From the Nov 21 Los Angeles Times:

….With his laptop, [Army recruiter] Hill shows recruits the Army’s sexy new recruiting DVD: high-adrenaline rock music in sync with soldiers rappelling down mountains and parachuting out of planes. Most recruits are more interested in Hill’s screensaver, a photo of him storming into Baghdad with the first U.S. troops. Nearly every recruit asks, and sometimes Hill tells them his stories, describes what it was like to sleep on the floor of Saddam Hussein’s palace.

…He doesn’t tell them what it was like to have his tank hit by a rocket-propelled grenade, and then to have the tank tumble into the Euphrates River. He doesn’t tell them about the shrapnel in both his legs, or the 38 friends he lost in battle ‚Äî including one who committed suicide, a man whose memory makes Hill’s eyes well with tears. He doesn’t tell them about the 30 rolls of film he took in Iraq, which he still can’t bring himself to develop. He doesn’t tell recruits about a day not long after he got home, when he was walking in the park with his 12-year-old son. A car backfired, and Hill dove into a ditch, where he lay cowering, suffering from tunnel vision and paralysis until his son phoned Hill’s wife and told her there was something wrong with Daddy.

“I’m glad he didn’t touch me,” Hill says. “Because I might’ve hurt him if he had.”

Hill keeps those things to himself, not because he’s afraid of scaring off recruits, but because he doesn’t yet feel comfortable sharing them with strangers.

There is something contradictory about striving to put fresh-faced men and women into the inferno of Iraq, and Hill acknowledges it, but only barely, because he lives inside the contradiction: He longs to return to Iraq. Most of the soldiers with whom he came home are soon being redeployed, and Hill wishes he were going with them. But the Army, he says, needs him here.

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