Near the western edge of North Carolina, bright-green kudzu vine spills like water down the hillsides of the Great Smoky Mountains. The kudzu seems to close in on the landscape at dusk. That's when Tim Queen likes to run, 10 to 15 miles at a time on country roads—training ground for the Marine Tim once hoped to become.

He's a tough kid. He ranks "cliff-jumping off of waterfalls" high among his hobbies. He's from a tough place: Cherokee County is one of the poorest, most sparsely populated parts of North Carolina, hill country where the descendants of Scotch-Irish settlers still speak with a unique southern brogue that takes some getting used to. (It's also where Eric Rudolph, the accused serial bomber of two abortion clinics, a lesbian nightclub, and Centennial Olympic Park, in Atlanta, lived off the land—and, some say, the sympathy of the locals—for five years as a fugitive before being caught.)

Tim was raised in a small home on seven acres with a brother and two sisters. His father, John, works on the production line at an auto-parts manufacturer. His mother, Sheilah, works at the local trout-processing plant, Carolina Mountain. Like most families in the area, the Queens are capable people, getting by on very little. They grow a lot of their own food—squash, cucumbers, okra, corn, beans, tomatoes, onions, pumpkins, radishes, and watermelons, all out back of their house.

In the spring of 2000, just out of high school, Tim was working part-time with his mom at the trout plant and taking welding classes at the community college. One morning, two Marine Corps recruiters arrived on campus in their dress blues and set up a "fruit stand" (a recruiting table). They rarely made the trip all the way out to Andrews, Tim's hometown, but one of the administrators at the college was an old Marine Corps master sergeant, so they were always welcome. That morning, they caught Tim Queen's eye. "I think I may be joining you soon," he announced.

Tim caught the recruiters' eyes, too. It was crunch time, a couple of days before the end of the month, and they needed one more body to "make mission"—their monthly quota. Timmy Queen would be that body.

The trip to Tim's school was a training run for the younger Marine, Sergeant Jimmy Massey, who'd been on recruiting duty less than a year. He was out with his gunnery sergeant, Tim Dalhouse, being shown the ropes. Massey wasn't new to the Marine Corps. He'd been in for eight years already, several of them working with new recruits as an infantry instructor at basic training at Parris Island. He planned to retire from the Marine Corps an old man; he was in for the long haul, and for many career Marines, doing a tour on recruiting duty is a gauntlet worth running, a roll-of-the-dice that can fast-track your career, all but guaranteeing promotion if you're good. If you're not, however, it can be a career-ender.

The latter prospect never entered Massey's mind, he said. He was as gung-ho as they come. When he'd go out "trolling," he'd always bring a prop—an English bulldog he named Tank Balls. When he brought potential recruits back to his office he'd show them a trick. "I had a toy gun in my desk, and when I'd pull it out the dog would go crazy," Massey told me. Tank Balls would lunge at the gun, teeth bared. "It would really impress the poolies," he added ("poolie" being Marine Corps slang for a new recruit).

On that spring day in 2000, Tim Queen was impressed by Massey and Dalhouse. "They was always saying things like 'Semper fi' and all that stuff, and it was definitely encouraging to be around. They seemed to me to be true and hard-core people, and I liked that."

In many ways, Tim has the makings of a great Marine. He's serious, polite, goes to church every Sunday, and keeps himself in shape. He graduated from high school with pretty good grades and scored well on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (known as "the ASVAB"), a standardized test given alongside the S.A.T. in many high schools, particularly in areas with deep military traditions. When Tim approached the recruiters that day, though, Massey thought his boss was joking when Dalhouse instructed him to proceed with the standard Marine Corps interview. Spend a couple of minutes with Tim and you'll understand why: ever since the ninth grade, Timmy's had a "twitch," as his father puts it. When I met Tim, the term struck me as a significant understatement.

At regular intervals—every 20 seconds or so—the muscles in Tim's left arm seem to convulse, sending his arm in a lurch he struggles to suppress. He'll also stutter when the twitch is bad, and blink involuntarily. His condition has never been formally diagnosed, but it's pronounced enough, especially when he's stressed, that he was not permitted to test for his driver's license until he passed several medical screenings, including an EEG to rule out seizures. Tim told me the condition got worse after a prank in high school: some other kids pinned him inside a locker and he panicked. Since then, he's also suffered from claustrophobia he characterized as "pretty bad."

Tim told me he talked to the recruiters about all of his medical issues that first day. They told him not to worry, he said, that they'd seen this kind of thing before; no problem, he'd get in. In Massey's version, after reassuring Tim, he concluded the standard recruiting interview the way he always did: "Tim, are you ready to be a Marine?"

"Yeah," Tim Queen answered. He didn't flinch.

If the recruiting trip to Cherokee County was meant to be instructional for Sergeant Massey, it indeed provided the first of many lessons that would fly in the face of the rules of ethical recruiting conduct the Marine Corps drills over and over at its seven-week course for recruiters in San Diego. But when a recruiter finds himself out in the boondocks—when it's just you and a kid who's on the fence, Massey said—recruiting school seems very far away. "Out of 75 kids I put in the Marine Corps, 70 of them were fraudulent enlistments," Massey told me when I first met him, in the spring of 2004. To "fraud" a recruit into the Marine Corps is to knowingly enlist someone who doesn't meet the strict physical, moral, and educational standards laid out by the military—a violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, punishable by court-martial.

Massey was recently back from Iraq when we met, honorably discharged for medical reasons after 12 years in the Marine Corps (he suffered from post-traumatic stress in Iraq). He's six feet two inches, with a bowl haircut and a hint of boyishness, but he projects authority. Tattoos cover his upper body, including, on the right forearm, the Marine Corps eagle-globe-and-anchor design, and, on the left, an image of a cowboy and four aces with his infantry division's motto: "Cowboys from Hell." He'd been a platoon sergeant in the war, he said, in charge of machine gunners, missilemen, and snipers tasked with providing security for supply chains.

