, his lips parted to reveal a full white smile. "An Army dress? Yeah, a camouflaged wedding dress."
Later, as the rhymes of Jay-Z poured out of a stereo perched on a bookshelf, Sergeant Guzman tapped away on his laptop, courting the 18-to-24 demographic via e-mail.
Near the entrance to the office, under a yellow banner that reads "An Army of One," a bulletin board presented photos of 50 young men and women, mostly black and Hispanic, with whom his approach had succeeded. Each photo listed the recruit's name, age, high school or college from which he or she had been recruited, and his or her enlistment bonus. Nearby was a postcard addressed to Sergeant Guzman from a recruit at boot camp. "Greetings from Henderson, Nevada!" it read. "Thank you for helping me enlist in the U.S. Army!"
Though so far only a few of Sergeant Guzman's recruits have been sent to Iraq, each time he receives a letter from the parents of a deployed soldier, he ships "his" recruit a care package that contains copies of Jet magazine and Sports Illustrated and homemade tapes of Hot 97 radio broadcasts.
Sergeant Guzman will not be going to Iraq himself. "Recruitment is very safe as far as deployment is concerned," he said. Nevertheless, he admits: "Half of me wants to go. The money is ridiculous."
While a dental assistant, for example, can net $1,400 a month, a young soldier in combat can net $2,000 to $2,500 a month, tax free. With enlistment bonuses and tuition assistance topping out at $40,000, it pays for Harlem recruits to be An Army of One.
It pays for Sergeant Guzman, too. Of $2,496 he receives as a monthly housing allowance, he pays $2,000 to live in a three-bedroom apartment in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and pockets the difference. He travels to work in a government-provided 2005 Dodge Stratus. With his $2,600 monthly income, plus the $425 monthly "special duty pay" that recruiters receive, he can indulge in his passion for diamond stud earrings, vintage X-Men comic books and sports jerseys that can cost up to $400 apiece.
On the advice of a colonel friend, Sergeant Guzman has begun to invest in the stock market; his portfolio includes G.E., Home Depot and Janus Funds. "I try to stay diversified," he explained.
Just recently, he bought his first Rolex. It cost $8,000. "Everything I've ever wanted in life, the Army's provided for me," he said, sipping a Capri Sun from its silver pouch.
In Search of a Calling
It was a different story for Sergeant Guzman 22 years ago, when his father was gunned down on a street in Richmond Hill "for being at the wrong place at the wrong time." The son, who was 4, suspects there is more to the story, but his mother, Carmen Guzman, a retired cosmetologist, would just say, "Your daddy's in a better place."
An only child, Richard Guzman was 15 and, as he put it, "hanging out with the wrong crowd" when a fellow he knew pointed a gun at his face and demanded his Nikes, a trendy pair of Bo Jacksons. "I kind of had lowlife friends," he admitted.
That year, 1994, two friends robbed a bodega and killed the cashier. "I was so close to being involved," Sergeant Guzman said. "I'm very lucky to be alive."
A couple of years later, with family and friends in the service and certain that "school really wasn't my thing," he enrolled in the Army's delayed-entry program, in which he participated in monthly drills and some basic training. After he scored well on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, the basic aptitude test for entrance to the military, a recruiter came calling.
What Sergeant Guzman calls the laid-back job choices appealed to him, and he decided to become an administration clerk. After nine weeks in boot camp and postings in Fort Bragg, N.C., Seattle and Alaska, he became attracted to the idea of career recruiting, and spent four years working at a recruiting station in Astoria, Queens, before moving to Harlem.
He feels that he has found his perfect match. "I don't think you'll ever find a recruiter like myself," he said. "I love this business."
With its typical 8-a.m.-to-9-p.m. schedule, recruiting leaves him little time for a social life (although he keeps an updated black book, just in case). And around the office, he hears tales of recruiters in other jurisdictions who suffer nervous breakdowns while trying to reach their quotas. "That's where the improprieties come in," he said. "That's where you fake a diploma."
