Latino Activists Seize on Texas Ruling to Boost Voting Power

By STEPHANIE SIMON

Latino activists are seeking to gain political clout by forcing electoral changes in communities nationwide, using a recent federal court decision in Irving, Texas, as a template.

The city of 200,000, a Dallas suburb, was ordered to reorganize its municipal election system to give Hispanics more voting power. Irving had been choosing its council members through citywide "at large" elections, but U.S. District Judge Jorge A. Solis ruled that the system diluted the influence of Irving's fast-growing minority population, which is concentrated in the southern half of the city.

He didn't impose a specific remedy but said any new system -- perhaps electing council members by district -- must allow "Hispanics to elect candidates of their own choosing."

The ruling offers a road map for activists who expect the 2010 census to show big growth in the Latino population, especially in Southern states such as Tennessee, Georgia and North Carolina. With the data in hand, they plan to press politicians to give Latino residents more influence when they redraw congressional and state legislative districts, and to force cities and towns to retool municipal elections -- or face lawsuits like the one in Irving.

Growth in the U.S. Hispanic Population

See annual changes from 2000-2008.

The coming census will allow Latinos to make their case to city and state power brokers "in a way they cannot ignore," said Arturo Vargas, executive director of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials.

The Irving case was brought by Manuel Benavidez, a Hispanic resident who argued that the city violated the 1965 Voting Rights Act by holding citywide elections instead of dividing the city into districts. Latinos make up nearly 42% of Irving's population, but only one Latino has won a city-council seat in the last 20 years (and, according to the court record, he didn't have a Spanish surname and didn't acknowledge his Hispanic heritage until after the election).

Irving, like other suburbs of Dallas, has churned with ethnic tension in recent years. City police have turned over more than 1,600 illegal immigrants suspected of various crimes to federal authorities for deportation, to the outrage of some in the Hispanic community. Last year, the Justice Department sent federal observers to monitor city elections to ensure compliance with the Voting Rights Act.

The city is negotiating with the Latino community to devise a new electoral system but also plans to appeal the ruling, Mayor Herbert Gears said. "We don't believe our system is illegal and we want to correct the record on that," he said.

Looking Back at the Latino Vote

• Latins in U.S. Seek Voting-Law Benefits, Claim Discrimination (July 11, 1975)
• Small City in Texas Is a Testing Ground Of Chicano Movement (Sept. 5, 1975)
• Plan to Simplify Voter Registration Is Slated by Carter (March 21, 1977)

Nationwide, Latinos and other minorities have been challenging at-large voting systems in court for three decades and have won scores of victories, including a landmark case in Dallas in 1990.

Afterward, Dallas was divided into 14 council districts, which has greatly increased minority representation -- but has also fueled discontent, with critics saying the council members run their districts like fiefdoms, with little concern for the greater good.

Mr. Gears says he supports diversity on the Irving city council but fears adopting a Dallas-style system will jeopardize the city's stability -- built on a strong business community and low tax rate -- by "creating parochialism and opportunities for corruption and shenanigans."

Latino advocates respond that they deserve a voice in policy making and will insist on districts and election rules that make that possible.

"To take a slogan from the American revolutionaries, taxation without representation is tyranny," said Hector M. Flores, past president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, a Latino advocacy group.

The Hispanic population in the U.S. is now estimated at 47 million and could top 50 million in the census, which aims to count everyone living in the country, including illegal immigrants.

Census directors are making an all-out effort to reach Hispanics and other groups considered hard to count because of language and cultural barriers. For the first time, the census will send a bilingual questionnaire to 13 million Spanish-speaking homes. Telemundo is even integrating census-related plot twists into its Spanish-language soap operas.

But there is some division in the Hispanic community. The Rev. Miguel Rivera, director of the National Coalition of Latino Clergy and Christian Leaders, has been urging undocumented residents to boycott the census. The boycott, he says, is designed to pressure Congress into enacting reform that will put illegal immigrants on a path to citizenship.

Census population figures govern distribution of more than $400 billion in federal funding for scores of programs.

The census also spurs political redistricting at the federal, state and local levels. This happens automatically every 10 years as the new data come out. This year, however, Latinos hope to make race and ethnicity a crucial part of the conversation, with the Irving court decision as Exhibit A.

Bill Brewer, the attorney who took Irving's political system to court, said his "phone has been ringing off the hook" since the July 15 ruling with calls from activists in other cities seeking advice on bringing similar cases.

"After the census we can expect tons of legal challenges, because in many ways it's a spoils system," said Ellen Katz, a law professor at the University of Michigan who studies voting rights. "Everyone is grabbing."

Write to Stephanie Simon at stephanie.simon@wsj.com

Off the Charts - Index of Leading Indicators Is Signaling the Recession’s End

By FLOYD NORRIS

THE American recession appears to be nearing an end, but only after it has become the deepest downturn in more than half a century.

The index of leading indicators, which signals turning points in the economy, is rising at a rate that has accurately indicated the end of every recession since the index began to be compiled in 1959.

The index was reported this week to have risen for the third consecutive month in June, and to have risen at a 12.8 percent annual rate over those three months. Such a rise, pointed out Harm Bandholz, an economist with UniCredit Group, “has always marked the end of the contraction.”

Mr. Bandholz said he expected that the National Bureau of Economic Research, the official arbiter of American economic cycles, would eventually conclude that the recession bottomed out in August or September of this year.

If that proves to be accurate, the recession that began in December 2007 will have lasted 21 or 22 months, making it the longest downturn since the Great Depression.

There are caveats to the forecast, of course. Somewhat illogically, the index of leading indicators is subject to revision in coming months, which could make the recent gain seem smaller and not necessarily indicative of an approaching recovery.

Only seven of the 1o leading indicators for June have been reported by the government, while the other three were estimated by the Conference Board, an independent research group that compiles the indicators. Some of the seven indicators that have been reported may be revised.

As can be seen in the accompanying charts, six of the seven recessions since 1960 either ended in the month the indicator first showed a 12 percent annualized gain, or had ended a month or two before the index did so.

The exception was the 1990-’91 recession, which was followed by one of the slowest recoveries ever. The official end of the recession was in March 1991, but the recovery was so tepid that it was not until December 1992 that the economic research bureau made that call. As it happened, December was the same month the indicator first showed such a strong three-month rise.

An end to recession is not, of course, the same thing as the beginning of a boom. The indicator “has an unblemished record on calling the turning point,” said another economist, Robert J. Barbera of ITG, “but it is not a particularly good guide to the power of the upturn.”

Indeed, one of the strongest moves in the leading indicators came at the end of the brief 1980 recession, as credit controls were removed. But the economy soon fell into another, longer recession.

Mr. Bandholz thinks we may get a “W” recovery, in which early gains are followed by weaker figures. “We do not expect this recovery to be strong and self-sustaining,” he said. “What is lacking is support from consumer spending.”

During the most recent three months, the strongest indicators have been the financial ones. The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index has risen while the gap has widened between long-term and short-term interest rates. The indicators index was also helped by an increase in consumer expectations and a slowing in deliveries by suppliers. (Slower deliveries are assumed to be caused by rising orders, although such a change could indicate the suppliers simply laid off too many workers.)

Two of the 10 indicators — the money supply and new orders for consumer goods — have shown declines.

Another measure compiled by the Conference Board, the index of coincident indicators, has fallen for eight consecutive months, and dropped in 17 of the last 19 months. That indicator is often used by the economic research bureau in dating decisions, and its failure to stabilize is a reason that Mr. Bandholz says he thinks the downturn is not yet over.

The index of coincident indicators has fallen 6.4 percent from the peak it reached in November 2007, making this the deepest recession since 1960. Before this cycle, its steepest decline was a 5.6 percent slide during the 1973-’75 downturn.

Floyd Norris’s blog on finance and economics is at nytimes.com/norris.

In Deal, N.J., Sephardic Jews Developed a Shore Haven

By KAREEM FAHIM

A century ago, Deal, a seaside resort carved from New Jersey farmland, was known as a playground for tycoons and magnates like Isidor Straus and Benjamin Guggenheim and celebrities who visited, including Mark Twain. At lavish “summer cottages,” garden parties raised money for the favorite charities of residents, predominantly Irish Catholics and Ashkenazic Jews who summered there.

By the 1940s, some of the shine had worn off, and the fabulously rich were replaced by the merely wealthy. In the late 1960s, Sephardic Jews who lived in Brooklyn and spent summers in nearby Bradley Beach began buying land in Deal; by 1973, more than 100 families had bought property in the town. By the mid-1990s, thousands of Sephardic Jews were flocking to the town during the summers, and today, local historians estimate, they make up 80 percent of the population.

That influx has led to occasional tensions with people outside their insular community. The Sephardim in Deal, many of whom call themselves Syrian Jews, include Solomon Dwek, the failed real estate mogul who is believed to have been the government informant who helped bring charges against New Jersey politicians and rabbis in a corruption and money laundering scandal this week. Before this case, Mr. Dwek was a central figure in a community built quickly and from scratch by the Syrian Jews in Deal and nearby towns.

Today, in a town of 1,000 people that swells to many times that size in the summer, there are synagogues and yeshivas, Jewish social service agencies and a main street lined with kosher delis and Syrian Jewish grocers.

Thirty-five years ago, those institutions and businesses hardly existed, said Poopa Dweck, a longtime resident and the author of a cookbook on Syrian Jewish cuisine. Ms. Dweck, who is not related to Mr. Dwek, was part of what she called a “pioneering group” that moved from Brooklyn to Deal not to summer, but to live.