He plugged his jaw with Red Man as we drove out into the heart of what was once his recruiting territory, the small-town hinterlands of western North Carolina. "Man, I had this whole place wired," he said as we wheeled up into the mountains. We talked all day. He chased the Red Man with loaf after loaf of Nicorette gum. "I knew from the get-go that it wasn't straight," Massey said of recruiting. "You know, Marines talk. It's a scam. You just figure out what the kid wants, and that's what you sell him, whether he's qualified or not. And most of 'em going in now"—Massey shook his head—"ain't."

Over his three years on recruiting duty, Massey developed such a knack for scooping up questionable new recruits that he earned a nickname: "Jimmy the Shark." By his own account, he enlisted kids with asthma, illegal-drug users, kids with criminal records. He'd coach most to lie to military doctors during their physicals. He'd advise some to stop taking prescription medications like Ritalin and antidepressants—which could disqualify them—without consulting their doctors. "The Marine Corps will be your backbone now," he'd explain. He was investigated for badgering a high-school student for lack of patriotism in the wake of 9/11. He was cleared (though he told me he taunted poolies all the time). "If it comes between a recruiter's word and some kid's, the recruiter wins every time," he said. He received a dozen or so recruiting awards. He was promoted to staff sergeant. None of his methods were new, however, or unique to the Marines. Rather, they are well-worn tricks of the trade passed down by veteran recruiters in the strip malls where military recruiters of all stripes share real estate.

"There's white, there's black, and there's gray," a recently retired army recruiting-station commander told me. "Any recruiter who's successful lives in the gray and goes into the black pretty often.… There's no way to recruit within the rules and be successful."

A former Marine recruiter from Dallas put it more bluntly: "Everybody frauds contracts. It's just a matter of coaching that kid to keep his mouth shut. Everybody does it. It doesn't matter what service. We all did it. They can sit there and tell you they haven't done it, but they're full of shit."

Reports of patterns of unethical recruiting have surfaced in the news lately, coinciding with low enlistment and a decline in public support for the war in Iraq, but underhanded methods pre-date the war, recruiters say. In extensive and progressively more candid interviews over a period of a year, 10 current and former recruiters with some 90 years' experience among them in the army and the Marine Corps—the two regular forces having the most trouble recruiting now because of the war—provided detailed accounts of a long-standing array of unethical and, they said, widely used recruiting practices that violate the Uniform Code of Military Justice and echo the infractions Sergeant Massey described. They provided strikingly similar accounts despite being stationed in five different states. (I also spoke with several of the recruits involved, who confirmed the stories.) The abuses they outlined—from instructing recruits to lie about serious medical conditions to coaching illegal-drug users on how to pass urine tests and even bribing screeners at enlistment processing centers to push unqualified recruits through the system—have become much more frequent as the public has grown increasingly leery of the war in Iraq. Army figures support that. Allegations of recruiting improprieties almost doubled from 2000 to 2004, with some 957 last year.

Yet despite the rise in allegations, the number of army recruiters who have been "involuntarily reassigned" has declined since the war began. Not only can the military not afford to lose recruiters, but more troops are being ordered onto recruiting duty (as opposed to volunteering) than in previous years, including many veterans of the combat in Iraq. Anger that recruiting is killing their careers, wrecking their home lives, and ultimately undermining the military services they say they dedicated their lives to is the main reason the recruiters gave for speaking out, though most did so on the condition of anonymity (the current recruiters for obvious reasons, and the former to protect their pensions and their colleagues still serving).

The heart of the problem, recruiters say, is the system itself. Like traffic cops, recruiters work on a monthly quota system, and the pressure to produce is intense. This year, the Marine Corps plans to ship just over 39,000 new troops to boot camp (up by about 2,000 from 2004), while the army's 2005 goal is 80,000 new soldiers (up from 77,000 last year). For the 2,650 Marine recruiters and their 7,500 counterparts in the army, those goals land in their cubicles like cannonballs. For every Marine recruiter, "making mission" means signing an average 2.5 new recruits a month. In the army, the quota is two a month. That may sound easy enough, but when I suggested as much to a number of recruiters, the depth of their frustration was palpable.

Last March the army announced it missed its monthly recruiting goal for the first time in five years—shipping 27 percent fewer active-duty troops to boot camp than slated in its mission. The slide continued from there, with the army missing its mission for the next four months. "Today's conditions represent the most challenging conditions we have seen in recruiting in my 33 years in this uniform," Major General Michael Rochelle, the head of the army's recruiting command, said in a recent press conference. He evoked combat imagery—"a very, very intense fight"—to convey the urgency of stanching the hemorrhaging of the all-volunteer army.

At press time, the Marine Corps was still shipping enough recruits to boot camp, but admitted that for the first time in 10 years it had failed to sign its quota of new troops to put in the pool from which it draws for boot camp. (In May the Marine Corps stopped making its contracting numbers available to reporters.) The situation is even worse when it comes to weekend warriors. The National Guard and five out of the country's six military reserve units have reported deficits. The Army Reserve, which missed its mission for five consecutive months earlier this year, is so overextended, wrote the Army Reserve's chief, Lieutenant General James R. "Ron" Helmly, in a memo to the army's chief of staff last December, that the Reserve "is rapidly degenerating into a 'broken' force."

Fissures are showing in recruiting offices all over the country. Many of the military's most successful field recruiters and station commanders, men who have never failed to make mission in their careers, are flailing now, and morale is in the gutter. According to the army, since October 2002 some 30 army recruiters have gone AWOL. Recruiters all over the country describe pressure barreling down the chain of command like never before. But it's never been an easy job.

