OFFENSIVE MANEUVERS

By Mark Thompson/Washington

The first place women meet today's Army is not at boot camp but in America's clean and well-lighted recruiting stations, where teenagers go to get the military sales pitch. When 18-year-old Carissa Schaper walked into one last year in St. Peters, Missouri, she thought she was safe. But as she later told an Army investigator, she was taken aback by what she saw and heard. "It's not a question of whether we can get you into the Army," she was told on her second visit, "but can the Army get into you?" The recruiters seemed more interested in enlisting her for sport sex than for service to her country. "They'd brag about all the young ladies they had slept with," she says. "They saw the young women as an added benefit of their job."

Schaper, a troubled young woman who was fighting depression and rebelling against her devoutly Christian parents, ended up having a six-month relationship with Sergeant Paul Belisle, a married recruiter. By the time it was over, the teenager had contracted herpes and twice attempted suicide. After a six-month probe, the Army washed its hands of the messy affair on April 14, telling the Schapers that it had no legal responsibility for an out-of-control sergeant. But Belisle acknowledges that he brought a formidable weapon to his role as seducer. "I didn't realize how powerful the uniform is,'' a repentant Belisle told TIME. "They look up to it--and to you when you're wearing it ... We're generally a bit older, and they talk to us about everything, even having sex with their boyfriends. And that leads to compromising situations. There are recruiters who take advantage of it."

They do indeed. A TIME investigation shows that women don't have to wait until they are under a sergeant's command to experience sexual harassment from men in uniform. They can just walk into one of the recruiting stations along Main Street or in shopping malls across America expressly designed to persuade youngsters to "be all that you can be." According to Army records obtained by TIME under the Freedom of Information Act, sexually predatory recruiters are a national problem. Though the reports had all names and locations blacked out, their dates show a dramatic rise in sexual-harassment complaints filed with national recruiting headquarters at Fort Knox, Kentucky. They climbed from two in 1994 to nine in 1995 to 20 last year, and don't include a rape charge made by a Massachusetts woman against a recruiter in 1996. Indeed, the Army privately concedes the problem is far worse than those numbers suggest. They don't include cases filed with the Army's inspector general, military police or equal-opportunity officials. Nor do they include cases Time has uncovered on its own. Belisle himself says harassment and relationships between male recruiters and female recruits are "pretty common." A veteran Army recruiter estimates that up to 15% of male recruiters commit such offenses. In fact, the Army's records indicate:

--At one station that was the target of Army investigators, a recruiter got a prospect pregnant and picked her up at the hospital after an abortion. The investigation also revealed that three recruiters had been dating candidates who had committed to enlist but not yet reported for duty, as well as prospective applicants. The recruiters bought alcohol for prospective recruits, invited them to their apartments "to socialize and drink" and even used them as baby-sitters.

--A sergeant at another recruiting station repeatedly harassed a 16-year-old high school freshman. At one point, the investigator concluded, he "grabbed" her and made her so upset she missed a quarter of her classes, contributing to a failing grade in algebra. "The Army image is now tainted in one of the more productive schools," said the investigator. "It could take years for the damage to disappear."

--At some recruiting stations, the men ignored the rule that only female recruiters should weigh and measure female applicants. A female prospect described how a male recruiter "placed his hands on my middle buttocks and traced around in a semicircle. A feeling of uncomfort came over me." She said that he told her, "Redheads really turn me on," and that later, as she filled out some forms, he started rubbing her back, feeling her leg and kissing her. "I pushed myself away," she told the investigator, "and said, 'I think you need to stop!'"

In another sham physical examination, a recruiter made a potential recruit who had a possible back-alignment problem pose for him in her bikini "so he could see whether or not her [back] would meet the doctor's approval."

Faced with reports like these, the Army seems to manage the problem by moving it around. Despite stern warnings against this behavior, the documents show, investigations were flimsy, and perpetrators received light punishment or were shifted to other locations or quietly eased out. Only once in the reports did a commander question the wisdom of allowing recruiters guilty of such wrongdoing to continue in the field. "We have a perceived behavioral pattern of sexual harassment against female applicants," he wrote.

Major General Alfonso Lenhardt, the Army's top recruiter, denies the problem is widespread but nonetheless promises to fix it. If recruiters "commit misdeeds," he says, "they're going to pay the price. We're going to make sure that everyone gets the word."

Despite rules forbidding any romantic relationships between recruiters and recruits, the Army has until now failed to enforce that ban with the intensity it has shown in denouncing the abuse at Maryland's Aberdeen Proving Ground. Last week a military jury there began deliberating whether to convict Sergeant Delmar Simpson of raping six female trainees under his command 19 times. One issue in his case is whether he used the sheer power of his position as a drill sergeant to intimidate women into submitting to him sexually. But recruiting stations present their own challenges to an Army trying to crack down on sexual harassment. Recruiters and their customers tend to be far from military headquarters, and oversight is minimal. The isolation creates a bond among recruiters that can lead them to count on their buddies to lie for them. In one case, "all of the recruiters in the station conspired to withhold information from me as an act of self-protection," an investigating officer wrote. In another case, a local commander was reprimanded by his superiors for trying to derail an investigation of sexual harassment on his watch.

