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Schaper's case is not the only evidence that the Army has been less than aggressive in getting to the bottom of these problems. Last month in upstate New York, a 30-year-old former Army policewoman left her 31-year-old recruiter husband after seven years of marriage and a four-year-old son. She says the reason was her husband's continued affair with a young woman he recruited last year when she was 18. "Recruiters' wives call it the 'officer and a gentleman syndrome,'" explains the estranged wife, who declined to be identified while the divorce is pending. "Those cute girls see that man in that uniform, and their hearts just go pitter-patter pitter-patter. They don't see a man who's got a marriage, a family and kids--they just see the uniform."
She says she learned that her husband had taken the girl to the movies with the free passes recruiters are given for their sign-up campaigns and that he had helped falsify the 18-year-old's enlistment papers to mask her asthma. A neighbor told the wife that shortly after she left town for a trial separation last month, the young girl moved into the recruiter's town house. The neighbor took pictures of the teenager entering and leaving the premises.
Alerted to the existence of the photos after the recruiter's wife made a formal complaint, Army investigators never asked for them. "We take such allegations very seriously, and we investigate them thoroughly," said Major Lester Felton, No. 2 officer in the Army's Syracuse, New York, recruiting headquarters. But he declined to say why he never interviewed the neighbor, never saw her pictures and never informed the wife of the results of the inquiry. "We're not required to," Felton says.
The recruiter's wife says she was told by the top enlisted man in the Syracuse office that "if I pursue this case, my husband will go to the Army's Leavenworth Penitentiary and I won't get any child support." The experience has left her bitter. "Yes, I'm angry at my husband," she says, "but I'm as angry at his commanders, because they didn't do anything."
The Schapers share her rage. "We were betrayed by the U.S. Army, and I will feel that way for the rest of my life," Arthur Schaper says. "These people are supposed to follow certain standards, instead of hiding behind their uniforms." Or using them as brass-buttoned date bait.