If you recruit by the book, the factors that could disqualify a potential enlistee are myriad: common medical conditions such as asthma, attention-deficit disorder, sleepwalking, flatfoot, eczema, psoriasis, and heart murmur; having used certain prescription medications like Ritalin or Prozac; illegal-drug use; even having tattoos above the neckline (more common an issue than you might imagine). A high-school diploma is the "preferred standard" for both the army and the Marine Corps, though there are certain exceptions for kids with a G.E.D. high-school equivalent. The army e-mailed me a color-coded chart—"Contacts to Contracts"—mapping out the odds for recruiters, and they are daunting: it takes from 120 to 150 contacts with potential recruits to yield, after a long process of meetings and screenings, one good man or woman who finally "accesses" into the army. A by-the-book recruiter can apply for waivers for applicants with disqualifying factors, but waivers can take a long time to process, so they're worthless to a recruiter who needs to put up numbers right away. As Sergeant Massey told me, "I didn't have time to mess around with waivers. 'Waiver' was not in my vocabulary."

"A lot of the kids that want to go just don't qualify," said another Marine Corps recruiter, summing up the problem. However, on "Mission Day"—the monthly deadline when quotas come due—there are no excuses. Failure to make mission, recruiters say, can mean a dizzying onslaught of reprimands, threats of demotion, and assorted punitive training assignments (including brutal physical-fitness sessions). Talk to a recruiter from any force for more than five minutes and you're bound to hear the recruiters' mantra: "It's the toughest job in the military short of combat." In one recent case, an unsuccessful Marine Corps recruiter died on duty in an auto accident his fellow recruiters describe as inseparable from their job's intense pressure.

"We call it a snowball effect. You know, it starts out small and it gets bigger and bigger and bigger," said one army recruiter, clearly overwhelmed. "Well, this one only gets hu-mon-gous. By the time it hits us it's an avalanche. There is no more snowball."

"I love my army, I really do," a recently retired army recruiting-station commander told me, "but it's driving itself off its frigging wheels right now. It's driving on the rims.… I had some really great recruiters, guys who worked for me. Every single one of them went from being bright-eyed and eager to do the job to 'I can't believe this job,' to 'O.K., my marriage is over,' to 'O.K., I'll do anything I need to do to get a kid into the army.'"

In Andrews, North Carolina, in the spring of 2000, Sergeant Jimmy Massey was the bright-eyed and eager new guy. But after sitting with Tim Queen in the cafeteria on that afternoon at the community college, Sergeant Massey was worried.

"I said, 'Gunny, there ain't no way that kid's gonna make it through MEPS,'" Massey told his gunnery sergeant, Tim Dalhouse, referring to the Military Entrance Processing Station, where recruits from all the forces are sent for physicals and other processing before shipping to boot camp. "And I never will forget," Massey told me. "He goes, 'It's not up to you to decide who gets into the Marine Corps. That's not your job. Your job is to find 'em and sell 'em.'"

After making arrangements to meet Tim Queen the following morning, Massey and "Gunny" Dalhouse spent the night in a local motel. They picked Tim up early and drove him to a recruiting station in Asheville, where Massey says another recruiter finished the paperwork and put Tim on a bus headed for the MEPS in Charlotte.

When he heard Tim had gone, Massey asked which recruiter's name had been put on his contract. "'Cause I didn't want my name on it," Massey explained to me. He was told the other recruiter had signed his, Massey's, name. "I was like, 'Fuck it, I don't care, because he ain't getting in anyway. There's no way.' And, sure as shit, he got in."

Tim Queen passed two separate physicals at MEPS—but how? The physicals, which are the same for all the services, are supposed to be comprehensive. The second physical, done the same day a recruit ships to boot camp, includes what's called an "Inspect," in which the recruit sits one-on-one, undressed, with the chief medical officer for a thorough exam. "We look at his arms and legs, check height and weight—get a good visual look at him," Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Weaver, M.D., the deputy director of medical policy at the Military Entrance Processing Command, told me. "We check them front and back, hands and feet, see if there are any new scars from surgery or trauma, see if there are any new tattoos. If there are no new concerns and if he's qualified, he swears in, signs his enlistment contract, and gets on the bus."

Lieutenant Colonel Weaver wasn't familiar with Tim Queen's medical history, but after hearing a description of what had happened to Tim, he said that covering up medical problems can cut both ways. "There are lots of cases where kids want to be in the service, and whether they're encouraged to or they do so on their own, they're not truthful and attempt to conceal any medical problems," he said, but added, "In this case, it's hard for me to imagine." Nevertheless, a doctor at MEPS in Charlotte green-lighted Tim Queen. Tim swore his oath and got on the bus for basic training at Parris Island.

The first day of basic training was great, Tim told me. He spent it with other recruits memorizing their general orders. The trouble started the second day, when drill instructors lined them up to issue them machine guns. Tim was given one, but it was taken away a few hours later. Watching him struggle to stand at attention, the drill instructors wanted to know what was wrong with Tim, and they didn't ask nicely.

"Was the doctor drunk or stoned when he gave you the test?" Tim quoted the drill instructor as wanting to know when Tim explained that he'd passed his physicals at MEPS and the brain scan back home. "I told 'em I shouldn't be having no problem out there, because I'd talked to everyone in the past … that I'd told my recruiter and everything, and all the people at MEPS. But they told me I didn't have a choice—they could send me home."

Despite having spotted Tim Queen's condition the instant they lined him up, the drill instructors nonetheless accused him of having somehow concealed his medical problems from his recruiters and the doctors at MEPS. They informed him that he was to sign papers conceding that he'd defrauded the Marine Corps, accept an "Other than Honorable" discharge, and board the next bus home. Tim refused. "I told them I didn't lie to the Marine Corps, that the Marine Corps lied to me. That I wasn't fraudulent, they was. And that I wasn't quitting them, they was quitting me. I was angry. I didn't make no bones about it, either."

