The Recruiters' War; Under increasingly intense pressure to fill their quotas and "make mission," army and Marine recruiters have been enlisting kids who don't meet basic physical, moral, and educational standards.

Byline: Michael Bronner

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…