Though he won't be going to Iraq, he maintains that the Iraqi war was unavoidable. "I don't see how we couldn't have gone," he said. "The World Trade Center was attacked. The Pentagon was attacked. We had to do something."
And weapons of mass destruction?
"I'm thinking there are some there that we haven't found in the underground caves or whatever," he said. "I believe that something is there, maybe Russian artillery. We have Hussein in custody, we killed his sons. We need him to confess or something."
An Escape Route Out
Unlike Sergeant Guzman, Alanna Chataigne does not support the war and thinks the American troops should come home immediately.
"It's just causing more terrorist attacks, here and in London, us being over there," said Alanna, a 17-year-old of Haitian descent who wears clear-rimmed glasses and has braids pulled back into a ponytail. Still, Alanna, a senior enrolled in the R.O.T.C. program at the High School of Graphic Communication Arts in Midtown, participates in the Army's delayed-entry program, just as Sergeant Guzman did, and she is counting the days until she turns 18 so she can fly off to boot camp and leave Harlem behind. "I have no life," she explained. "With the knowledge I learn from the Army, I want to go around the world."
Precocious and poised, Alanna acts the way a teenager thinks that an adult should act. During one of her frequent visits to the Harlem recruiting station, she rattled off the chronology of the founding of the American armed forces - "I was born exactly 212 years after the Marine Corps," she announced proudly - before waxing rhapsodic, in equal measure, about Mozart and the reggaeton artist Daddy Yankee.
Showing up several times a week in her black and gold "Army of One" T-shirt, Alanna runs errands for the recruiters and banters with the officers. "Watch the language!" she scolded Sergeant Guzman one afternoon when he fired off an expletive. When he complained that his Snapple was too warm, she jumped up to get ice.
"The Army is in her blood," Sergeant Guzman said of Alanna's passion for the military, which is shared by a sister at Marine boot camp and a stepfather in the National Guard. But Sergeant Guzman also thinks that Alanna turned to the Army to escape a rough family life on West 130th Street - basically, as Sergeant Guzman described it, "that situation that any person has with a stepparent."
Alanna would agree that the Army offers an appealing escape route for her. "My mom just wants me to get out of the city," she said. "She wants me to see something different. She lived here all her life."
A Battle for Hearts and Minds
On a recent afternoon, Sergeant Guzman dropped by City College on Convent Avenue and 138th Street to obtain its "stop-out" list, a register of students who have dropped out of college midcareer and might be likely recruits.
Sergeant Guzman acknowledged that some high schools and colleges were resistant to his presence, and potential recruits often report back that their teachers try to dissuade them from military service. He finds this attitude downright unpatriotic.
"You'd think that given the times and needs of the country now, schools would be more understanding," he said, seeming perplexed by guidance counselors who encourage college over the military. "I've got a mission from the president of the United States. These schools are not going to tell me what to do."
After a quick chat with a City College receptionist, he emerged with a thick stack of papers containing the names of thousands of recent dropouts ripe for recruiting. Holding up the list as a proud father would his newborn child, he said: "All this is potential recruits. This gets me excited right here."
Heading back to his car, he elaborated on his approach.
"I don't like taking no for an answer," he said. "I've got a mission to accomplish each month. And it's not just recruiting. If I say no, I won't get anywhere in life, man." Placing the list safely in the trunk next to the boxes of key chains, stickers and yellow water bottles he gives to potential recruits, he added: "Like in the dating scene. Sometimes no means yes. She just says it to make you want her more, you know?"
Yo Soy El Army
Every Harlem recruiter has goals: to make two appointments a day with prospective recruits, to get four of those recruits interviewed that week, and to administer an aptitude test to two of them with the hope of a single passing grade.
Although curious teenagers sometimes make their way to the Harlem office, most of the recruiting is done in the street, which was why Sergeant Guzman was out in front of the Manhattan Center for Science and Mathematics that late summer day. He had set up his folding table, which is wallpapered with images of soldiers in combat, in a patch of shade provided by the scaffolding that surrounded the school. As he laid out pens, blank address cards and stickers that read "Yo Soy El Army," a small crowd of rowdy teenagers began peppering him with questions.
