By Daniel Hartill,Staff Writer

For a time – angry and heartsick – Patricia McGillivary made war on the U.S. Marines.

It was her job, she believed.

Her 17-year-old son, Curtis Haslip, who she always believed would attend college after high school, had begun talking about joining the Marines.

It was something she had never imagined.

“I was heartbroken,” she said. A nurse, Patricia had protested the Vietnam War. She opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq. And Curtis earned good grades, enough to have his pick of colleges.

“He didn’t need this,” she said. “I was pretty angry.”

When she finally met his recruiter, a square-shouldered sergeant named Brian Brown, she argued with him for more than an hour.

“I respected him,” Patricia said. “I respected that he was doing his job. My job as a mother was to tell him to buzz off.”

And she’s not alone.

For the first time in a generation, young people are joining the armed forces with the knowledge that they may be sent to war.

According to the Pentagon, recruitment remains strong. In an October speech, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced that every service is meeting its recruiting goal at 100 percent or more. Currently, 1.4 million people are on active duty and another 865,000 are in the National Guard and reserves. Those numbers have changed little since 2001, when active duty personnel was slightly less than 1.4 million and guard and reserve units totaled more than 867,000.

Recruiting is steady, but not easy.

With a new generation of wartime parents, the services have begun campaigns aimed at winning the hearts and minds of moms and dads.

The Army is adding almost 1,000 recruiters and the Army National Guard is adding about 700, according to the Chicago Tribune.

In Maine, the demands by parents have slowed recruiting to a crawl.

Sgt. Troy Stanley, who is in charge of recruiting all of Maine’s Marines, came here in August 2003.

“Everything’s slower,” Stanley said. “More so nowadays than ever, recruiting concerns the parents.”

Young people who once took a few days to make the decision now take weeks, he said. The ones who took weeks now take months.

A few parents want to vent, Stanley said. Some want to know if their son or daughter will be sent to war. Many just want to talk with an informed person.

To the Pentagon, parents matter.

Both the Marines and the Army have added sections to their recruiting Web sites to answering parents’ questions. They include details about service life and testimonials from proud parents who talk about their children’s growth.

The military knows that if a mother or father is upset, it can upset the young person who is contemplating enlistment.

“It’s important that each recruit feels comfortable with his or her decision,” Stanley said. “So, we answer every question parents ask.”

Usually, that leads to the war.

“I provide information,” he said. “I don’t offer any certainty.”

A new future

For Patricia McGillivary, certainty was the first casualty. All of her plans for her son’s future had changed.

However, for him, it was uncertainty that led to the military.

“I’m not ready to decide what kind of career I’m going to do,” said Curtis, a Poland High School senior.

The military seemed like a place to figure that out, he said. And it seemed right for him. He was a patriotic kid.

Curtis and his friend, Ian Beaule, teammates on Poland Regional High School’s football team, began attending monthly meetings for Marine recruits and those interested in joining. They would exercise: run, swim, canoe or play basketball.

Curtis took the military’s version of the SAT, the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery test.

And he searched inside himself.

“I took a real gut check,” Cur tis said. Meanwhile, he began dropping hints to his mother and father that he might not do what they expected.

It’s a chore his friend, Ian, never had to do.

A perfect fit

Ian seemed destined for the military.

He was an outdoor kid, building forts in the backyard and creating scout-like packs of provisions, remembers his mother, Pauline Cadrin of Lewiston.

As he entered high school, he was drawn first to the Navy, where his uncles have served. But he didn’t like what the Navy recruiters told him.

“They all wanted to tell me what they could do for me,” he said. So, he talked with the Marines. “They wanted to know what I could do for them.”

It seemed a perfect fit.

“I have my future all planned,” Ian said. He aims to be a career Marine, perhaps joining an elite, special forces unit.

Before that, however, he expects to serve in Iraq.

It doesn’t bother him, he said.

Making war is what soldiers do, he said. Anyone who joins the military has to be ready to fight. If not, they shouldn’t join.

If they do fight, however, they don’t go alone.

Sitting beside Curtis in a conference room at Poland Regional High School – with seven other seniors preparing for the military – Ian described the Marines as a “brotherhood.”

“I would die for him,” he said with a nod to Curtis. “And he would die for me.”

Family tradition

To Ian’s family, the military carries both fear and pride.

“If it wasn’t for people like him, this wouldn’t be the country it is,” said his stepmother, Julie Beaule. She and Ian’s father, Keith, both support the war in Iraq.

As Ian decided to join the Marines, his family invited Sgt. Brown to their Minot home for dinner.

Ian signed his enlistment papers in the living room, where a photo of his grandfather, Roger Beaule, 91, is displayed.

The black and white picture shows Roger as a young man in an Army uniform. His grandson bears the same nose and chin.

The elder Beaule, who lives in Lewiston, fought at Normandy and in the Battle of the Bulge during World War II.

When Ian graduates from boot camp, he plans to come straight home to his grandfather.

“I want him to see me in uniform,” Ian said.

Postponing college

Curtis’ parents are trying to make peace with that image.

Curtis already looks the part, athletic and lean with a haircut almost as short as a Marine’s flattop.

Patricia copes. She consoles herself, in part, with Curtis’ insistence that he still plans to go to college when his six-year promise to the Marines is over.

For Curtis’ parents, it’s an important promise. Both earned degrees. And before he told them he wanted to join the Marines, they had hired a counselor to help him find a school.

Abruptly, Curtis asked them to call off the search.

“That kind of tipped me off that things were going to be very different for Curtis,” said Richard Haslip, Curtis’ father.

Then, in the spring of 2004, the couple met Sgt. Brian Brown, the Marine recruiter. Brown works from a recruiting office in Auburn, among a row of offices for each service branch.

For the meeting, Curtis was on a Rumford ball field, playing for Poland High, while his mom and dad sat in the bleachers with the young sergeant. For the whole game, they talked.

Meeting the recruiter

It was a tense meeting.

“Patty was really angry, worried that they had fast-talked Curtis,” Richard said. Until days earlier, neither he nor Patricia knew that Curtis had been talking with recruiters.

His news came as the war in Iraq worsened. The couple imagined that Marines had filled their son with wild promises.

They worried that Curtis was in over his head.

“I would have insisted on a meeting if the recruiter hadn’t come,” Richard said. “I would have taken him out to lunch and talked with him, man to man.”

In his mind, Richard even contemplated getting his passport and following his son to Iraq.

Instead, bit by bit, Brown eased their worries.

“He did a lot to calm us down,” Richard said.

They talked about the war in Iraq, where Brown had served. They talked about all the preparations Curtis would need to make before going to boot camp this July.

They talked about Brown’s own background and service.

“He was actually a nice young man,” Richard said. “I sensed that he was really talking from the heart when he talked about wanting to watch over Curtis.”

It began the parent’s journey toward understanding their son’s goals.

“I’m not at peace,” said Richard. “But I’m resigned to it.”

Patricia contemplates having her son in Iraq. She tries not to think of him carrying a gun or enduring any of the war’s brutality.

“It all scares me,” she said. “I won’t have peace until he comes home.”