Coffeehouse recruiting

Brendan Buhler, Las Vegas Sun

Friday, Oct. 12, 2007 | 7:22 a.m.

The young man in the coffee shop struggled with his broken cell phone while help sat at the next table, where capable men drank iced mochas. Men in uniform. At first he thought they were in the Air Force.

No, they said. The Army. Then they fixed his phone.

The young man in shiny leather shoes and an untucked shirt looked at them in awe and started talking to them loudly, letting the whole coffee shop know he could have a casual conversation with Army guys in uniform. Yeah, he has guns, too. Loves 'em. Always gets the military magazines, too. He's totally ready to fight Them off when They invade.

Really, said the soldiers, much more quietly. Had he ever considered enlisting?

No. Oh no.

"You guys have to climb up that big ladder and stuff in training? I don't want to climb that ladder," he said. "If I wanted to climb that ladder, I would have done it when I was 19, and I didn't climb it when I was 19."

But, you know, he was really grateful about the phone.

The soldiers were recruiters, Staff Sgts. Joe Fletcher and Alfonso Flores, training and support specialists, respectively, with more than 30 years and a dozen countries worth of experience between them.

They had already been sitting in the coffee shop for an hour one day last week without much to show for it. But in a way, they weren't supposed to have anything to show for it.

Their assignment was public relations: Sit there, in the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf in Henderson, drink coffee and talk with anyone who wanted to talk with them.

Not that there were many people who talked to them. There was the guy with the phone, yes, and also a man who looked amazingly like the late shah of Iran, who looked up from the cream station to thank Fletcher and Flores for serving. Also, a woman nodded at them and said, "Hi."

The Army's 6th Recruiting Brigade has been testing an idea it calls "coffee with a soldier" in five cities, including Las Vegas. For the past four weekends, soldiers have gone to a Starbucks in Summerlin, a Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf near Summerlin on West Lake Mead Boulevard and the one in Henderson.

The shops were chosen for their high foot traffic and, with the shops consent, the events were advertised. The point, brigade spokesman Michael Goldstein says, isn't recruiting so much as putting a human face on the Army, giving people a chance to talk to soldiers and maybe calming the fears of friends and family of those thinking about enlisting.

But it would be understandable if recruitment was on the minds of Fletcher and Flores as they sipped iced drinks, particularly as support for the war in Iraq steadily erodes and families and other adults with influence over young people become less supportive of enlistment. The Army exceeded its goal of 80,000 recruits in fiscal year 2007, but did so in part by lowering its recruiting standards and offering large cash bonuses.

To Phil Patent, president and chief operating officer of Las Vegas Coffee Investors, which owns the local Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf franchises, civic spirit was behind the company's decision to allow the recruiters to use the shops for education sessions and recruitment potential. They view the stores as community centers, he said, adding, "it certainly was not a political statement."

For Fletcher and Flores, it was low-key work that, aside from the odd interruption, left plenty of time for coffee, chat, checking their cell phones and the occasional cigarette break.

Most people in the coffee shop noticed them and the tabletop advertisements for their presence, but said nothing to them or about them.

Well, except for one older man in a sailing cap and a flannel jacket who told a woman and her kids - Flores' wife, actually - that he didn't care for the war. But that was only after he'd already offered his advice on child rearing, "Children need to be trained, like dogs, nothing wrong with that."

Fletcher and Flores said the shop was busier on weekends, not so much on Friday afternoons. The questions fielded were generally about where they'd been, what they'd done and how long they'd been in the military. Also, both men said, it was nice to hear that people really do support soldiers.

"It's never anything about the war, about feelings for the president, the Congress," Fletcher said. "It's just, 'Thank you.'

"That never gets old."