In Washington: Missionary

By KURT ANDERSEN

There were recruiters in Walla Walla, Wash., more than a century ago, long before it was Walla Walla. Missionaries, determined to sell the local heathens on Christianity, were the first white settlers between the Snake River and the Blue Mountains. Their mission, however, was a mixed success: after eleven years, the Indians massacred them. Soon the U.S. Cavalry came, built a fort and won the peace.

Fort Walla Walla is no more. A monument has replaced the doomed mission. But in the Eastgate Plaza shopping mall, just catercorner from Walla Walla's only De Lorean Motor Car dealership, the Army has stationed its missionary. Sergeant First Class Patrick Yasenak is a recruiter, and he has done very well. In fact, the Pentagon brass have made it official that he is exemplary, perhaps the best among their 4,797 Regular Army proselytizers: a few weeks ago, in a ceremony at his Eastgate Plaza office on a sunny day as crisp as cold soda, Recruiter of the Year Pat Yasenak had a Meritorious Service Medal pinned to his chest.

Yasenak, 33, looks like the kind of neighborhood soldier Norman Rockwell painted. Although he is a former drill sergeant, as a recruiter he thinks it best not to insist or shove. Rather, his specialty is a kind of sober sweet talk about experience and cash bonuses and duty. Last year he persuaded 47 men and women to join the Army and Army Reserve, more than half again as many as his quota. "No," he corrects with deadpan good humor, "we don't have quotas. We have missions." Over four years, he figures, he has signed up enough people to fill an infantry company. A smart company too: five of Yasenak's privates were college graduates, and his recruits tend to score better on their military entrance exams than the Army demands. But his new medal and his prize, a week for two in Hawaii, are not simply rewards for high body counts. After all, recruiters elsewhere have signed up many more. Army review boards in three cities probed and quizzed him about everything from nerve gas to NATO politics, and they decided that he was a great guy, their apotheosis. "I was shocked," Yasenak says.

His manner most of the time tends toward the bashful, tensed but not combative. He cannot afford to come on too strong. Many of his 60 working hours a week have been spent on the telephone trying to engage strangers--mumbly, uncertain teen-agers--in serious conversations about their lives. He has called hundreds of high school seniors in his two-county district, most of them WaHi Blue Devils.

Sometimes they phone him, unsolicited. One morning late in March, his first call comes in before 9. "Army opportunities, Sergeant Yasenak. May I help you?" A young woman, looking for the number of the Navy recruiter. "Sure, sure, no problem." The next one, a bona fide Army prospect, is guided to the office by way of a teen-age landmark, Taco Time, about 150 yds. away. When Yasenak gets a local collect call, a regular thing, he looks knowing and amused: the Washington State Penitentiary is in Walla Walla, and inmates must reverse all phone charges. "The guy said, Take me, I'm yours!' " He will not.

Prospects pop up all over town. At Mr. Ed's drive-in, where Yasenak fills up his coffee jug late in the morning and then sits down for a warm, sweet butterhorn pastry, one of the waitresses, Julie Lynn Ratliff, makes an appointment to talk later.

Among the questions he asks, before getting down to more complicated business, are her weight (both he and she blush) and eye color. "Blue," she says. He looks up from his Army form for a fond moment. "I never argue with a lady about the color of her eyes." But it comes out that Ratliff, who is turning 19 as she sits in the recruitment office, did not finish high school. Female recruits must be graduates. "I have to send a lot of good people out the door because of that diploma," he tells her.

"He's nicer to the girls," teases Kevin Cooper after Ratliff has left Yasenak's office. Cooper, 18, enlisted in mid-March.

"Nicer? Oh, I probably am," concedes the sergeant. "But I'm not missioned to get a lot of women, so I don't go out of my way to get them." Yet his wife Linda swears that he eyes women on the street only to reckon their Army qualifications: a passing teen-ager looks to be about 5 ft. 4 in., 140 lbs.--a tad too chunky. "Guys, in essence, can be little butterballs," says Yasenak, who is perfectly lean.