"If you go to the Army to play ball, you got to serve four years, man?"
"How many push-ups can you do?"
"Is it true they can kick you out?"
"You think they're gonna do that draft thing?"
Sergeant Guzman nodded to this one.
"Oh, I am running from that!" said a young man sporting a heavy gold chain.
"You might not have a choice," Sergeant Guzman replied dryly.
To each teenager he offered earnest eye contact and a spirited handshake. He opened by asking, "What year are you?" and closed with, "Do good in school." Some of the young people filled out the address cards, giving the Army their contact information; when they did, Sergeant Guzman watched over their shoulders like a hawk. Upon returning to the office, Sergeant Guzman would file the cards and call the young people who had filled them out. If a person sounded hesitant on the phone, Sergeant Guzman would send him or her information and phone once more in the hope of setting up an interview.
"Who's a senior?" he called into a crowd of teenagers outside the Manhattan Center school. Most were curious, but politely declined to volunteer their status.
"Hello, I like your T-shirt," he said to a girl wearing a camouflage tank top. Smiling, she moved on.
Sergeant Guzman greeted familiar faces by their first names. In his opinion, matching names to faces is part of the job. "It's like if you were buying a car and the sales rep didn't remember your name," he said. "You'd think it was funny."
While Sergeant Guzman followed one teenager down the street, a group of girls commandeered the folding table. "Buenas," one of them said, handing out T-shirts to her friends as if she were a staff sergeant herself. Her friends began taking Sergeant Guzman's pens and attaching his stickers to their stomachs.
On average, Sergeant Guzman estimates, each visit to a high school nets three or four interviews, two passing aptitude test scores and one recruit. This session would attract one teenager, who stopped by the recruiting center a few days later, failed the test, and was sent home by Sergeant Guzman to study.
The crowd at Manhattan Center High had dispersed into the bright summer day. But before leaving, Sergeant Guzman plastered "Yo Soy El Army" stickers onto the scaffolding poles. Just in case.
On the best view on the city
Knockin' on Heaven's Door
By NEAL BASCOMB
IT is one of the most unforgettable moments in the history of movies.
Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr, star-crossed lovers returning to New York after a long journey abroad, are reluctantly parting, but planning to reunite six months hence. "You name the place, and I'll obey," Kerr says excitedly as their ship steams up the Hudson. Behind her, the Empire State Building passes into the frame, an elegant giant in the city's skyline. Grant suggests the building's observation deck. "Oh, yes, that's perfect!" Kerr replies. "It's the nearest thing to heaven we have in New York."
When I first arrived in New York over a decade ago, I had no such life-altering reason to ascend to the Empire State Building's top, as Grant and Kerr had in the 1957 three-hankie movie "An Affair to Remember." Yet a few days after I had dropped my bags, there I was. In a way I found difficult to articulate, I felt that I could not fully appreciate the city's grandeur without first climbing its loftiest heights and reveling in the view.
Starting Tuesday, Top of the Rock, a restored observatory at Rockefeller Center, will begin doing battle with the Empire State Building for the admiration of newly arrived visitors like me. To reach Top of the Rock, visitors will shoot 67 stories high aboard an elevator with a glass ceiling. They will emerge into a "Grand Viewing Room" that offers north and south perspectives on the city.
From there, they can ascend to the 70th-floor deck, a narrow, 190-foot long promenade whose original design in the 1930's resembled a ship's deck, complete with Adirondack chairs and vents resembling smoke stacks, according to Daniel Okrent's history of Rockefeller Center, "Great Fortune." The restoration promises luxurious surroundings and the same jaw-dropping, 360-degree views that once drew huge crowds to the space before it was closed in 1986, when the Rainbow Room was expanded.