“We loved the life here,” she said. “We were able to maintain our Orthodox Jewish religion and bring up our children. It was beautiful.”

Quickly, she and the other new arrivals started building the structures of their community. “We didn’t even wait,” she said, describing how she helped found the Sephardic Women’s Organization of the Jersey Shore. “We had the first meeting in my living room.”

Dr. Richard G. Fernicola, a physician and local historian, said the first Sephardic Jew in the area might well have been Benjamin N. Cardozo, the Supreme Court justice, who had a house in neighboring Allenhurst in the 1930s. The first Syrian Jewish family in Deal arrived in 1939, moving into a home that the singer Enrico Caruso had once regularly visited, said Jim Foley, the town’s historian.

Fifty years later, when Sephardic Jews started moving to Deal in large numbers, there were occasional fights for control. In the mid-1990s, a dispute over a plan to build a synagogue on the site of a house on Main Street underscored growing divisions between the Sephardim and other residents, including other Jews. Today, some of those strains persist: in interviews, some non-Jewish residents professed resentment of the Sephardim, largely because of the crowds that descend on Deal every summer.

Generally, however, residents interact peacefully, many mingling at the Deal Casino, a historic beach club that only recently started allowing out-of-towners to become members. Much of the Sephardic summer social scene takes place in huge houses set on gigantic lawns where Victorians and Queen Annes once stood.

A generation still speaks Arabic, though some of the earliest Sephardic settlers have moved away, tired of the commute back to Brooklyn.

Some of their children have been shaped by the town’s seaside charms. Henry Garfield, 19, a Syrian Jew who called himself “somewhat religious,” ate a slice of pizza Friday afternoon along Norwood Avenue and seemed not to notice the tension that has developed in Deal. This might as well have been Malibu.

“It’s a very laid-back atmosphere,” he said. “Everyone is chilled out. We surf all day.”

Ann Farmer contributed reporting.

In Recession, Optimistic College Graduates Turn Down Jobs

By STEVE FRIESS

It has been two months since Diana Parsons graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a liberal arts degree that cost about $100,000, and she has still not found a full-time job. She has returned to Milwaukee, where she is living with her parents and occasionally waiting tables at a restaurant owned by a friend of her mother.

Another hard-luck case in a miserable economy? Not exactly. Ms. Parsons, 21, is jobless by choice. She turned down one $23,000-a-year offer to become a research assistant at a magazine because she did not want to move to Chicago and another because she did not want to work nights.

“I’m not really worried,” she said. “When the right thing comes along, I’ll know it.”

Ms. Parsons is far from the only member of the class of 2009 who is picky when it comes to employers. Job recruiters may be bypassing university campuses in droves and the unemployment rate may be at its highest point in decades, but college career advisers are noticing that many recent graduates do not seem to comprehend the challenging economic world they have just entered.

“I don’t think the students understand, I really don’t, but come September, October, when they still don’t have jobs, they’re going to be panicky,” said Clarice Wilsey, a career counselor at the University of Oregon, where just 55 employers came to a recent job fair, down from nearly 90 the year before.

Ms. Wilsey and others in her field said part of the problem stemmed from the fact that the latest graduates had spent most of their college years in a booming economy that went suddenly cold in their final academic year.

Until recently, students like Ms. Parsons had every reason to expect a bounty of high-paying career opportunities, said Manny Contomanolis, president of the National Association of Colleges and Employers, an organization for career counselors that met last month in Las Vegas to ponder how to help themselves and their students cope with the souring economy.

“If you went back to September and October, most campuses were reporting record recruiting activity,” Mr. Contomanolis said. “It was really in the November time frame that things really started manifesting themselves. A lot of students haven’t gone through a full recruiting cycle yet.”

Some students, like Ms. Parsons, say they can afford to hold out a while. So does Robert Sherman, a finance major at Syracuse University who rejected a $50,000-a-year job as head of technology for a consulting company because he did not get a good vibe from his potential bosses. Instead, he said, he is “doing odd jobs to support myself, and I’m O.K. with that” while he tries to get two technology companies of his own off the ground.

“I’m definitely seeing a lot of the older generation saying, ‘Oh, it’s so awful,’ but my generation isn’t getting as depressed and uptight about it,” said Mr. Sherman, who admitted he and his parents had deliberated for a week before he turned down the offer. “We’re working within the bounds of the situation. The economy will rebound.”

Some praise that approach. Steven Rothberg, founder of the online job board CollegeRecruiter.com, noted that most seniors were not compelled by mortgages or other expenses to grab just any position at whatever salary is offered. To do so could haunt them later when the economy improves, he said.

“A lot of times, the offer is simply not acceptable to them, the compensation is far beneath where it should be, the job does not line up with their career interest,” Mr. Rothberg said. “If they take it, they’re going to be stuck with that career path and compensation level for years to come.”

The phenomenon of students’ turning down offers despite the economic conditions is so pervasive that the president of the University of Connecticut, Michael J. Hogan, addressed it in his commencement speech in May.

“My first word of advice is this: Say yes,” Mr. Hogan urged the graduates when it came to prospective employers. “In fact, say yes as often as you can. Saying yes begins things. Saying yes is how things grow. Saying yes leads to new experiences, and new experiences will lead you to knowledge and wisdom. Yes is for young people, and an attitude of yes is how you will be able to go forward in these uncertain times.”

That is how Anthony Scruggs, 23, sees it, too. Mr. Scruggs recently graduated from the University of Arkansas and is moving home to Houston to take a $30,000-a-year job as a self-described “paper pusher” with a real estate development firm, the only offer he received in seven months of searching.

“It kind of took me by surprise because you just assume when you’re in college that when you graduate you’re going to get the job, and here I am,” Mr. Scruggs said. “I’m 23 years old, and I’m going to move back in with my parents. I kind of had to rearrange the game plan for sure.”

Career counselors like Ms. Wilsey wish more students saw it that way. She is bracing for a busy summer as new graduates finally face up to the tough market and turn to her for help.

“There are fewer successes, but I have to keep a positive attitude because if I don’t, then I’ll get discouraged, and then that’ll discourage the students,” Ms. Wilsey said. “I’ve got to say: ‘Here’s what you have to do, here’s how I can support you — yeah, it’s going to be tough, but I’m going to support you.’ ”

Karzai Vows More Control Over Foreign Troops

By CARLOTTA GALL

KABUL, Afghanistan — President Hamid Karzai said Friday that if he was re-elected president in August he would negotiate a new agreement with foreign nations deploying troops in Afghanistan, to regulate their status and their behavior.

Speaking to 3,000 supporters at a rally in Kabul, Mr. Karzai also said that his top priority was to bring about peace and that he would push ahead with negotiations with the Taliban and other opposition groups, and would devote more effort to law and order and to governance.

His comments were intended to appeal to voters by addressing Afghan complaints about civilian casualties, raids on private homes and the detention of people without charges.

They came as two United States soldiers were killed in an explosion in southern Afghanistan on Friday, adding to the more than 30 American soldiers killed in July, the deadliest month for Americans in Afghanistan. Thousands of Marines have been deployed in the south in an attempt to curb the Taliban insurgency enough to allow elections on Aug. 20.

Visiting the central province of Ghazni on Friday, the United States special envoy for the region, Richard C. Holbrooke, seemed to acknowledge worries that the country’s continuing lack of security would make the voting difficult, as well as complaints from Mr. Karzai’s challengers over the fairness of the campaign.

“Elections here will be imperfect,” Mr. Holbrooke said, according to The Associated Press. “But I am an American who lived through an imperfect election eight years ago. I am not going to hold Afghanistan to standards which even the United States does not achieve.

“What we want is an election that reflects the legitimate will of the Afghan people, and whoever wins, the international community will support,” he said.

Mr. Karzai has done little campaigning so far and pulled out of a television debate on Thursday, saying that he had not yet announced his platform.

But on Friday he addressed the country’s most pressing issues, the continuing fighting and the actions of foreign troops, which have affected his popularity.

“In this fight against terrorism we want our home to be safe, not to be insecure,” he told the gathering. “Our law should be respected, our religion and our culture should be respected.

“It should be known who is the owner of the house and who is the guest,” he said. “We want to legitimize their presence.”

He spoke at the rally after another candidate, Muhammad Said Hashimi, leader of the Harakat-e-Inqilabi Islami party, announced that he was withdrawing from the presidential race in favor of Mr. Karzai. Many of the early members of the Taliban movement were from the party, and some of those gathered spoke with bitterness about the continuing war and about the actions of the foreign forces in Afghanistan. One man said foreign troops should leave and Mr. Karzai should then make peace with the Taliban.

Mr. Karzai said he had tried hard to reach agreements with foreign forces in Afghanistan. “We have seen some steps, but we want to go further,” he said. He promised that any solution would be worked out with tribal and religious leaders in a loya jirga, or grand tribal council.

He also said that he would bring members of the Taliban and Hesbe Islami, another opposition group, to peace negotiations and include them in a tribal council. The United States and the rest of the international community has resisted such plans but were now more supportive of the idea, he said.

Saudi Arabia has agreed to oversee negotiations with the Taliban, and one of the first moves would be to hold a second peace gathering between Afghan and Pakistani tribal elders, he said.

