Word: sergeant
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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...
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...
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...
...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...
Smith joined the Army in 1967 and climbed to staff sergeant, then in 1977 shifted to civilian status as a member of the Army Intelligence and Security Command, which tries to protect the Army against penetration by foreign spies. From October 1976 to July 1978, he was assigned as the case officer to handle a U.S. double agent code-named Royal Miter. The double agent posed as an informant for the KGB but was actually feeding Smith information on Soviet attempts to plant agents in jobs where they could acquire sensitive details about the U.S. Army. Smith met periodically with...