As with the many skirmishes to claim the title of New York's tallest building, the quest for the city's finest view also comes steeped in a history of competition. In the 19th century, sightseers paid a few pennies to climb a creaking wooden staircase inside the steeple of the 284-foot-high Trinity Church for a bird's-eye view of the city, at the time a low, flat landscape of five-story mud-brown buildings. The small platform within the Statue of Liberty's torch trumped this observation point by about 30 feet, but it closed for structural reasons about the time that New York's first great observation deck opened on the 58th floor of the 792-foot Woolworth Tower, in 1913.
Frank Woolworth, the five-and-dime king, realized the advantage of his skyscraper's aerie perch and set the trend for attracting visitors to its top. In the overwrought brochure promoting his "Cathedral of Commerce," Woolworth boasted: "The thrilling sensation which comes over the sightseer that is never to be forgotten. It is indeed the most remarkable if not the most wonderful view in all the world."
More than 100,000 visitors a year doubtless agreed. "You'll be bewildered," he promised with less decorum, at the sight of the "multitudes of people scurrying about the busy streets" who "resemble an aggregation of pygmies." His skyscraper maintained its pre-eminence until the Roaring Twenties duel that gave rise to the Chrysler and Empire State towers.
The story of the height race between these buildings is widely known. The secret spires and last-minute design changes to seize the crown of world's tallest is part of the city's legend. But these skyscrapers also competed for visitors.
On the Chrysler Building observation deck, 71 stories high, one entered a fantastic chamber with vaulted ceilings painted with celestial motifs and hanging glass Saturns. In news releases and brochures, Chrysler promised a "magnificent vista" of a hundred miles from its triangular windows.
As in the height race, however, Chrysler lost to the Empire State when that building's open-air observation decks on the 86th and 102nd floors opened a year later in 1931, attracting a couple of thousand visitors a day. John J. Raskob, the skyscraper's chief financier, relished the monthly reports detailing how much business he had taken away from his competitor. Good thing, since the rest of his building was largely empty of tenants.
The Empire State's deck ruled without peer until the opening of the deck atop Rockefeller Center. Then, in the 1970's, the World Trade Center towers laid claim to the highest observatory with a deck above the 110th floor of the South Tower. The Sept. 11 attacks returned the Empire State to its unrivaled position. Only after a recent trip there was I reminded of the great absence in the skyline created by the loss of the twin towers. From the observation deck's south side, I kept looking downtown in search of something I would never see again.
My visit made me wonder, not for the first time, why these aeries have such a powerful allure. The benefit to a building owner's coffers is obvious, but what is it about observation decks that make them such a compelling draw, luring hundreds of thousands of out-of-towners and playing starring roles as meeting places for fictional lovers on film?
The answer, of course, has to do with point of view. At the base of the city's canyons, we can look up at the leap of steel and stone of a skyscraper, but this hardly does justice to the buildings' magnificence. Their height can be truly appreciated only from a distance, as part of the skyline, or, more significant, as a vantage point from which to gaze down on the city and the expanse beyond. Much like a mountaintop, they beg to be surmounted.
After the Eiffel Tower was completed in 1889, its observation deck not only became an instant attraction, it also revolutionized the way Parisians looked at their landscape. The art critic Robert Hughes likened the experience of viewing the city from the tower to seeing the first photograph of Earth from space. Parisian artists who up to that point had focused on perspective and depth began to look at landscapes in terms of patterns and planes - part of the influence that brought about the Cubist movement. The views from the Empire State Building have amazed and reshaped people's views of New York in a similar manner for years. No doubt the view from the Top of the Rock will do the same.
Looking toward my Greenwich Village neighborhood from the observation deck of the Empire State Building, I realized that given the broad sweep of the city, my life was a small affair. But on this trip, as on so many others, I also felt exhilaration. From this height, New York revealed its beautiful secrets: the gridiron pattern of the streets, the scale of each building to those around it, the waters that first brought the city to life, the hustle and flow of the people who sustained it now. For a moment, I felt alone with the city at my feet.