As Trees Fall in the Amazon, Fears That Tribes Won’t Be Heard

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

XINGU NATIONAL PARK, Brazil — As the naked, painted young men of the Kamayurá tribe prepare for the ritualized war games of a festival, they end their haunting fireside chant with a blowing sound — “whoosh, whoosh” — a symbolic attempt to eliminate the scent of fish so they will not be detected by enemies. For centuries, fish from jungle lakes and rivers have been a staple of the Kamayurá diet, the tribe’s primary source of protein.

But fish smells are not a problem for the warriors anymore. Deforestation and, some scientists contend, global climate change are making the Amazon region drier and hotter, decimating fish stocks in this area and imperiling the Kamayurá’s very existence. Like other small indigenous cultures around the world with little money or capacity to move, they are struggling to adapt to the changes.

“Us old monkeys can take the hunger, but the little ones suffer — they’re always asking for fish,” said Kotok, the tribe’s chief, who stood in front of a hut containing the tribe’s sacred flutes on a recent evening. He wore a white T-shirt over the tribe’s traditional dress, which is basically nothing.

Chief Kotok, who like all of the Kamayurá people goes by only one name, said that men can now fish all night without a bite in streams where fish used to be abundant; they safely swim in lakes previously teeming with piranhas.

Responsible for 3 wives, 24 children and hundreds of other tribe members, he said his once-idyllic existence had turned into a kind of bad dream.

“I’m stressed and anxious — this has all changed so quickly, and life has become very hard,” he said in Portuguese, speaking through an interpreter. “As a chief, I have to have vision and look down the road, but I don’t know what will happen to my children and grandchildren.”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that up to 30 percent of animals and plants face an increased risk of extinction if global temperatures rise 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) in coming decades. But anthropologists also fear a wave of cultural extinction for dozens of small indigenous groups — the loss of their traditions, their arts, their languages.

“In some places, people will have to move to preserve their culture,” said Gonzalo Oviedo, a senior adviser on social policy at the International Union for Conservation of Nature in Gland, Switzerland. “But some of those that are small and marginal will assimilate and disappear.”

To make do without fish, Kamayurá children are eating ants on their traditional spongy flatbread, made from tropical cassava flour. “There aren’t as many around because the kids have eaten them,” Chief Kotok said of the ants. Sometimes members of the tribe kill monkeys for their meat, but, the chief said, “You have to eat 30 monkeys to fill your stomach.”

Living deep in the forest with no transportation and little money, he noted, “We don’t have a way to go to the grocery store for rice and beans to supplement what is missing.”

Tacuma, the tribe’s wizened senior shaman, said that the only threat he could remember rivaling climate change was a measles virus that arrived deep in the Amazon in 1954, killing more than 90 percent of the Kamayurá.

Cultures threatened by climate change span the globe. They include rainforest residents like the Kamayurá who face dwindling food supplies; remote Arctic communities where the only roads were frozen rivers that are now flowing most of the year; and residents of low-lying islands whose land is threatened by rising seas.

Many indigenous people depend intimately on the cycles of nature and have had to adapt to climate variations — a season of drought, for example, or a hurricane that kills animals.

But worldwide, the change is large, rapid and inexorable, heading in only one direction: warmer. Eskimo settlements like Kivalina and Shishmaref in Alaska are “literally being washed away,” said Thomas Thornton, an anthropologist who studies the region, because the sea ice that long protected their shores is melting and the seas around are rising. Without that hard ice, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to hunt for seals, a mainstay of the traditional diet.

Some Eskimo groups are suing polluters and developed nations, demanding compensation and help with adapting.

“As they see it, they didn’t cause the problem, and their lifestyle is being threatened by pollution from industrial nations,” said Dr. Thornton, who is a researcher at the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford. “The message is that this is about people, not just about polar bears and wildlife.”

At climate negotiations in December in Poznan, Poland, the United Nations created an “adaptation fund” through which rich nations could in theory help poor nations adjust to climate change. But some of the money was expected to come from voluntary contributions, and there have been none so far, said Yvo De Boer, the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. “It would help if rich countries could make financial commitments,” he said.

Throughout history, the traditional final response for indigenous cultures threatened by untenable climate conditions or political strife was to move. But today, moving is often impossible. Land surrounding tribes is now usually occupied by an expanding global population, and once-nomadic groups have often settled down, building homes and schools and even declaring statehood.

The Kamayurá live in the middle of Xingu National Park, a vast territory that was once deep in the Amazon but is now surrounded by farms and ranches.

About 5,000 square miles of Amazon forest are being cut down annually in recent years, according to the Brazilian government. And with far less foliage, there is less moisture in the regional water cycle, lending unpredictability to seasonal rains and leaving the climate drier and hotter.

That has upended the cycles of nature that long regulated Kamayurá life. They wake with the sun and have no set meals, eating whenever they are hungry.

Fish stocks began to dwindle in the 1990s and “have just collapsed” since 2006, said Chief Kotok, who is considering the possibility of fish farming, in which fish would be fed in a penned area of a lake. With hotter temperatures as well as less rain and humidity in the region, water levels in rivers are extremely low. Fish cannot get to their spawning grounds.

Last year, for the first time, the beach on the lake that abuts the village was not covered by water in the rainy season, rendering useless the tribe’s method of catching turtles by putting food in holes that would fill up, luring the animals.

The tribe’s agriculture has suffered, too. For centuries, the Kamayurá planted their summer crops when a certain star appeared on the horizon. “When it appeared, everyone celebrated because it was the sign to start planting cassava since the rain and wind would come,” Chief Kotok recalled. But starting seven or eight seasons ago, the star’s appearance was no longer followed by rain, an ominous divergence, forcing the tribe to adjust its schedule.

It has been an ever-shifting game of trial and error since. Last year, families had to plant their cassava four times — it died in September, October and November because there was not enough moisture in the ground. It was not until December that the planting took. The corn also failed, said Mapulu, the chief’s sister. “It sprouted and withered away,” she said.

A specialist in medicinal plants, Ms. Mapulu said that a root she used to treat diarrhea and other ailments had become nearly impossible to find because the forest flora had changed. The grass they use to bound together the essential beams of their huts has also become difficult to find.

But perhaps the Kamayurá’s greatest fear are the new summer forest fires. Once too moist to ignite, the forest here is now flammable because of the drier weather. In 2007, Xingu National Park burned for the first time, and thousands of acres were destroyed.

“The whole Xingu was burning — it stung our lungs and our eyes,” Chief Kotok said. “We had nowhere to escape. We suffered along with the animals.”

The Making of an Agent

By Laura Blumenfeld
Sunday, July 26, 2009

LESSON ONE: Get Ready To Die

The teacher walks into the mat room.

"Good morning, Mr. Mixon," the students say in unison.

"Cut that [expletive] out. Don't act like you give a crap about my morning."

Steve Mixon smiles, or maybe it's a snarl. Before he became an instructor at the Secret Service training camp outside Washington, Mixon served as a team leader on President George W. Bush's Counter Assault Team.

"Everyone's going to leave today in some degree of pain," Mixon tells the special agent trainees.

The 24 recruits, dressed in black combat pants and jackets, stiffen into four rows, jingling handcuffs. Scott Swantner clenches his jaw. Krista Bradford rubs raw knuckles. One trainee, who broke a rib, is keeping it a secret, fearing he'll be discharged.

"Everything is in play here, guys. Everything you learned from Day One," Mixon tells them in a basement that muffles rifle blasts. "Assailant control. Guillotine chokeholds."

For the members of Special Agent Training Class No. 283, this is finals time. They have been cramming here for months, since days after the election of Barack Obama, hoping to join the men and women charged with protecting the president.

Not all of them will make it.

If they fail, they will leave humiliated. If they pass, they'll become members of an elite, stealthy service during a period of exceptional pressures. At their annual party, Ralph Basham, the former director, greeted his replacement: "I'm the happiest guy in Washington because I'm not the director of the Secret Service anymore."

With the rise of Islamic terrorism, the agency's roster of protectees has grown. With the election of the first African American president, public scrutiny has exploded. Presidents typically receive 3,000 threats a year, says a Secret Service expert. Obama is outpacing the average.

"We understand the historic significance," says the current director, Mark Sullivan. "If we make a mistake, it's going to be devastating for the country. We're not going to let the country down."

That promise depends in large part on what happens inside this 493-acre compound. Unmarked, behind barbed wire and hidden in the woods, the James J. Rowley Training Center sits so close to the Baltimore-Washington Parkway that its inhabitants -- in chemical weapons suits, suicide bomber vests or white robes while role-playing the pope -- can hear the commuter traffic's oblivious swish.

Obama's security detail drills here two weeks out of every eight. The vice president's detail, the first lady's, the agents who protect foreign dignitaries and former presidents, as well as the tactical units -- the counter snipers posted on the White House roof, and the Emergency Response Team, which stops incursions into the White House grounds--also drill here.

Overseeing them are instructors like Mixon, who wears a size 52 suit jacket, whose T-shirt says "Fighting Solves Everything," and whose 2-year-old son knows how to do a one-man takedown. This morning Mixon, 40, is testing control tactics, or ground-fighting.

Forty minutes into the wristlocks and head stuns, the trainees' necks burn with scratches. Dan Batt is supposed to disarm a classmate but accidentally knees him in the groin.

"Right in the junk!" Mixon laughs.

Dan wants to apologize for his clumsiness -- his infant daughter is teething and kept him up half the night -- but the men keep wrestling, too afraid to stop. A student in the class ahead of them flunked out the week before graduation for buckling during push-ups.