Tim was confined to the barracks, except for meals. After several days, he shaved off his eyebrows (to scare the guards, he told me) and informed the guards that he was "having dreams." He wrote a letter home to his family on Marine Corps stationery: "Wish I'd listened [to what] you tried to tell me.… People here believe me to be insane. One doctor told me my twitching was a result of constant anger.… I'm not really [a] fraud.… You believe anyone will buy a story like mine? I hope so." He added that he hoped his father was going to church, assured his mom he had a Bible with him, and instructed his little sister not to watch too much TV.

After 25 days, the Marine Corps gave Tim Queen $100 and an "Other than Honorable" discharge, and put him on a bus home.

"I was 80 percent sure this was the way it was going to turn out," Tim's father, John, told me over coffee recently. Humiliated, Tim refused to leave the house for several weeks after he got home, John said, except at night, when he'd sneak out and run. "He'd run from Peachtree to Hayesville and back," the father said, describing a route 20 miles long. "Timmy feels like he's let the town of Andrews down. He feels he let the family down. I mean, he won't tell you that, but really he does. I think it's still part of his everyday life. I think he thinks about it every day." (Tim now works with his father on the line at the auto-parts plant.)

Andrews, North Carolina, is a small town, and word about what happened to Tim spread through the community. "I'm slow to anger, but I was very upset," the Cherokee County sheriff, Keith Lovin, told me, lowering his boots from his desk, suddenly intense. He's known Tim Queen from church since Tim was a kid. "I mean, Tim cannot stand still," Sheriff Lovin said, incredulous to this day. "If they're missing things like this, what other kinds of emotional or psychological things are they missing? Kind of makes you wonder who's got the gun, don't it?"

Sheriff Lovin contacted his congressman, Charles Taylor, about Tim Queen's case, and Taylor subsequently addressed a stern letter to the Pentagon: "I am calling on the Marine Corps to take a serious look at the possibility of recruiter misconduct in this case. It seems to me that this is a much more likely possibility than that an unsophisticated teenager with two easily noticeable medical conditions [his twitch and stutter] would engage in deceptive practices in an effort to lie his way into the Marine Corps." Taylor "strongly" recommended that the Marine Corps give Tim Queen a formal apology, pay him for his month of service, and adjust his discharge status from "Other than Honorable" to "Uncharacterized." The Marine Corps did none of the above, though it did launch an investigation into Tim Queen's recruitment.

Back in Asheville, Sergeant Massey told me, his gunnery sergeant, having been made aware of the investigation, sent him back to Andrews on a mission: not to apologize to the Queen family, but rather to try to recruit Tim's younger brother, Jason. "Takes some pretty big huevos, huh?" Massey said when he recounted the story. Did they really think the brother would join after what happened to Tim, I asked him. "No. It was just to fuck with the Queens."

The Marine Corps declined to discuss any specific allegations of recruiter misconduct, but responded in writing to questions I submitted. "Our screening and enlistment process is composed of many checks and balances in order to ensure we accept only the most qualified applicants," wrote Major David Griesmer, a public-affairs officer. "If any fraud or discrepancies are noted at any point during the processing period, the issue is traced back to the recruiter who enlisted the individual."

Sergeant Massey's former boss, Tim Dalhouse, now a master sergeant and no longer on recruiting duty, said he did not remember the specifics of Tim Queen's case and told me he was never questioned in the investigation. Dalhouse insisted that neither he nor Jimmy Massey did anything wrong in recruiting Tim Queen. "I'm trained as an aircraft mechanic. How would I know if a kid has a medical problem?" Dalhouse said. "We're like trained monkeys. We ask the questions and let the doctors make the determination, so I'm absolutely opposed to you holding a recruiter accountable for something like that." He added, "Recruiting duty is insanely hard. People don't want to join the military. We're trying to defend the country. We put recruiters on the street every day and ask them to do the impossible." Dalhouse denied being involved in any recruiting improprieties during his time as the non-commissioned officer in charge of the Asheville recruiting station.

It was a rainy Sunday in the rural Southeast. I'd arranged to meet a highly decorated army recruiter currently serving in a town of 10,000 about two hours from the nearest city. It's a depressed area, with a third of the town's stores boarded up. The local recruiting offices sit side by side in a 50s red-brick ranch-style strip mall. Sergeant First Class Peters was waiting for me in the parking lot, smoking. He's been in the army more than 20 years and is a winner of both the Army Recruiter Ring and the Glen E. Morrell Award, the highest honors in army recruiting. These days, though, he said he's disgusted—with his job, with his chain of command, and with himself. "Peters" is not the sergeant's real name, and this was not an authorized visit.

"The one thing I like about this job is actually sitting down and showing somebody that, 'Look, I know you're living in the slums, and I can show you a way out,'" he said when we sat down inside his office. "'I can show you a way to better your future, teach you a job, and give you something to hold on to,'" he continued, as if talking to a potential recruit. "'That white picket fence and that home you've always wanted is there. All you have to do is pick your ass up and come in here and talk to me.'" He looked haggard. These days, hardly anyone is coming in to talk to Sergeant Peters. For the first time in his career, he's missing his quota month after month.

Most army recruiting stations have a poster onto which pictures of the recruits for the current year are affixed. It's called "the future-soldiers board." In Sergeant Peters's station, it's on the wall behind his desk, and on this day it was looking bleak. There were only 11 new recruits on the board. He swiveled around and started tapping photographs with his index finger. "Yes. Yes. No … Yes. Yes … No," and so on. He was pointing out which new recruits went into the army despite having "pissed hot" for drugs. It's 7 of 11. "There's a lot of illegal-drug use in this area," he explained. Methamphetamines and marijuana are the ones he sees the most.