Recruiters believe they have a special status because the Army treats them differently. The Army recruits them by boasting that only the best sergeants are considered for the job and by paying them an additional $375 a month for pulling long hours and giving up the conveniences of living on a military post. To keep the Army at its current level of 495,000 soldiers, its 5,000 recruiters must bring in 90,000 new recruits a year. More than 20% are female.

In Schaper's case, Army recruiters from the local station in St. Peters called to invite her for a visit in January 1996. "Ever since I went to Washington when I was 10, I wanted to be in the military," she says. Her parents were pleased. Schaper's father Arthur, a 43-year-old insurance manager, applauded his daughter's decision. "All the officers that I personally know are of the highest caliber," he says. "I only expected the best from the military."

But his daughter's contact with the Army exposed her to an environment that was not only sexually loaded but also filled with deceit. Schaper had been taking Prozac for depression, and would be barred from the Army if she acknowledged her condition. So recruiters advised her to lie, she claims. They kept her coming back to the station to do typing and other clerical tasks while telling her that her enlistment paperwork was being processed. She started a relationship with Belisle, and during its ups and downs, Schaper became suicidal, twice slashing her wrists.

Belisle, 27, a nine-year Army veteran who worked in recruiting for 18 months, was eventually kicked out of the Army. He says it was not for having sex with Schaper but because he committed adultery, a crime under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. "I should never have been involved with her," he concedes. Before he was discharged on March 28, Belisle was posted away from recruits as a clerical worker in the St. Louis recruiting headquarters. That's when he learned just how common his transgression was. "There were five or six guys who came through there, out of 230 total recruiters, who had been suspended from recruiting duty because of sexual allegations," he says. "And there are a lot more who don't get caught."

When her parents found out about the affair and complained to Army authorities, Schaper says, the recruiting-station commander, Sergeant Michael Jackson, took her aside. "If you really love Paul," Jackson allegedly told her, "you will say that you were only friends and that nothing has happened." Jackson, through his attorney, denies the charge. When Schaper's older brother rounded up a posse of about a dozen friends and went banging on Belisle's door, the recruiter got help from his boss: Jackson issued Belisle a 12-gauge shotgun for his protection.

After a low-key investigation in the wake of the Schapers' complaint, the Army quietly punished four sergeants, although none were court-martialed. Three, including Belisle, were booted out of the Army, and Jackson received a reprimand. On April 17, three days after the Army declined to assume blame for the episode, Schaper sued the U.S. in St. Louis federal court, seeking $10 million for emotional trauma and for medical and psychiatric bills.

Schaper's case is not the only evidence that the Army has been less than aggressive in getting to the bottom of these problems. Last month in upstate New York, a 30-year-old former Army policewoman left her 31-year-old recruiter husband after seven years of marriage and a four-year-old son. She says the reason was her husband's continued affair with a young woman he recruited last year when she was 18. "Recruiters' wives call it the 'officer and a gentleman syndrome,'" explains the estranged wife, who declined to be identified while the divorce is pending. "Those cute girls see that man in that uniform, and their hearts just go pitter-patter pitter-patter. They don't see a man who's got a marriage, a family and kids--they just see the uniform."

She says she learned that her husband had taken the girl to the movies with the free passes recruiters are given for their sign-up campaigns and that he had helped falsify the 18-year-old's enlistment papers to mask her asthma. A neighbor told the wife that shortly after she left town for a trial separation last month, the young girl moved into the recruiter's town house. The neighbor took pictures of the teenager entering and leaving the premises.

Alerted to the existence of the photos after the recruiter's wife made a formal complaint, Army investigators never asked for them. "We take such allegations very seriously, and we investigate them thoroughly," said Major Lester Felton, No. 2 officer in the Army's Syracuse, New York, recruiting headquarters. But he declined to say why he never interviewed the neighbor, never saw her pictures and never informed the wife of the results of the inquiry. "We're not required to," Felton says.

The recruiter's wife says she was told by the top enlisted man in the Syracuse office that "if I pursue this case, my husband will go to the Army's Leavenworth Penitentiary and I won't get any child support." The experience has left her bitter. "Yes, I'm angry at my husband," she says, "but I'm as angry at his commanders, because they didn't do anything."

The Schapers share her rage. "We were betrayed by the U.S. Army, and I will feel that way for the rest of my life," Arthur Schaper says. "These people are supposed to follow certain standards, instead of hiding behind their uniforms." Or using them as brass-buttoned date bait.