"Next!" Mixon calls.

Scott Swantner ten-huts, shoulders back, towering over the others. A former rifle platoon commander with the Marine Corps, Scott lost three fingers in Iraq. In Beltsville, he attended remedial control tactics with Krista Bradford every Friday before sunrise.

"Yes, sir!" Scott says cheerlessly. For the last scenario of their four-hour exam, the mat room becomes a heavy metal bar. Red and blue lights flash in the dark. The rock band Disturbed blares from speakers.

Their instructions: "Patty McGuire has made threats against POTUS [President of the United States] and you have an arrest warrant . . . An informant told you Patty is in the bar."

In pairs, the trainees open the door.

"Why don't you [expletive] off and die?" shrieks Disturbed. The instructors pounce with sticks and training knives. They slam the trainees into the wall. They rip at their hair. One trainee shatters his instructor's cheekbone. But another freezes, goes into "brain vapor-lock," as his partner is repeatedly shot.

Krista and her partner wait outside for their turn. "If they clench their fists," Krista strategizes, "I'll pull out my baton."

Krista is 4 feet 11 inches. She moves like a gymnast, nimbly, with concentrated grace. She has lively green eyes, fine features and a buoyant ponytail. She cheers Scott, Dan and the others between drills with Dove chocolates. A social worker, she also used to work at Disney World, dressing up as cartoon characters.

"She was Minnie Mouse, for God sakes," Mixon grumbles.

Within seconds of entering the mat-room bar, Krista's partner, an Army National Guardsman who earned a Bronze Star, is knocked to the ground. A role-player drags Krista across the floor by the cuff of her pants. He straddles Krista and punches her.

"Get off me!" Krista screams.

"Get ready to die!" the music screams.

"Keep fighting!" Mixon screams.

The role-player twists Krista's arms around her neck and pulls, choking her with her own hands. She gags. Her nose is bleeding. Her cheek is bleeding. Blood blisters on her legs, bruised by training bullets while chasing assassins through the woods, trickle and ooze.

On her back, in the dark, Krista watches the role-player's face swirl into darker shades of gray. She is losing consciousness. Mixon yells, "Do something!"

In the Secret Service, the saying goes, "You never quit. You always win. Everything else is negotiable."

Krista lifts her head an inch, level with her assailant's hand. She opens her mouth.

"Here it comes! Get ready to die!" the music screams.

Krista grinds her teeth into the meat of his palm.

He releases her, and Krista and her partner stagger out of the room. Their final exam is over. A drop of sweat dangles from the tip of her partner's nose. He looks at Krista, gasping:

"Did we pass?"

LESSON TWO (Nine Months Earlier): Do Whatever It Takes

Business was slow at the Sherwin-Williams paint store. Dan Batt, a sales associate, sat cataloguing colors: Salute red, Nantucket Dune.

Dan is 24, the second-oldest of nine home-schooled children, a quiet man with sloping shoulders, fair skin and pure black hair. He has a face that often gets skipped over in a crowd, a modest chin and nice-boy eyes.

Dan smiled mildly as a teenager tramped into the store.

"But I want it, Dad!" A blast of cold Buffalo air blew in with the girl and her father.

She wanted to paint her bedroom Lime Rickey green. It was, Dan thought, a hideous color.

"This is a very, uh, fun color," Dan later recalled saying.

Dan always deferred to the customer. His wife was seven months pregnant, and they needed the paycheck.

"Yes, he said to everyone. "Yes, yes, yes."

No, this wasn't the career he'd wanted. His mother, who read her Bible, had taught him about good and bad, and he dreamed -- never mind that he is shy -- of fighting for good. When Dan's cellphone rang later at the store, "Restricted Number," he felt something lurch inside his chest. Maybe his wife was having early contractions.

Or maybe, improbably, it was the other call, the one that meant Dan had mixed his last Lime Rickey.

Twelve hundred miles to the south in New Orleans, Krista Bradford, 32, was driving her car. She almost didn't answer when her call came.

Krista had just assessed a 4-year-old autistic girl. She told the girl's mother to buy crayons and blocks, she later recalled. As a social worker, Krista was tired of rappelling into lives after they'd crumbled. She wanted to try something preemptive, such as law enforcement.

Krista herself had experienced the limits of social services. She was given up at birth in an adoption that failed, and later moved into an adolescent group house where she reached for a serving bowl and was stabbed in the hand with a fork.

"I'll be a good protector," Krista believed. "I know how important it is to be protected."

The application process took nine months, complicated by a background check that tracked three different childhood last names, and a job history that included dressing up as Jiminy Cricket and Dopey.

Eventually one afternoon, her cellphone flashed: "Withheld." "Hello?" Krista said, thinking: I'll do whatever it takes.

Four states away, in an Oakland, Calif., shipyard, Scott Swantner, 30, watched a freighter offload a container. An Iraq war veteran, he was two weeks into a job at the Pacific Maritime Association. He had the air of a man whose penalty kick had clunked off a goal post.

Earlier in the year, Scott had spent a month filling out the 34-page Secret Service application. He had flown from his Berlin Marine post to California to renew his driver's license, which had been shredded in Nasiriyah by a rocket-propelled grenade. He had passed the written test, the drug test, the vision test, the hearing test, the initial interview, the panel interview, the home interview, and the "worst experience of my life," the polygraph, which elicited every foible and shame.

Tall and broad, Scott had played right guard for the Naval Academy football team. He has thick, brown hair, buzz cut for the military. His features project success. Scott's father, a termite inspector, constantly told his winning boy, "Don't screw up."

Yet, somehow Scott had. He had fallen short on the Secret Service's physical exam, he guessed, "because of my hand." As a Marine, Scott had hoped to emulate his grandfather's World War II service in the Pacific. Instead, in Iraq, Scott lost two soldiers in his platoon -- "You feel you let them down. It'll always stick with you" -- and, later, part of his left hand.

Things that had come easily for Scott were now doubted. Secret Service screeners questioned Scott's commander: "He says he can physically do this, but can he?" Can he still shoot?

Eventually, Scott was told they had found a better-qualified applicant. Scott took the shipyard job. He was talking to a longshoreman when his cellphone beeped: "Unknown."

The voice sounded friendly. "Hey, it's Charlie White." From the San Francisco Field Office. "We want to offer you -- "

The Secret Service had never accepted anyone with his disability before but had reconsidered. They were going to give Scott a try.

The acceptance calls rang out in 24 corners of the country. In Plant City, Fla., a YMCA director felt his phone vibrate during a board meeting debating zumba dance classes. In Tulsa, a police officer exhausted from jumping fences while chasing drug dealers till 2 a.m. snapped open his phone. In Baltimore, a Home Depot manager folded his orange apron then and there in Hardwood Flooring.

Their family and friends sometimes found the news confusing: "So you're going to be a spy?" "Do you change your name?" "Will the president talk to you directly through that plastic thing in your ear?"

The new recruits -- 21 men and three women, 25 to 32 years old -- assembled in Glynco, Ga., for 12 weeks of basic federal law-enforcement training. Then they moved to a Residence Inn in Maryland. They unpacked creatine bodybuilding powder and Aveda Comforting Tea, boxing DVDs and voodoo dolls.

On their first morning, the recruits ride in government vans to the classified complex. A guard in a booth raises the gate. They cross over, into a mission called for by Congress following the 1901 assassination of President William McKinley. They are admitted onto the grounds and into the secrets of the Service.

"We train unlike any other federal agency," says A.T. Smith, an assistant director, who stands by while the trainees stencil their names on their T-shirts. "We train to the edge, and then we lean over."

The center's drills are increasingly scenario-based, says Smith, who had served as Hillary Clinton's detail leader. "For years, our training was based on the lone gunman and the long-range rifle. Now it's automatic weapons, multiple explosions as a diversion to a secondary attack." An intelligence PowerPoint presentation on "The Emerging Threat" flashes from the old-style assassin, Squeaky Fromme, to chanting Islamic fanatics. Threat experts have created a new Obama-era prototype, a white supremacist who calls Obama "a mud person" and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel, a Jew, "the Antichrist."

New hazards have prompted a new emphasis in training -- a kind of extreme, lethal improv -- using scenarios that are dynamic and demand responses that run counter to typical human behavior. Smith says, "Our goal is to make it instinct."

To alter reflexes, to rewire the "muscle memory" of recruits, they built 37 buildings, including fake colonial-style houses and a mock airport. Facades line the main street: a cafe, a tattoo parlor and a hardware store.

"It's like a small town," Smith explains.

Except that all day and many nights, explosions rock presidential candidates at the pizzeria. The dogs, on command, break from their leashes and maul shrieking men. Gunmen fire from the All Saints Church at the president's wife. Marine One, the president's helicopter, crashes in the swimming pool, and fleeing black Suburbans climb the curbs at 45 mph. Behind every mailbox, lamppost and flowering bush, a killer possibly squats, racking his AK. Or, he might spray a vial of sarin.

Smith smiles: "I never said it was a nice town. I said it was a small town."

LESSON THREE: Be Obsessive-Compulsive

"Your head's going to spin and you feel like you're going to throw up," says Mixon. "Don't do it in my mat room."

This is Mixon's welcome speech to SATC No. 283 on its first day. "Sometimes trainees pass out in the bathroom, so develop a buddy system among yourselves."