"Do I get a butt-chewing if I don't make my mission? Yes. Can I get fired for not making my mission? Yes. So what do I do? I put in that kid because, hey, look, I gotta make my mission," he said. "That's what it's about."

Recruits from all the armed forces are given an official drug test at MEPS before they ship to boot camp. If they "piss hot" at MEPS they are disqualified from the military for 45 days to a year, depending on the drug, and then have to retest to get in. To avoid that, the army now gives recruiters home urine-test kits so they can be sure the kids are clean before sending them to MEPS. But being clean, Peters explained, doesn't mean they're not using drugs, only that they've stopped using them long enough to get through the drug test at MEPS.

"We'll give them a urine-analysis test just prior to getting in the car and driving down [to MEPS]," Peters said. If they test positive he tells them: "Dude, you're hot. Go over there and get you some of this and clean yourself up" before trying another day. (By "this" he means herbal detox products sold in health-food stores, though he claims drinking a gallon of water a day works just as well.)

"Does it happen? Every day. Every single day. Especially here. There's a case of marijuana or meth use in this office every day."

Drugs aren't Sergeant Peters's only hindrance. Recruits for all the armed forces have to fill out an elaborate medical history at MEPS when they first join. A list of 75 conditions and medical procedures—from bee-sting allergies to back surgery—follow the header query "HAVE YOU EVER HAD OR DO YOU NOW HAVE … " If the recruit checks "Yes" on any one of these, that delays—and could derail—his enlistment. For the recruiter, this means the recruit ultimately doesn't count toward his monthly quota. The key, nearly every army and Marine Corps recruiter I spoke to said, is to coach the recruit to answer "No" on all of them—to the point where, as one recruiter put it, "even if you ask him his own name he'll answer 'No.'" If a problem is discovered later at basic training, the recruiter is technically off the hook because the recruit is the one who lied on the form.

In terms of female recruits, Sergeant Peters said, one of the biggest problems is single mothers' wanting to enlist. Being a single mom is a nonstarter for becoming a soldier—no exceptions—unless she has given up custody of her child. It's strictly out of bounds for an army recruiter to advise a woman to give up custody, but, as Peters explained, he can (and does) show her the regulations that spell out what would have to be done in order for her to get in. "Here's how it would go," he said, pulling the regulations from his desk and speaking to me as if I were a single mother: "Read this. I didn't tell you about it because I'm not authorized to tell you about it, but I can ask you to read. This paragraph states what you need to do:"

"The U.S. Army recognizes that some persons for personal reasons have given up custody of a child or children.… If an applicant is without a spouse and the child or children have been placed in the custody of the other parent or another adult by court order prior to application for enlistment, and the applicant is not required to pay support for more than two dependents, then the applicant is eligible to process for enlistment. [A.R. 601-210]"

"If you come back two days later and say, 'I gave up custody of my child,' or if the individual comes in and says, 'Hey, I changed my mind, I've never been pregnant, I never had a child … ' Well, O.K.," Peters said. "I would say 3 out of 10 single mothers who pass through this office lie about their child's status to get in."

Recruits who are taking (or have taken) Ritalin or antidepressants are among the most common examples recruiters gave of enlistees who can be disqualified if their medical histories become known. Having taken Ritalin after age 12 used to be a frequent disqualifier, but after a change in standards last year a recruit can now enlist if a doctor certifies that the recruit has been off the drug for a full year and has done well academically without it.

Another recruiter I interviewed, Staff Sergeant "Eriksen," a highly decorated former army station commander (who also asked that his real name not be used), described how he would regularly stop just short of advising outright a kid currently taking Ritalin to take himself off it. (The scenario he laid out dovetailed with those provided by other recruiters I spoke with about both Ritalin and antidepressants such as Prozac).

"Here's what I'm gonna tell you, Johnny," Staff Sergeant Eriksen said, as if to the recruit. "If you go there and tell the doctor you're taking this, he's going to tell you you're not qualified. Now, do you think this drug really does anything for you? Because if you go and tell them you're taking it, you're not going to be allowed to join." Eriksen then told me, "So, you're skirting the issue but delivering the message. You're telling the kid to say no without telling the kid to say no.… I guarantee that right now if a kid comes into a recruiting station and says he's taking Ritalin or antidepressants he's going to get told, 'No you're not.'"

Lieutenant Colonel Weaver, the air-force doctor and deputy director of MEPS medical policy, was exasperated when I recounted this story. "Typically, Ritalin is given for attention-deficit disorder or hyperactive disorder, and that kid wouldn't do well—wouldn't be successful most likely—in a combat environment, where they need to stay on focus and stay on task in a very stressful situation," he said in a tone that suggested this was not the first time he was hearing of recruiters' encouraging enlistees to lie about their medical histories. "If we could communicate en masse to all of the recruiters and convince them that checking 'Yes' on a pre-screen does not automatically keep a person out, we'd be much better off. Sure, it's going to make things more complicated. We're going to want medical documentation. We're going to take a little more time. But it comes back to who we want out there in a potentially highly stressful combat situation."

Staff Sergeant Eriksen said most recruiters will go out of their way to avoid anything that might make their job "more complicated." That means pre-empting the need for waivers by coaching recruits to just say no.

"Heart murmur—that's another good example," Eriksen continued without breaking his stride. "Kid says, 'I have a heart murmur.' 'Really? Have you ever heard it? [He shook his head instructionally.] Well, then, how do you know you have a heart murmur?'" Presumably, the kid then checks "No" on the survey.

"If a kid does anything more athletic than playing Xbox, you tell him it's obvious you don't have a medical problem, because it would have done you in by now," a former Marine recruiter from Little Rock offered as a bottom line.

