You're in the Army Now... If It Suits You

TODAY'S ARMY WANTS TO JOIN YOU goes the pitch these days, as the military looks for new lures to pull young men into service. The trouble is (to the chagrin of ramrod recruiting sergeants from the old brown-boot Army), those breezy promises of salubrious duty have to be kept. Indeed, an astonishing precedent to that end has been set.

In 1969, Sergeant David Lee Klapp bought the blandishments of those hip, upbeat re-enlistment posters and, as they say in the service, took a burst of six. When he arrived in Germany last year, however, Klapp found the contemporary Army was nowhere near as new as it cracked itself up to be. Said he: "The old ways were still enforced in Germany. There was the caste system, harassing treatment by superiors, unnecessary and unfair rigid inspections and a soldier's loss of his constitutional rights."

That may sound like barracks griping, but Klapp, a Viet Nam veteran, was in dead earnest. He charged the Army with false advertising and claimed he had a right to quit. Understandably miffed, the chain of command processed Klapp's papers as slowly as it well knows how. Yet Klapp persevered and won an honorable discharge, a full three years before his hitch was up.

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