Krista finds a buddy -- the other woman who can't do a pull-up. Dan's buddy is the Tulsa cop who classmates swear can bench-press a Honda. Scott scans the room with the dark-browed scowl of an American eagle, privately amazed that he is even here.

Mixon distributes their "Use of Force" chart, which graphs the amount of force to use on a subject, depending on their level of menace. The trainees' eyes widen at its complexity.

"Details! Think details!" Mixon says. He walks around the room, his chest forward, like a piece of earth-moving equipment. "What is your job? The man in the most powerful office in the world -- you're standing next to him with a loaded gun."

Success, Mixon says, rests on attention to detail.

"Use the force necessary. You can hit them with your car, stab them with a big pin," Mixon says. "We in the Secret Service are super Type-A personalities, people who want to take control and win at all costs." But within legal limits, Mixon warns. "Don't get that little extra shot in there, that extra revenge . . . I want to make sure if I'm going through a door with you, that I can trust you. If not, I'm not going to let you take that walk on graduation day."

All day, instructors say, Do sweat the details:

"I expect neat hair! No goatees!"

"If you wore boxer shorts, it's the last day you do!"

"Cut off [alcoholic] drinking eight hours prior to range practice!"

"You know the old joke: We're just one assassination away from wearing the FBI badge!"

The recruits recite a list of rules. Dan reads No. 16 out loud, "No sleeping in class." He stifles a new-father yawn. Dan is the only recruit who moved his family to Beltsville. He wedged a Pack 'n Play next to the bed. He bought his 4-month-old a pink Secret Service onesie. He keeps uniforms in the bathroom, so he doesn't wake his wife and infant when he dresses at dawn.

At the end of the nine-hour hazing, the students stand, soaked and mute. A former IRS employee nods toward a sweat splash on the mat: "That's me and Scott, right about there."

The Home Depot manager stamps his foot. "One day down."

Krista exhales. "Four days and 15 weeks to go."

Krista is counting down to graduation on a hand-drawn chart, penciling an "X" when she wakes up every morning. She tallies Mixon's sessions with a dash that she crosses when completed. Holidays are coded in orange marker. She jokingly calls it her "calendar of what to dread."

Her meticulousness is actually the sign of a good agent. "You got to have a little OCD [obsessive-compulsive disorder] to have this job," says the firearms coordinator. "You worry about every little thing. That's what we do. That's who we are."

Why? The firearms instructor explains: "A bad guy's attacking POTUS, you fire and you miss. Who you gonna hit? POTUS!" Trainees have to score 80 percent in marksmanship. They spend months learning how to shoot and assemble their Sig Sauer P229 pistols, MP5 9mm submachine guns, Remington 12-gauge shotguns. Krista buys a finger-exerciser to build trigger muscles. She and the others will fire about a thousand rounds at practice targets such as the vacant-eyed white man with glasses and thinning hair, lifting his pistol.

They aim for "center mass," the heart. No warning shots.

"What should be the first thing on your belt?" an instructor asks.

"Spare magazine?" Dan says.

"Right. I've seen people load pagers and cellphones. They don't go bang when you pull the trigger."

The students struggle to memorize details that parse life and death. During barricade-shooting, a technician chastens Dan: "Don't expose your leg. You get hit in the fibular artery, you're dead in seconds." Though, if hit, you are still expected to fight: "You have 10 seconds where you can keep fighting." They call it "the dead man's 10 seconds." The one Secret Service employee who died in the line of duty shot the would-be assassin after he'd been mortally wounded. "He fired back. He didn't give up."

"Do not use starch or bleach on the ballistic panels," a teacher says, laundry tips for their sweaty bulletproof vests. "And if you're at the White House and hear shooting, hit the deck -- the vest does not stop ERT [Emergency Response Team] bullets."

During their sixth week, students take an emergency medicine course: "So you're standing post on the golf course, and someone gets struck by lightning ... " They learn how to treat a head of state who's been eviscerated: "Some of you with military backgrounds were taught to urinate on the intestines to keep them warm. That is not Secret Service protocol." And how to deliver a baby while standing post (happened twice last year): "I don't want to hear about you using your shoelaces or anything nasty to tie the cord. Do not let the woman go to the bathroom, or Junior is going to be bungee jumping into the toilet."

Krista memorizes her flashcards and aces the medical exam.

The "details! details!" theme follows them into a surveillance course, where trainees trail each other around Maryland malls. "Act normal," the teacher says, Rule No. 5. "If you're halfway through your low-fat blueberry muffin -- that's not really low-fat -- finish it. Otherwise, it looks suspicious. If you and your partner are friends, act like friends! And do not make out in surveillance -- it's happened."

During the rescue swimming unit, the instructor specifies, "Talk to the flailing victim. Now, there is an exception: If Mr. Obama falls overboard, do you say, 'Mr. Obama, kick your feet! Move your legs!' No. Get in the water."

The deadliest details emerge during WMD training. Much of it is classified, involving untraceable toxins that could kill the president in his hotel suite while he is showering or clipping his toenails.

"There is an unbelievable amount of unaccounted-for chemical weapons," says the WMD specialist. "And when it turns up, it better not be on your advance. But if it does, this class is going to help."

The students learn how to adjust their gas masks after they've clapped on the president's, whose straps are custom-sewn for a tight seal. They inhale caustic fumes in a gas chamber, discovering their initial symptoms -- Scott's throat itches, Dan's eyes blaze, Krista's lips sting -- to recognize a gas attack.

WMD attacks could come at any time, the instructor says in class: "You're on an advance team in Ohio, and you eat at the Golden Corral salad bar." An assassin squirts SEB toxin from a rubber ball in his sleeve onto the chopped lettuce. The entire team gets sick.

"The president is due in minutes, and you're in bed, projectile vomiting to knock the clock off the wall. Every orifice in your body is going to be exuding liquid, like doing back-to-back advances in Cairo."

The trainees stare, glassy-eyed. It is 4:30 p.m., break time.

"Okay, folks," says the WMD specialist. The students are saturated in detail, in every blood, blister, nerve, bacterial and viral agent that will clot, choke and putrefy their bodily organs.

The teacher smiles sweetly as the students shuffle toward the candy machines. "You guys have a nice day!"

LESSON FOUR: Keep Moving

The control tactics coordinator addresses Scott as "the delicate one."

Scott is huge and meat-freezer hard, aside from his injured hand.

The coordinator says, "Are we sadists? No. We find and exploit any weakness in all trainees. It's stress inoculation."

"They're terrified, that's our preferred mode," says Mixon. (When the trainees aren't looking, he coos over pictures of his toddler nuzzling cherry blossoms.)

On this sunny afternoon on the race-car pad, the students' source of terror is a tactical driving test. The armored vehicles, many from President George H.W. Bush's old fleet, roll out of a garage, "the inner sanctum."

An instructor who chauffeured George W. Bush cautions, "I hit a bump in Denver and hit Bush's head on the ceiling. He asked me when was the last time I had a drug test. Try to avoid that."

Krista slides into the driver's seat, "Anyone want a paper bag?" Her feet strain to reach the pedals.

"Don't forget to lock the back doors. Nothing more embarrassing than the president busting your chops because you forgot to lock the door," an instructor says. Then he shares one of the Service's biggest secrets -- where they hide the presidential spare keys.

"All right, Scott Swantner's up," says the evaluator, Tipper Gore's former driver, his voice drawling over the police radio. Scott shifts vehicle No. 5 into gear, facing a slalom course of orange traffic cones.

The blacktop -- 1,800 feet long, 300 feet wide -- is streaked with truck-tire marks from the Humvee-heavy limousines. One instructor executes a J-turn, performed when a driver can't ram a roadblock. He zooms backward and whips the wheel, spinning the limousine a screeching reverse 180 degrees.

The air is pungent with gas and smoking rubber.

"The track's clear. Turn on your lights and sirens," the evaluator says to Scott.

Scott must complete two runs, no fishtailing or skidding outside the lines. For Scott this is a natural. He thrives inside lines: lays out his uniform just so each night, cooks one low-sodium recipe on Saturday and eats leftovers every evening.

"Ready, set, bang!"

Scott weaves through the orange cones. "Run the course hard, as if you're taking the protectee to a hospital," the evaluator had told them.

Recently here, Obama's security detail had practiced assaults on a motorcade parade. A mock Obama, first lady and two daughters strolled, waving to cheering crowds. Suddenly, over the trees, mortars crashed. Fanatics in pickup trucks thundered out, crippling "the Beast," the president's limousine. Counter snipers in a tower fired back. The Counter Assault Team stampeded. The first family was bundled into the spare limousine, "the Tomb," and sped out of the kill zone.

Scott's class had also practiced "pushing out" of the kill zone. The maneuver: Drive a Suburban into the president's rear fender, pushing his disabled limousine.

"If you're 'pushing out' on a $3 million car, you're not out of gas," the instructor said. "You're in the woods, you're taking rounds, the limo's dead. What do you do?"

"Push it out," Scott said.

"Want to know what we do, in two words?" the instructor said. "Keep moving."

Motorcade attacks average 45 seconds, he said. "Get out of the kill zone. If Iraq has taught us one thing -- you cannot stop."

In Musayyib, Iraq, Scott's Marines kept him moving the night a Russian-made fuse tore off part of his hand. Scott was clearing houses. A group of frightened girls showed him grenade fuses inside an old helmet. "I'm taking these," Scott said, reaching down. Then, he recalled, "I heard a pop. The guys I was with wouldn't let me look down."