Later, speaking with a few of the sightseers crowded around the observation deck, I realized they felt some of the same things. An English couple, who were making their second trip to the Empire State's observation deck, spoke of understanding the city's massiveness only after seeing it from so high an elevation.
A visitor from Oregon added: "All my life, I've wanted to come here. Now I'm 74, and I finally made it."
Finally, an article about evangelicals trying to help soldiers stay "sexually pure" (a far more worthy endeavour, clearly, than stopping them from killing people....)
Sex and the Faithful Soldier
By JOHN LELAND
ADD another item to the well-equipped soldier's duffel. An evangelical radio ministry has developed a book kit meant to help soldiers protect their sexual purity, and is raising money to send 6,000 kits to chaplains who have requested them.
The kits, from New Life Ministries, which broadcasts on 150 stations nationally, is intended to promote Bible-based abstinence from pornography, adultery, nonmarital sex and masturbation. "Your goal is sexual purity," the authors write. "You are sexually pure when no sexual gratification comes from anyone or anything but your wife."
The five-book "Every Soldier's Battle" kit, boxed in camouflage, arrives at a time of "increased underlying tension in military chaplaincy," as more chaplains come from evangelical Christian traditions, said David Segal, director of the Center for Research on Military Organization at the University of Maryland. These chaplains often bring a culture of proselytizing, Mr. Segal said, that is "not in consonance with the way the military defines chaplaincy."
"Every Soldier's Battle" began with a call earlier this year to New Life from Michael Music, a chaplain's assistant (official rank: religious program specialist first class), with a Navy unit then in Iraq.
"There was a big problem as far as sexual incidents, harassment, some diseases and unplanned pregnancies," Mr. Music said, speaking from Millington, Tenn., where he is now stationed. His chaplain, Brian Keel, mentioned "Every Man's Battle," by the founder of New Life, Stephen Arterburn, and Fred Stoeker, which the ministry calls "a practical, detailed plan to help men find freedom from sexual temptation God's way." It has sold 701,000 copies, according to Mr. Arterburn's assistant. (There's a popular spinoff, "Every Woman's Battle.")
Mr. Music asked: Could they get copies to run a soldiers' group?
"You've got really good guys over there who are trying to keep their act together," said Mr. Arterburn, host of a daily radio program of Christian counseling. Mr. Arterburn said he was particularly concerned about pornography, which he said "has actually neutered men," because it has replaced real women with images.
The ministry assembled the kits as part of a study program, including either "Every Man's Battle" or "Every Woman's Battle," and asked for donations. So far it has raised $69,645. The kits, which cost about $50, have not been shipped yet, Mr. Arterburn said.
Sgt. First Class Daniel L. Roberts, a chaplain's assistant at Fort Jackson in South Carolina, requested 200 kits for troops in basic combat training. "Overseas, they'll have to battle temptations," said Sergeant Roberts, who added that he approaches sexual matters from a "commitment standpoint" as well as a "biblical standpoint."
He said he thought the kits would be helpful, but added that he was dubious about treating masturbation as a sin. "When you're deployed, away from family, it happens," Sergeant Roberts said. "I don't think that equates to sexual impurity."
Mr. Segal of the University of Maryland said the war in Iraq had created unusually high sexual and marital tensions, because troops are deployed more often and for longer stints than in other recent wars, and because more soldiers are married. Divorce rates have risen, especially in the Army, where the number of divorces nearly doubled from 2001 to 2004, to 4 percent of all married personnel.
Sgt. Rowe Stayton, a former Air Force pilot who served in Iraq in the National Guard, said about a quarter of the soldiers in his platoon ended their marriages while in Iraq. At the same time, he said, troops in Iraq "indulge in sexual fantasies more than they ever would in the U.S.," because there was so little to do most of the time.
Mr. Music said that 100 soldiers participated in his groups using "Every Man's Battle," openly discussing their temptations and lapses. "Us as men, we need to be accountable," he said.
