Army scouting NASCAR circuit

In time of war, recruiters turn to young racing fans By Brian MacQuarrie, Globe Staff | August 28, 2005

BROOKLYN, Mich. -- Swiveling an imitation machine gun mounted on a mock Army jeep, young men and women fire round after round of laser ''bullets" at masked insurgents while ''patrolling" the dusty streets and sand-colored buildings of a war-pocked city that looks very much like Baghdad.

For Seger, the experience only heightened his interest in the Army. ''I've been thinking about joining ever since I was a little kid," he said.

Seger's reaction is music to the ears of the recruit-strapped Army, which brings the free interactive display to Nextel Cup auto races around the country to build a list of potential soldiers. On this day, before a 400-mile stock-car race roars past 136,000 fans at Michigan International Speedway, visitors to the Army exhibit will spray bullets during the virtual patrol, scale a 25-foot rock-climbing wall, bounce from side to side in a Humvee simulator, have their names stamped on dog tags, and walk through a trailer where recruiters show off equipment, answer questions, and guide the curious to more combat video games.

For the Army, the road show is a success story amid a drumbeat of disappointing news about missed recruiting quotas and mounting casualties. The 5,023 visitors to the Michigan display will yield 1,000 to 2,500 potential recruits, said Guy Morgan, who manages the exhibit for a marketing firm hired by the Army. And when NASCAR's 36-race Nextel Cup series ends this year, the Army expects to gather 40,000 names, each of whom will be contacted at least once by a recruiter.

Tom Wolfe seems to agree with you:

From, "The Last American Hero":

"Driving a stock car does not require much handling ability, at least not as compared to Grand Prix racing, because the tracks are simple banked ovals and there is almost no shifting of gears. So qualifying becomes a test of raw nerve—of how fast a man is willing to take a curve. Many of the top drivers in competition are willing to calculate their risks only against the risks the other drivers are taking. Junior takes the pure risk as no other driver has ever taken it.

"Pure" risk or total risk, whichever, Indianapolis and Grand Prix drivers have seldom been willing to face the challenge of the Southern stock-car driver. . . .

"With all this isolation, the mountain people began to take on certain characteristics normally associated, by the diffident civilizations of today, with tribes. There was a strong sense of family, clan and honor. People would cut and shoot each other up over honor. And physical courage! They were almost like Turks that way.

"In the Korean War, not a very heroic performance by American soldiers generally, there were seventy-eight Medal of Honor winners. Thirty-nine of them were from the South, and practically all of the thirty-nine were from small towns in or near the Appalachians. The New York metropolitan area, which has more people than all these towns put together, had three Medal of Honor winners, and one of them had just moved to New York from the Appalachian region of West Virginia. Three of the Medal of Honor winners came from within fifty miles of Junior Johnson's side porch. Detroit has discovered these pockets of courage almost like a natural resource, in the form of Junior Johnson and about twenty other drivers. There is something exquisitely ironic about it. Detroit is now engaged in the highly sophisticated business of offering the illusion of Speed for Everyman—making their cars of 175 miles an hour on racetracks—by discovering and putting behind the wheel a breed of mountain men who are living vestiges of a degree of physical courage that became extinct in most other sections of the country by 1900."

If you have never read this article, check it out here:

http://www.esquire.com/features/articles/2003/031001_mfe_wolfe_1.html

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