But they kept Scott moving. It took 15 minutes to walk to their patrol. Scott was in shock, dripping blood, but somehow he moved his feet.

Privately Scott blames himself: "I should have known." But he jokes with friends, "Give me seven!" He tells himself, "Got to move on."

And though doubtful, Scott keeps moving.

On the driving pad, the evaluator scratches his head. "I don't see any problems with this class," he mumbles, and he adds their test numbers again. "Scott might be the weakest." Scott scored 68, missing the 70-point minimum.

The evaluator announces: "I need Car 5 to stay here. Which is Scott Swantner?"

Scott bites his lip. He calls the feeling "black hole," a place where a voice warns of disappointment. "It's my voice," Scott says later, "It says, 'Don't fail.' With a little crowd of people agreeing -- my family and guys I served with in Iraq. I don't want to let people down."

The evaluator notes, "could be his fingers, driving with your thumb and index finger." On the range, it was the same. When Scott jerked the trigger, the instructor shook his head: "He doesn't have much there to hold on to the gun."

The rest of the class rumbles off the pad. The evaluator tells Scott, "We got to run through this again, get you up to snuff."

"Yes, sir."

Overhead, gray clouds crowd out the sun. Raindrops pit Scott's windshield.

Two days later, Scott joins the others outside the mat room for their control tactics midterm. One role-playing instructor moans, "I got killed 24 times today. This is embarrassing."

Mixon is giving the test, pretending to be a member of the president's political staff. Mixon the political aide races over to Scott on tippy-toes, his eyes wild, his voice high:

"Oh, my God! You gotta help me! This guy is in there, and the president's going to be here in, like, 10 minutes! I told the guy to leave and he told me to go [expletive] myself! Make him leave! He scares me!!"

Scott stalks off to investigate.

Mixon the staffer smiles, "Thanks! I'm going to go get a latte."

After each student fights the assailant, he or she is directed to a small, dark room. Except for Scott, who is told to wait in the stairwell.

"I don't like being separated like this," he says.

Out on the driving pad, in fact, the driving evaluator had made a math mistake. Scott had qualified, first try.

"This has been the longest week," Scott sighs in the stairwell. He begins to pace. It is part of him now, a survival instinct.Two words: keep moving.

LESSON FIVE: Be a Meat Shield

Dan's wife is kicking him. Third or fourth time tonight. The baby is whimpering, and Dan is sleeping through it, even though he lies closer to her crib. Dan pops in her pacifier, he later recalls, amazed by how quickly his wife wakes up. It's as if she possesses a different set of senses.

In the morning, at the center, Dan huddles in the fake lobby of a fake hotel with Krista and the Tulsa cop. On the mezzanine above them, Bill Clinton's current detail skulks along the railings, poking submachine guns around corners, practicing clearing halls.

The mandatory three-mile runs are giving Dan painful shin splints. "You still got five weeks, man," the Tulsa cop tells Dan. "You don't want to get stress fractures."

But Dan is afraid he'll be dismissed if he doesn't run. And besides, he's a guy who says yes: at the paint store to Lime Rickey, and at a recent baton drill to battling three of his biggest classmates -- a sky diver, a self-described Cro-Magnon and Scott -- all at once. Afterward, Dan tottered away in a cold sweat, as dizzy as he'd been when he fainted as an 8-year-old altar boy. "Dude, you're white. You need to get checked out," said the Tulsa cop, lugging Dan off to the emergency medical services office down the hall.

Dan's gentle nature is a problem, and it worries him. "My whole life I'm always right in the middle," he once said. He may be the most agreeable recruit, but Dan won't make it as an agent if his response is always affirmative.

On this morning, at the fake hotel, Mixon ambles over to the students and cracks his neck. He's here to teach them how the Secret Service says no.

"We'll start with basic stuff. Attacks on the rope line, lapel grabs, overzealous handshakes. "

During the George W. Bush years, an instructor says, Bush always told them if he was planning to shake hands. "We're not in that environment now. We're in a Clintonesque environment, you have to deal with spontaneous rope lines."

Mixon says: "You may say, why do I need to know this?" because new agents don't work on the president's security detail. They investigate crimes and work advance or security posts. "But my first post-standing was in Brownsville, for President Clinton. I was standing there in my new J.C. Penney suit, and Clinton dives into the crowd. The shift leader grabs me by the back of my belt loops and made me help. You could be working rope lines in a matter of weeks."

Dan watches Mixon demonstrate releasing a fan's handshake. He peels back the fan's thumb with so much force, it makes a popping sound.

"If he's still jaw-jacking, saying to the protectee, 'We need to save the three-legged mosquito!' and the protectee's giving you that 'Oh, [expletive]' look, you'll peel him off," Mixon says. "The press is always around, and he's just a knucklehead, not necessarily a threat, so -- " Mixon cuts to the Tulsa cop. "You can't punch him in the face."

During a break, Dan calls Amanda. She's busy changing the baby. They met when he was 11 and she was 9. They still speak to each other with a childhood sweetness.

When the trainees reassemble, Mixon initiates them into the most sacred rite of protection:

"If there's an attack, get as big as you can to protect him. Make a nice meat shield between the protectee and the problem."

It takes a few beats to understand "meat shield."

"And where's the shielding for the protectee?" Mixon says.

The students blink. "The shift leader?" "The limousine?"

"No," Mixon says. "Point to yourself. You are the shielding for the protectee."

Scott taps his foot. Dan and Krista exchange glances.

"Your job is to get big. Get your lats out wide. We are now a meat shield. A sandwich: Kevlar, your body, another layer of Kevlar -- covering the protectee."

For the U.N. General Assembly, Mixon says, "you'll be working foreign protectees, Sultan Abu Bin Abu Babab. In an attack, get the protectee's head down, cover vital organs. If he falls, pick him up. You may have to think for them -- 'move, move, move' -- they may be literally pooping themselves."

"Do the protectees know what our responses are going to be?" says Krista.

"The president, yes. But the first lady of Iceland, no. On 9/11, two agents snatched Cheney out of his desk, and his feet never touched the ground till he was out of danger."

For weeks, the class practices shift formations, as if working a security detail. A pudgy politician makes speeches: "Keep paying your taxes! We need the money!" Dan, Krista and Scott shadow him out of boardrooms, into ballrooms and onto a Boeing 707 replica of Air Force One. They encounter actors and role-playing agents as innocuous as a flirty redhead and as deadly as a bald man wielding a syringe of Ebola.

Mixon critiques them: "You guys made a nice meat shield," he says to Krista. When shots rang out, Krista cupped the candidate's body with her own, his greasy hair sliding over her throat. "Excellent job controlling him. Bradford got as big as she's ever gotten in her life. Mighty Midget came to the rescue."

To Scott, who repelled an autograph seeker, Mixon says, "Too much aggression. You were on him like a spider monkey jacked up on Mountain Dew."

"I'll turn it down, sir," says Scott. He's adjusting to post-Iraq rules of engagement.

And Mixon scolds Dan, who saw a man throw a bottle. "Apparently, you can throw a bottle at the president and nothing happens. Don't wait for someone to hit you. You can hit him back first."

But Mixon levels his biggest criticism at the entire class. "Everyone took steps backwards when the shooting started." He glares at a former police officer.

"I'm used to going down on a knee," the former cop pleads. It's a reflex, basic officer safety.

"Well, resist. Now you're working protection. You need to be the shield."

Students remove their earplugs and safety glasses, dazed, looking existentially perplexed. An instructor who had protected Bush shrugs:

"That's the premise of protective training -- to override human nature."

In the evening, Dan drives back to the Residence Inn, to human nature as it seems intended. He locks his training gun and bathes the baby. She eats potato puffs in her high chair and laughs at her dad on the floor doing push--ups.

Dan's wife, Amanda, a luminescent brunette, cooks them tuna casserole and tries not to think about his work. "It's hard for me to visualize," she says.

The baby is sitting on Amanda's lap, gnawing a teething ring. Dan is mulling Mixon's lesson, which he's not yet internalized.

But the words "meat shield" spark recognition in Amanda's soft eyes. When she was pregnant in Buffalo, "I slipped and fell on the ice. As I was going down, I was thinking, 'Don't fall to hurt the baby. Don't fall on your stomach.' I didn't care if I broke an arm, I had to protect the baby."

Amanda sprained her wrist. She used her body as a shield.

Dan turns to his wife, nodding, as if the tumblers in his head were finally grinding in the right combination. Click: meat shield.

"It's the instinct, the mother instinct," Dan says. "When the cubs are in danger, the mother bear gets big, as Mr. Mixon says."

Being a Secret Service agent might be a stoic, macho job.

It is also a little bit like being pregnant with the president.

LESSON SIX: Stand Your Ground

"Let's see -- gun, lip gloss," Krista says. It is 5:30 a.m. at the Residence Inn.

Dan texts Krista, "R U driving in this morn?"

Yes, but Krista has to drive in early for remedial submachine gun. She qualified on the MP5, but her supervisor said she needs practice. He also assigned her to remedial physical fitness, though her scores are on par with the Tulsa cop's. Krista jokes to Dan and Scott that she has remedial lunch and remedial breathing.

She plays the song by Pink: "So What?" She never lets the guys see her tear up. She averages 96.5 percent on her written exams.

In the bathroom, a green smear of Biore Pore Perfect mask dabs the pull-up bar Krista installed for practice. Last night, she hit her cheek while cranking out four pull-ups. Enough for her to pass.