"Army opportunities, Sergeant Yasenak. May I help you?" Just as he is leaving for lunch, a hot prospect rings up. With the phone cradled on one bony shoulder, Yasenak flips on a lamp and leans over his desk from the front, pulling out a file card as he says, "Sure, uh-huh--what time do you get home from work?" Within 90 seconds, tops, Yasenak has the youngster agreeing to take a 334-item aptitude test. "A little old gray-haired lady administers it," the sergeant says, "and you'll be asked questions about all kinds of strange things."

Yasenak acts like a charming older brother toward his signed-and-sealed recruits, by turns sardonic and heartfelt, especially with the ones who stay around town for some months between enlistment and basic training. They treat him like a favorite teacher, his office almost as a hangout. "He showed me all the sides to the Army, including the disadvantages," says Rhonda Clark, 18, a blond former cheerleader who will help operate a ground-to-air missile battery in Europe. She is just days away from basic training. "It's a little nerve-racking, like he said it would be. Going into a new society, I mean," she explains. "For most of basic, I won't see children or watch TV or hear music or even see animals." Cooper, however, does not confess any apprehension. He calls Yasenak "Yasenak," like a pal, and believes he knows what he's getting into. "He showed me videos of the different Army occupations I could take." A combat specialty does not appeal? "You can't really get a job, later in life, firing mortars."

Yasenak was a mortarman in Viet Nam. But, as he says, "not every mother wants her son to grow up to be John Wayne." Most of the sons and daughters want the Army to train them for civilian work. Some--but not all--seek adventure, which usually means a couple of years in West Germany or South Korea. "About half want to be stationed as close to home as possible," he says. "The other half don't care where they're sent as long as they get the hell out of Walla Walla."

Cooper's stepbrother and fellow enlistee, Jeff Dirks, puts himself in the restless half. He is a fan of wild, anarchic rock music. He says he "works with a lot of liberals" at Walla Walla's Left Bank restaurant, but he is an articulate believer in U.S. intervention abroad. With a score of 96% on the most important part of the aptitude test, he is also a great catch for Yasenak. "I don't spend time thinking about combat," says Dirks, who was in second grade when U.S. troops left Viet Nam. "But I'm ready to go." He glances at his recruiter. "I'm really interested in the situation in El Salvador."

Walla Walla (pop. 25,618) is a pretty insular place. "When I got here three years ago," Yasenak says, "I was told I wouldn't do well, that this was a Navy town." An I-told-them-so grin sneaks across his face. The Navy ("squids," he calls sailors) and the Air Force have offices on either side of his, both locked and empty one recent Monday. He denies any competitive ill will. "It doesn't amount to competition; in 1983 I took in more enlistments than all of the others combined." Yasenak despises big cities and their pace, but he has the salesman's instinct for hustling. Last year, he remembers, "I had a very qualified female from Columbia County, a farm girl. She said, 'I climb down off the combine at 10 p.m. Can you be at my house then?' " He was out at the wheat farm late that night. "Three weeks after that," he says, his tight grin again showing, "the girl enlisted."

He has done best in winter, when there is no work planting or harvesting. "I'm supposed to call a prospect back every three days, but if he tells me to bug off, it'll be months before I think of him again." Yasenak, pressed to "get production up," has continued in his chaplain-esque way instead. "I don't pull people off street corners." With three local colleges, the town has plenty of young people on corners. At Whitman College, there is an oddly generic poster in a dorm window--WRITE YOUR CONGRESSMAN ABOUT AN ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUE--that seems to typify Walla Walla's citizen earnestness. How a recruiter recruits, Yasenak explains, "all depends on the market you're working in." Patriotism is robust in Walla Walla, he says. But his young recruits are a little uncomfortable talking in such abstractions. "They may not say they're enlisting to serve their country. They talk around the question and mention the financial benefits," he says, reaching for the day's second pack of Marlboro Lights, "but I believe if we just gave them the chance to serve and nothing else, most of them would still enlist."

Starting this month, Yasenak will be working at his brigade headquarters near San Francisco. "I have mixed emotions," he says. He leaves proud that none of his volunteers have complained, including people the Army has booted out. His single major regret, it seems, is the gang of Palauans who got away. Palau is a Micronesian island administered by the U.S. The 20 attended college in town, and all of them were ready to join up. The Army said no. Remembering, Yasenak has a mischievous, rueful glint. He very much liked the idea of giving the Army 20 Palauan privates from Walla Walla, Wash. "That," he says, "might have deserved a medal." --By