California and the West : Army ‘Recruits’ School Advisors : Vocations: A tour of Ft. Irwin offers guidance counselors insight into life in the military in the hope that they will mention it to students as a career option.

FT. IRWIN —  The U.S. Army may be having a hard time recruiting soldiers these days, but what was a 52-year-old school administrator doing in an M1 battle tank?

Dennis Shephard was among a handful of educators visiting the Army’s National Training Center in the Mojave Desert to learn for themselves what life in the military is like in 1999.

Shephard, of course, was way too old to join--but the Army hopes he and others may be able to help reinvigorate its struggling recruiting and retention efforts.

Shephard is the registrar at Chino Adult School in San Bernardino County. He is the kind of person, the Army hopes, who can put in a friendly word for the military at a time when too many high school career guidance counselors seem singularly focused on pushing graduates into college, without so much as a whisper--and in worst cases, a negative word--about military options.

The Army wants to recruit 74,000 soldiers this year--and is braced to fall short of its goal by 7,000.

“A lot of schools don’t even want recruiters contacting their students,” complained Joe Stephenson, a civilian who, based in Mission Viejo, coordinates Army recruiting drives in Southern California school districts. “A lot of counselors are neutral at best, or anti-military, when it comes to talking to kids about going into the service.”

Charles Espalin, director of counseling for the Los Angeles Unified School District, said career advisors are not supposed to either encourage or discourage students from pursuing the military, but to simply offer it as an option. He agrees that some counselors may need to update their own view of the military because of personal biases against it.

He said more than half of the district’s schools give students the chance to take the military’s vocational aptitude tests, which he said is widely respected for assessing student interests beyond military occupations.

But many schools resist giving the tests because it opens the door to military recruiters, he said, and many counselors “may be throwbacks to the ‘60s and ‘70s, and have uninformed or bad impressions of the military.”

He said he encourages counselors to accept invitations to military bases “just as they visit colleges and places of work, so they have a good view of what’s out there and, when they talk to students, their information is up to date.”

That is precisely what Stephenson, the Army recruiter, hopes to accomplish by inviting counselors and other educators to spend a couple of days at Ft. Irwin, the Army’s largest training center.

He launched his first effort 10 days ago, a kind of show-and-tell where seven educators--some of them military veterans with woefully dated memories--left with their eyes opened wide.

“Talk about changes,” Shephard, a Vietnam veteran, remarked jealously after a tour of some barracks. He saw one- and two-man rooms with kitchenettes, walk-in-closets, private bathrooms and full-blown, soldier-equipped entertainment centers with wide-screen TVs.

“I’ve got something to go back and tell my people about,” he said afterward. “The parents can’t always do that because they’re like me; they remember the old experience. I still remember the 40-man barracks without air conditioning where we slept in two-man bunks. . . . I guess this is the new Army.”

Mac McLeod, who spent 23 years in the Air Force and is a junior reserve officer training instructor at Santa Margarita High School in south Orange County, said: “There’s no comparison to what I experienced. When you see all the changes that have occurred, I’d have rather joined the military today.”

Stephenson was disappointed that more high school counselors did not accept his invitation to attend the military field trip--a poor turnout that he attributed in part to the fact it was staged during the heat of summer vacation. It also reflected, he said, a general lack of interest among school counselors in urging students to pursue military careers.

Several of the seven who attended the Ft. Irwin event were already military enthusiasts, and said the field trip illustrated how the Army has updated itself since they served in the armed forces.

Those who had no military experience were gee-whizzing at everything in sight.

Cheryl Bardowell, who works at nearby Barstow College, snuggled herself into the virtually prone bucket seat of an M1 tank driver and promptly proclaimed: “I like this! This is comfortable! What’s the model? What’s the make?” The tank’s crew members could only smile at her exhilaration.

Earlier, she tried her skills in a high-tech simulator where tank gunners take aim at computer-generated targets. After she was shown how to grasp the hand controls, move the gun turret, aim a laser beam at a tiny blip and fire, she struck her target on the fourth attempt and blurted loudly for all to hear, “I got one!”

The two-day tour of the base included visits to the repair shops where the M1’s complex turbine engines and electronic targeting components are repaired and tested, as well as visits to the base command center where computers and video and audio feeds monitor and record brigade-level maneuvers.

But for all the eyeballing and hands-on experiences, the educators seemed to learn the most in talking to soldiers about how they were encouraged--or discouraged--into joining the service.

Most said they sought out the Army on their own, with little or no support from school counselors or their parents.

Among them was Raquel Urena, 20, who grew up in Simi Valley and figured that her strong grades and interest in music would lead to college but who also sought out Army recruiters on her own.

“When I talked to my high school counselors, I was the one who mentioned the service. When I did, they were amazed. They were shocked,” said Urena, a private.

At the conclusion of the base visit, Samy Rinaldi, a dropout prevention specialist for a high school in Blythe, said she was impressed by the quality of the troops.

“All of the soldiers are smart and proud of themselves,” she said. “You can tell by how they carry themselves. And they’re establishing long-term goals.

“Now that I’ve seen this for myself,” she said, “I’ve got something to tell my kids back home.”