One of Sergeant Eriksen's more outrageous fraudulent enlistments, he recalled, involved advising a young recruit to explain away a long, zigzagging abdominal scar by telling the doctors at MEPS that he'd fallen off his bike. In reality, he'd fallen off a ladder and caught his stomach on a jagged piece of metal. It lacerated his liver and intestines, requiring emergency surgery. He also fractured his skull, suffering a major concussion and losing all sense of taste and smell. "He would have been absolutely disqualified," Eriksen said. "I knew the doc would try and disqualify him just from looking at that scar." With the bike story, however, it would be the recruit's word against the doctor's. "By then I was so used to the game I said, 'Look, here's the deal. You say this: This is how it happened. This is when it happened. This is the hospital I went to.'" Eriksen said he gave the recruit a letter from a local hospital that destroys its records after several years so the recruit could explain why he had no records of being treated for the "bike accident." Did the screeners at MEPS really fall for that? I asked. "They knew," he said. "Come on. The counselors [at MEPS] are all ex-recruiters and station commanders. They all know. It's a great big game. Everybody knows. Nobody says." The recruit involved, who served two and a half years, confirmed this story to me.

In May, after a high-school student in Denver won national headlines with a tape recording he had made of army recruiters advising him on how best to create a fake high-school diploma and mask his marijuana habit with an over-the-counter detoxification product (the student had identified himself as a dope-smoking dropout), General Rochelle, the head of the army's recruiting command, called a nationwide "stand-down" day for all of the army's recruiters. Meeting with their local commanders, recruiters were given special "leadership" training. They were also shown scenes from Hollywood war movies in which soldiers distinguished themselves with honor and integrity. The recruiters then re-swore their enlistment oaths ("I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic … "), and were made to sign a letter forswearing all unauthorized communications with reporters, according to one recruiter who continued to communicate with me anyway, angered that the army did nothing to modify the inflexible quota system he considers the problem's core. When asked about this at a press conference, General Rochelle said simply, "The mission is the mission."

For Del Murphy, like so many wartime military moms, desolation arrived with strange headlights in her driveway. It was 8:30 p.m., three days before Christmas 2003. Her 26-year-old son, Billy William Lowry, a Marine Corps sergeant, had been killed just a few hours earlier.

Among the circumstances that set Lowry's death apart from the daily tally of American servicemen killed in the line of duty these days are that the uniformed officer at Del Murphy's door was not a Marine but a Texas state trooper, and that her son, whom she called William, died not on a dusty road in Fallujah but on a stretch of U.S. Interstate 30 between Dallas and Little Rock.

It's a distinction that means everything to Del Murphy, who thought her son was safe on the home front. Sergeant Lowry was a recruiter.

"The Marine Corps killed my son," she said, her voice even with pain and anger as we sat on her front porch in Jewett, Texas, watching a freight train roll by. She's not alone in that belief. Several of Lowry's former colleagues agreed.

After five years in the Marine Corps, Lowry volunteered to be a recruiter when he re-upped in late 2002 for eight more years. At the time, he was full of bluster, telling his mom he'd win the stripes of a staff sergeant, the next rank up, in half the time it might otherwise take.

"Oh, he was gonna knock 'em dead," Murphy said, instantly animated by the memory. "By God, he was gonna go up there and show them how it was done, and he was gonna get that stripe, and, man, he was gonna have as many stripes as an NCO [non-commissioned officer] could have by the time he retired."

He never got his promotion.

Over the year he spent on recruiting duty before his death, Lowry would become a desperate Marine, teetering constantly on the verge of losing his career and his family. He'd put in 12-, 14-, 16-hour workdays, often seven days a week, trying to make mission. He didn't come close and would be punished repeatedly for failing, ordered to make 11-hour drives round-trip between Little Rock and his command in Dallas so he could be told to do better. Ultimately, the pressures of Lowry's situation would coalesce into a perfect storm, laying bare a sense of relentlessness felt by all of the recruiters I spoke with, both current and former, and providing a snapshot of how some recruiters spiral into patterns of predatory recruiting.

Lowry had been assigned to the recruiting office in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, a substation 45 minutes south of the larger Little Rock office. "Positively Pine Bluff" is the town's motto, but among Little Rock recruiters it's considered an awful place to find kids to put in the military. A high-poverty urban enclave surrounded by cotton fields and pine forest, Pine Bluff has been ranked among America's "10 Worst Places to Live" due to high rates of violence and drug crime. The larger Little Rock metropolitan area ranks among the country's Top 25 "asthma capitals," and asthma is among the biggest medical disqualifiers in all the armed forces. Many Pine Bluff residents feel the town's asthma problem is augmented by two of the town's main fixtures: an International Paper mill, from which billowing plumes stretch out over the landscape, and the Pine Bluff Arsenal, a military facility where 3,850 tons of chemical weapons—mustard gas and liquid nerve agents like VX—are being incrementally incinerated in compliance with international treaties.

Lowry was sent to Pine Bluff as the replacement for a hotshot field recruiter, Staff Sergeant Steven Whitfield, who'd just been promoted to station commander in Little Rock and would now be Lowry's boss. Whitfield, by all accounts, is an easy talker, relaxed and personable—requisite traits in a good recruiter. Of equal importance in this case, former Little Rock recruiters said, is that Whitfield, like the majority of people in Pine Bluff, is black. "Every white guy down there failed," said one, a white guy who, indeed, had failed.

Generally, the Marine Corps tries to make a good match in terms of ethnicity and language when placing recruiters, but with Lowry the pairing was way off. On his birth certificate and other official documents, Lowry is listed as Native American. His father is a Lumbee Indian. His mother is white. "I think they were expecting a dark-eyed, dark-haired, dark-skinned Native American," Murphy said as she showed me the life-size enlargement of Lowry's Marine Corps mug shot which hangs above the fireplace in her home. Lowry was six feet three inches and blond with hazel eyes.

"He wasn't just Caucasian, he was pale-faced," one of his former colleagues explained. But Lowry's biggest problem may have been more subtle. "The guy just didn't have the gift of gab," another recruiter said, and in recruiting, gab is everything.

The Pine Bluff substation is "a one-man fighting hole"—a tiny office at the far extremity of the local mall, down where the shops trail off into "Excuse Our Dust" construction walls and bad light. Lowry was out there on his own with no immediate supervision. His territory covered all of southern Arkansas—more than 6,000 square miles. He'd get to the office before eight a.m. for paperwork, spend the rest of the day in the car visiting several of the 20 high schools in his area, then put in more hours back in the office going up and down high-school phone directories, dialing one teenager after another well into the night, hoping to make an appointment.

Cold-calling high-school kids at home is now a ubiquitous recruiting tactic, thanks to a clause buried deep within the No Child Left Behind Act. The law's Section 9528, lobbied hard for by the Pentagon, is a mandate that public high schools provide military recruiters with the names, addresses, and home phone numbers of all juniors and seniors—information high schools have traditionally guarded as private—unless parents write a letter opting out. Noncompliant high schools risk losing government funding (and several principals have received visits from high-ranking officers from various services to make that clear).

In June, the Pentagon went a step further, contracting a private marketing firm to compile a database of high-school students aged 16 to 18 and all college students—listing personal information from birth dates to Social Security numbers, grade-point averages, ethnicities, e-mail addresses, and interests—to help identify potential recruits. There is growing opposition among parents to these lists, but recruiters consider them invaluable. Not that they helped Lowry much—it seemed he just couldn't connect with the local kids. But he wasn't allowed to leave the office and go home to his wife, Natalie, and their baby until he had at least three appointments confirmed for the following day, a task which often took as many as 150 calls. The threat of being fired hung constantly over his head.

'It's a vicious cycle," said Staff Sergeant Eriksen, the army station commander who supervised several young recruiters just like Lowry. "You're not producing, so they make you work more hours. And you're going to be discouraged and more tired, so it's harder to recruit. And then you fail even further and they make you work more hours. And it's really a quick slide.… Then you've got your family on top of that, since you're working 16 hours a day. If you're going to be successful, first year you're out there you have to be working 12 to 16 hours a day."

Despite all his problems, Lowry's situation was only on the bad end of normal for Marine Corps recruiters in the Little Rock area. All of them were struggling.

"I saw one go bankrupt, I saw two get fired," said a former Little Rock recruiter of his various station commanders; he had four superior officers in as many years. "Everybody was getting fired" (which for recruiters means being sent back to the main body of their service, stopping their careers dead in their tracks). The year Lowry spent there, the Little Rock station as a whole missed its monthly mission five times and squeaked by the other seven, recruiters said—a situation the region's command headquarters in Dallas made clear was intolerable. Recruiters were regularly ordered to jump in a government van on a moment's notice and get to command A.S.A.P. There, after the five-and-a-half-hour drive, they'd receive "an ass-chewing" up close and personal, sometimes accompanied by "grueling P.T." (physical training). Whatever else these punishments accomplished, they burned valuable time the recruiters could have spent recruiting.

"We all had to do it," one former Little Rock recruiter told me. To get to Dallas for a seven a.m. P.T. session, they'd have to leave at midnight. "That's after working all day. It's 'Get there, get back, get to work.'"

"Sometimes they'd call you in and scream at you for five minutes," said another who had to make several of these drives. "Sometimes nobody would talk to you. You'd sit there for hours, then they'd just turn you around and send you back."

In November 2003, Mission Day was the day before Thanksgiving, and the Little Rock Recruiting Station had come up short again. The entire station—five recruiters and the station commander—was ordered to Dallas for what one of the Marines on the trip characterized as "a group ass-chewing." The six men left early that morning. Upon arrival, they were read a formal reprimand and sent on a punishing five-mile run through the streets of Dallas. They were then turned around and sent home, exhausted, around nine that night. Before they left, an angry recruiter spoke up. "One day someone's going to die on the road, and it's going to be your fault," he said to his commanding officer, according to Marines who witnessed it. In the words of one, the officer "looked him in the eye and said, 'No, we won't. If you guys will just make mission we won't have to go through this stuff.'" On the drive home, some of the Marines, who were taking turns driving, began to fall asleep at the wheel, several told me. That night, they coined a prescient term for this particular punishment: "the Death Drive."

Less than a month after the Thanksgiving trip, Sergeant Lowry was ordered to Dallas again "to address certain personal problems that had been brought to the attention of the command," according to a letter from the Marine Corps to his mother's congressman, Jeb Hensarling, written after Lowry's death. A young Marine helping out temporarily at the Little Rock station was told to jump in the van and go with Lowry to keep him company. They spent nearly the entire day waiting outside the sergeant major's office, unable to leave even for lunch. When the sergeant major finally called Lowry in, a Marine who worked in the Dallas office told me, you could hear the upbraiding all the way down the hall. "He was yelling at him that he was a piece of shit and he was going to get him fired from recruiting duty and all that. They ran that kid through the wringer that day, man, pretty bad."

Lowry died a few hours later, asleep in the reclined passenger seat when the younger Marine—who was not authorized to drive the van, according to former recruiters from the Little Rock station—fell asleep at the wheel and rolled it. "That could have been any one of us," one of Lowry's fellow recruiters told me. "It was only a matter of time." (The driver survived and is still in the Marine Corps.)

The exact reason or reasons Lowry was called in that day are hard to pin down because the Marine Corps has divulged very little about his case (even after several specific requests for this article). According to Marines who knew Lowry, at the time of his death he was under investigation for as many as three separate incidents of fraudulent enlistment. One was said to involve a recruit with asthma, a condition for which the Marine Corps, envisioning battlefield asthma attacks, rarely makes exceptions. When the recruit's condition was discovered during his physical, he fingered Lowry for telling him to lie, something Lowry only kind of denied. "Not that I wouldn't have done it," Lowry told his mom, "but [in this case] I didn't." Del Murphy said her son had also told her about a local diploma mill that could supply fake high-school credentials for kids who hadn't graduated but wanted in. (Falsifying documents for recruits is considered a felony in the Marine Corps.) Another Marine who worked in the Dallas headquarters said Lowry was being written up for bouncing personal checks. "If you have problems before, recruiting duty just brings out the demons," said one of Lowry's former colleagues. "Best way to describe it: recruiting brings out the demons."

The consensus among Marines who knew Lowry, however, is that command's beef with him was less about his being unethical than about his being unproductive. "Because Lowry wasn't doing good, Dallas started looking for dirt on Lowry," one said. (It's called being "blackballed" in military parlance.) "The truth is, they could find something on any of us if they looked hard enough for it."

At 11:51 on the night after Billy William Lowry died on his way home to Little Rock, Captain Darrell Allen, the executive officer at the Dallas command, sent himself an e-mail (first obtained by the CBS affiliate in Dallas). Allen had just hung up the phone with one of Lowry's fellow recruiters in Little Rock, a staff sergeant named Derrick Hammond, who'd been ordered to go to the morgue the night before to identify Lowry's body. "He sounded shaken up and distraught and he was obviously emotional," Allen wrote. "I did not sense that he'd been drinking. He was clear in his communications to me."

The e-mail catalogued a torrent of pent-up frustration, which Allen listed "in no particular order":

"[Hammond] expressed anger for what he called frequent death drives, pain drives, and suicide drives to Dallas.…

"He stated that he had brought these dangerous drives to the command's attention before and that nothing was done about it.…

"He expressed that he believes Recruiting Duty does not value a life, family, or the person like in the Fleet [the main body of the Marine Corps]. Here it's all about mission and nothing else matters.…

"He stated his desire was to get the Marine Corps to look into this and fix it before we kill others."

Nine months after the accident, Del Murphy received a copy of the letter the Marine Corps sent to her congressman describing the findings of the inquiry into her son's death. It was written by a U.S. Marine Corps colonel named Christopher O'Connor, deputy legislative assistant to the commandant. After expressing condolences to the family, O'Connor outlines various policies and general facts of the case and, at letter's end, concludes that the recruiting command in Dallas "was not unreasonable in expecting Sergeant Lowry would safely complete the drive back to Little Rock." The letter says, among other things, that Lowry was offered a hotel room in Dallas for the night but declined, saying he wanted to get home to his family instead. It's an assertion Lowry's mother, among others, insists is untrue.

I read the complete letter to several of Lowry's former recruiting colleagues, two of whom testified in the investigation. Each characterized the inquiry as whitewash and strongly took issue with several key elements of the Marine Corps's account, chief among them its assertion that Lowry declined a hotel room and returned to Little Rock of his own volition.

"I stood in the hallway, and he told me he'd been ordered to drive back," a former Marine who worked in the Dallas office told me. "They can stand there all day and tell me and you and whoever that they offered him a hotel room and it's a lie. I talked to him before he left that night. I know what he told me."

In separate interviews, two former Little Rock Marines gave nearly identical accounts. "After Lowry, yes, we'd stay the night," one said. "Before that, no. It was drive there, get back, get to work." The whole station was particularly angry about the accident because they all saw it coming. "I mean, every one of us wrecked government vehicles at one time or another," said one. He was a pallbearer at Lowry's funeral.

Sitting on her porch in Jewett, Texas, Del Murphy told me she wanted nothing from the Marine Corps but an honest reckoning of what happened with her son. "I want to see the person who told him to get into that truck and drive back to Little Rock—I want to see him apologize to me and his wife and his father. That's it," she said. "William had done something wrong, and they were holding him responsible. And I want them held to the same standard that they were holding him to." She began to cry. "I don't think that's a lot. I want him to look me in the face. I just want to see who changed my life forever."

I submitted detailed questions to the Marine Corps about the circumstances surrounding Lowry's death, but the Corps declined to comment. I also filed a Freedom of Information Request on Lowry's case in September 2004. At press time, it remained unfulfilled.

Early on while researching this piece, I received a small white padded packing envelope, unsolicited, in the mail. A large gold ring with a green stone tumbled out when I opened it. There was no note, just the ring.

"U.S. ARMY—1775" is inscribed around the stone, "U.S. ARMY—RECRUITER" around a molded eagle, amid laurel leaves, in smaller letters on the side. It's the U.S. Army Recruiter Ring, the coveted commendation awarded to the top army recruiters. The sender was Staff Sergeant Eriksen, the former army station commander.

It was an awkward gesture. I wasn't sure what to make of it. I sent him an e-mail thanking him for showing it to me. He responded the next day:

"Glad you received the ring," he wrote.

"Please keep it. If it'll help you remember this whole story, and eventually see that it gets told, it's served a far better purpose than that for which it was intended.…

"Upon reflection I cannot understand why I wanted it so badly. I honestly never want to see it again. I sacrificed so much in pursuit of it, my time with my family, my time in pursuit of higher education, a part of my honor.…

"I can look back and see where I accomplished some good in several people's lives, but after time my whole perspective shifted into seeing recruits simply as numbers and no longer as real people. The mission of the station became my whole life, and everything else was secondary, including my own personal honor."

Michael Bronner is a former producer for 60 Minutes II. This is his first article for Vanity Fair.