"Don't be defined by other people's limited perceptions!" says the Post-it on her bathroom mirror.

Her instructors may see a perky, size-2 woman dispensing ibuprofen and Alka Seltzer to classmates who are beat--up or hung-over. They may see that she is only one of two recruits who'd never used a weapon or been in a fight before.

But what they don't know, Krista says, is that she'll do "whatever it takes." Tumbling as a child from failed adoptions to foster homes, with no sense of where her mother was, she used to write letters, "Dear Mrs. X, Today I graduated from high school . . ." She felt like she'd been "born in midair." Now she is determined to embrace an identity that is defined by standing your ground.

Standing one's ground -- standing post -- is the recruits' next lesson. First, a classroom lecture:

"No playing BrickBreaker."

"No hands in pockets." Hands should be up and ready; as Mixon puts it, "New York, Italian."

"In Muslim countries, no pounding a balled fist into a palm. It's like the middle finger."

"If you have to go to the bathroom, suck it up. Don't drink water. You can always get an IV after your shift."

Then, the students are tested in the tactical village. Krista and Mr. Home Depot stand outside a bookstore, where a candidate is signing books. Across the street, men squeal up and rob a bank. Some of the other recruits had chased the robbers.

"It may be a diversion, a favorite tactic of Tommy Taliban and his al-Qaeda friends," Mixon says. Never abandon your guard post, Mixon says, even if someone faints: "Make sure he's not doing the funky chicken with foam coming out of his mouth, it could be a nerve gas attack. Otherwise, it's not your problem."

A role-player nicknamed "the horse" tries to push into the bookstore. Other trainees didn't notice him, but Krista, weighing 105 pounds, blocks him with her flattened palm. A drunk rolls out of the bar next door, distracting Mr. Home Depot. Another man lopes up, wearing a suicide bomber vest.

"Bomb!!!!" Krista yells, shooting the suicide bomber. Mixon had taught them to shout so loudly, "dope dealers two blocks away should be flushing toilets."

Afterward, Mr. Home Depot says, "Can't believe I didn't see the guy with the freakin' bomb." Home Depot has such good aim on the range, he routinely rubs Krista's trigger finger with his, to transfer his magic.

"You had tunnel vision," the evaluator says to him, and turns to Krista, "Even with the horse in front of you, you saw. I watched your eyes. I'm impressed. You a former cop, ma'am?"

Krista braces for his smirk, "I'm a former social worker, sir."

"No. You're a protection agent now."

But not until Krista passes control tactics, which she fails along with four other trainees. "You've got to find that inner bitch," the coordinator says, "the thing that pisses you off, and use it."

Two weeks before graduation, the five retest. The scenario: standing post; bad guys pounce. When it's over, they can barely speak, panting:

"You do okay?"

"Who knows."

"No one knows."

"Did he shoot you?"

"I think he did."

Everyone passes except for Krista. When Mixon tells her on the spot, all her breath leaves her body.

"I know I can do it," she says, her lips pale. "I'm going to graduate." She is mottled with so many blood blisters from training bullets, a massage therapist pulled her aside to ask about an abusive relationship.

After she leaves, Mixon explains that Krista didn't "demonstrate the warrior spirit." Like Krista, Mixon grew up without a mother. Her heart gave out when he was 2. No one tucked him in at night, and he realized, as Krista did at an early age, that he would have to make his own way.

One spring evening in 1981, as a "poor, badass kid" in Kentucky, Mixon watched the news on his black-and-white TV. He saw a man in a gray suit jump up, as if he were impenetrable, and block a .22--caliber bullet meant for President Ronald Reagan. Right then, Mixon decided he wanted to be that hard man. He still keeps the old TV in his garage. Now that he has a 2-year-old, he tells the boy when he trips and cries, in a voice blunted with gruff love: "Shake it off."

As a social worker, Krista's slogan is: "positive reinforcement."

As an agent, Mixon's slogan is: "Americans sleep well in their beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would harm them!"

"We can't pass her cause we think she's a nice girl," Mixon says.

Over the next week, Krista sticks with her class. They dress in business suits and visit the intelligence division at headquarters, inside a vault. They see pictures of 50 "class 3" subjects who, if given a chance, would attack the president, including one grizzled white man, "whereabouts unknown, last seen in Tennessee." A class 3 must be supervised if the president visits his district. "Be creative," an instructor had advised. "Some agents take them out for ice cream, take them bowling, make sure he's on his medication. In L.A., we took class 3s to the movies when the president was in town."

They peer into the 24-hour duty desk, a glass-enclosed room resembling a flight- tracking center. The names of 37 protectees light up the wall, along with their call signs and locations. The Obama girls are at Camp David; Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter are in Walnut Mountain, Ga.

The next day, the review board convenes and decides to give Krista one more try.

"My whole future depends on tomorrow, and when I pass, Jess," her pull-up buddy, "and I are going to go get eyelash extensions," Krista jokes. The anxiety has whittled her weight so sharply, she's using a safety pin to hold up her pants.

"If I had to go through the extra training and the adversity you faced," Dan tells her, "I don't know how I could get up in the morning."

Her mother helps. "Short people rule!" reads a card from Krista's birth mother, whom Krista eventually tracked down. When Krista first called, her mother gulped: "I've been waiting for this call for 19 years." Five months after Krista was born, her mother married her father. They had three more kids.

Her classmates also help. The entire SATC No. 283 turns out in the chilly predawn for Krista's test. "She's like the group mom," says one guy, twice her size. Krista had ordered shoulder holsters for them all.

But in the end it is Krista alone, one week before graduation, walking barefoot past her friends into the mat room.

Most of the guys hang back. Scott walks up to the closed door and presses against it, listening:

Krista is standing post. Two trainers jump her. She uses her gun and baton to beat them back. Then the evaluator says, "All right, now we're overseas and you're not allowed to carry a weapon." Krista must overcome them, unarmed.

"Get on the ground!" Krista screams. "Police! Stop fighting!" There's pleading in her screams. The guys in the hall are squirming, looking down at their boots.

"Stop! Stop! Aaaagh!" Krista's screams are wild, and after a minute the sounds grow guttural. "Aaaagh! Yaaagh!" Scott's forehead furrows. Goose bumps rise on the arms of a New Orleans cop who once heard the transmission of an officer friend being executed by thugs. He wants to break into the mat room. His eyes fill with tears: "It's what a radio sounds like when a cop is dying."

LESSON SEVEN: Get A Will

The firearms instructor clicks on a PowerPoint slide: a picture of a toilet.

"You're in the hopper; where's the safest place to put your weapon?"

"On the toilet paper holder?"

"No, you get lead all over the toilet paper and then . . . you see? Put the gun between your feet. Which stall do you use?"

No one tries to answer.

"The stall next to the wall. You don't want someone reaching to grab your gun. Call ahead for reservations."

Thus concludes the last Secret Service class, one day before graduation. The previous lecturer told them about alcohol counseling. Four employees had DUI arrests in the past year. She also said: "Get a will."

"Good riddance!" Dan says, tossing a bag of combat training pants into the center's laundry cart. His voice has hardened, as has his body, as has his attitude. Dan turns people down now. And when the shooting started during their final exercises, Dan became a meat shield -- "I didn't even think,it was instinct" -- repudiating a gunman's bullet with a full-bodied no.

That night, Dan and Amanda sleep peacefully. The baby's front teeth have finally cut through her gums. In the morning, at commencement, Dan mills around backstage at the fake hotel.

Everyone is there except for Krista. She was released from training for failing control tactics. She hung on until the last hour, doing advance work for a candidate at a nature preserve, tramping through goose droppings in the rain, until the training director summoned her to his office. Krista's classmates were stricken. When Scott walked past the mat room, he avoided Mixon's eyes, hunching over his new government-issued BlackBerry.

Mixon said, "I feel like I failed. I've given my all; she's given her all. In good conscience though, I would be attending her funeral next week."

Krista is back home in New Orleans now, running along the bayou, pushing the mandatory three-mile run to five, six, seven. She thinks she should have passed. "The only rule in fighting is to never quit. I never stopped fighting." She appealed the decision and is waiting to hear from headquarters. She says she'll do whatever it takes to become an agent.

Backstage, at the center's fake hotel, an instructor says: "One minute to showtime!"

"I need some Visine," says a recruit. "I drank too much last night."

They all line up: the chubbiest recruit, who lost 85 pounds to enlist; the homesick recruit, who never unpacked his suitcase; the grittiest recruit, who agonized in silence over his detached rib.

Each had beat his weakness.

Scott glances around, the doubt for once lifting from his dark brows. On their last day of training, Scott walked onto the outdoor range and plugged 24 out of 30 shots into the heart of a silhouette -- a class record, and a refutation of the claim that a seven-fingered man can't shoot.

Out in the audience, in the front row, Scott's father is beaming, holding two cameras in case one malfunctions. He flew in from California, a giant man, who says, "God help the person who comes up against Scott." And then all at once, he turns red, and lifts a thick thumb to wipe away his tears: "When we got that call at 3 a.m. from Iraq, it was very, very tough ... "

Mixon takes a seat in the back, behind the families watching the ceremony.

There is the speech: "You have completed 28 weeks of the most intensive training of any law enforcement agency in the world."

And the oath of office: "I do solemnly swear . . . so help me God."

Mixon leans forward, rubbing scarred knuckles, his gaze alighting on his pupils' open faces, his own expression different from that of the glowing parents, more knowing, a trace sad.

"Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the special agents of Class 283!" Applause.

Mixon wanders into the crowd to say goodbye. The Tulsa cop's father exclaims, "I'm the happiest duck in the pond!"

"You got your badge!" Scott's father gushes. "You want me to hold it?"

Mixon pushes past a row of chairs to offer Scott his hand: "Congratulations."

"Yes, sir."

"Hey, cut this 'sir' [expletive] out."

Scott meets Mixon's eyes.

Mixon pulls back for a moment and then opens his arms, wrapping Scott in a hug. In a hurried, hidden gesture, Mixon lifts his mouth to Scott's ear. He whispers to the new Secret Service agent, "Stay safe."

Laura Blumenfeld is an enterprise writer on the National staff of The Washington Post. She can be reached at blumenfeldl@washpost.com.

***

About This Story

Although a few subjects asked not to be identified, in most cases the Magazine chose to omit the names of minor subjects to make it easier for readers to follow the story.

China, Uighur Groups Present Conflicting Accounts of Unrest

By Ariana Eunjung Cha
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, July 25, 2009

BEIJING -- Three weeks after the riots that left nearly 200 people dead and more than 1,700 injured in the capital of the far western Xinjiang region, the Chinese government and Uighur exile groups have been circulating dueling versions of what happened, in an emotional global propaganda war with geopolitical implications.

According to the version of events offered by China's Foreign Ministry and state media, the ethnic unrest that erupted in Urumqi on July 5 was a terrorist attack by Uighur separatists. Women in black Islamic robes stood at street corners giving orders, and at least one handed out clubs, officials said, before Muslim Uighur gangs in 50 locations throughout the city simultaneously began beating Han Chinese.

In the account being circulated by Rebiya Kadeer, a U.S.-based Uighur leader who has emerged as the community's main spokesman, Chinese security forces were responsible for the violence that night. According to Kadeer, police and paramilitary and other troops chased peaceful demonstrators, mostly young people protesting a deadly factory brawl elsewhere, into closed-off areas. Then they turned off streetlights and began shooting indiscriminately.

Clear Details Absent

Chinese authorities have allowed foreign reporters access to the area where the clashes occurred and unusual freedom to conduct interviews, and they have provided evidence verifying the brutal attacks on Han Chinese. But few details are clear, and many witnesses who might be able to answer other questions -- Who set off the initial violence? Why were the police unable to stop the attacks? -- are either in jail or dead.

"The narratives of both the Chinese government and outside observers about what happened are hobbled by the lack of independent, verifiable accounts," said Phelim Kine, a researcher with New York-based Human Rights Watch, which is calling for a U.N. investigation into the incident.

Both sides face huge obstacles in trying to convince the world of their stories.

The Chinese government, after decades of covering up and denying such incidents, has a major trust problem, many analysts say. Chinese officials have said they will release video footage of the attacks, phone records and other evidence to support their view of the events in Urumqi, but have not yet done so.

For Kadeer, a 63-year-old former business mogul from Xinjiang who was exiled in 2005 and now lives in the Washington area, observers say the main challenge is convincing people that she can give an authoritative account of events that happened in a country she has not visited in years. Uighur exile groups have declined to provide information about their sources in China, saying they fear that those people will be arrested or worse if they speak out.

Resentment has been building for years between Han Chinese, who make up 92 percent of China's population and dominate its politics and economy, and Uighurs, who once were the majority in the far west, but whose presence there has shrunk in recent decades because of migration by Han Chinese.

Although the Chinese government says its policies have improved Uighurs' educational and job opportunities, some Uighurs say its goal is to assimilate them at the expense of their language, religion and culture.

In the past, the government has linked Uighur separatism to a group known as the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, which it characterizes as a terrorist organization and blames for some recent attacks. Some analysts say that China exaggerates the influence of this group.

When it comes to the events of July 5, Dong Guanpeng, director of the Global Journalism Institute at Tsinghua University in Beijing, said he thinks China is being honest this time, but that doubts have been cast on the information it is releasing because Kadeer is "doing a better job than the Chinese government in public relations."

"Of course, Rebiya's statements have won sympathy in foreign countries," Dong said. "They contain beautiful lies."

Kadeer's version of events appears to have gained traction abroad. In Turkey, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has expressed solidarity with China's Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking minority group, and described the riots as "a kind of genocide." Protesters in Tokyo, Washington, Munich and Amsterdam have descended on Chinese embassies and consulates demanding a full account of what happened to Uighurs. A top Iranian cleric condemned China for "horribly" suppressing the community, and al-Qaeda's North African arm vowed to avenge Uighurs' deaths.

Zhan Jiang, a professor of journalism and mass communications at the China Youth University for Political Sciences, contends that the Chinese government inadvertently elevated Kadeer's status and gave her an audience that she does not deserve. Beijing has accused Kadeer of being the "mastermind" behind the clashes in Urumqi, accusations she denies.

"The government should haven't portrayed her as a hero by condemning her. She was unknown at first, and she is a well-known person in the world right now," Zhan said.

Gaps in Both Stories

Meanwhile, China has hit back by assigning some blame to third parties. The Communist Party's People's Daily newspaper said that the United States backed the "separatists" who launched the attacks. It also said that Kadeer's organization received funds from the National Endowment for Democracy, which in turn is funded by the U.S. Congress. Separately, the official China Daily has played up the terrorism angle, saying that the riots were meant to "help" al-Qaeda and were related to the continuing U.S. military presence in Afghanistan.

Some analysts say there are holes in both sides' narratives.

For instance, according to Kadeer's timeline of events, the violence was triggered by police who "under the cover of darkness . . . began to fire" on the protesters. But witnesses have said the rioting began about 8 p.m. Beijing time, when the sun was still up in Urumqi, 1,500 miles west of Beijing.

Chang Chungfu, a specialist in Muslim and Uighur studies at the National Chengchi University in Taiwan, said "the two parties -- the government and Kadeer -- are choosing the parts of the stories that favor their own agendas," in efforts to win foreign sympathy.

He said he considers it "unlikely that a peaceful protest turned into violence against innocent people just because of policemen cracking down," suggesting at least a measure of organization to the Uighurs' attacks on Han Chinese that night.

On the other hand, Chang said, he is skeptical of the government's assertions that Kadeer instigated the attacks because she lacks that kind of power. Furthermore, he said, "the government hasn't released detailed information of those who were killed, such as their ages and identities, so even the number of dead is in doubt."

Li Wei, a terrorism expert at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, which is affiliated with China's national security bureau, dismissed allegations by state media of involvement by outside terrorist groups. "I have not found any proof that points at linkage between the riot and other terrorism groups, including al-Qaeda," he said.

Li did say, however, that he believes Kadeer is in contact with the East Turkestan Islamic Movement.

Rohan Gunaratna, a Singapore-based terrorism expert, blamed some of the tension on Beijing's failure to differentiate "between terrorists who attack and the political activities of separatists."

"If China is too hard on the Uighur people, then support of terrorism will grow," Gunaratna said. "The Chinese government must be hard on terrorists but soft on the Uighur people."

Researchers Liu Liu, Wang Juan and Zhang Jie contributed to this report.

Shortages of Capable Afghan Forces in South Complicates U.S. Mission

By Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, July 25, 2009

GARMSIR, Afghanistan -- "Six, you've got six," Marine 1st Lt. Justin Grieco told his military police training team, counting the handful of Afghan police officers present for a patrol in this volatile region of southern Afghanistan.

The men filed out of the dusty compound gate into the baking afternoon sun. On the patrol, U.S. military police officers outnumbered the Afghans two to one -- a reflection of the severe shortfall in Afghan security forces working with Marines in Helmand province.

President Obama's strategy for Afghanistan is heavily dependent upon raising more capable local security forces, but the myriad challenges faced by mentors such as Grieco underscore just how limiting a factor that is -- especially in the Taliban heartland of southern Afghanistan.

The extent of the push by 4,500 Marines into Taliban strongholds of southern Helmand will be determined, to a degree, by whether there are enough qualified Afghan forces to partner with and eventually leave behind to protect Afghan civilians. Brig. Gen. Lawrence D. Nicholson, commander of the Marine forces here, said urgent efforts are underway to dispatch additional Afghan forces to Helmand.

But here in Helmand's Garmsir district -- as in much of the south -- Afghan forces remain few in number, as well as short of training, equipment and basic supplies such as fuel and ammunition. Some Afghans quit because they are reluctant to work in the violent south; others are expelled because of drug use. The Afghan troops here, heavily dependent on Western forces, are hesitating to take on greater responsibilities -- and, in some cases, are simply refusing to do so.

The Afghan National Police officers mentored by Grieco's team, for example, are resisting a U.S. military effort to have them expand to checkpoints in villages outside the town center of Garmsir as the Marines push farther south, taking with them the Afghan Border Police officers, who currently man some of those stations.

"Without the Marines, we cannot secure the stations," said Mohammed Agha, deputy commander of the roughly 80 Garmsir police officers. "We can't go to other villages because of the mines, and some people have weapons hidden in their houses. We can't go out of Garmsir, or we will be killed."

The border police, too, have resisted taking up new positions. Col. Gula Agha Amiri, executive officer of the 7th Afghan Border Police, complained of his unit's lack of body armor and chronic shortages of ammunition and fuel. "If we have contact with the enemy, we can't fight for more than two hours," he said.

Both police forces have lost dozens of men to insurgent attacks in recent years, the Afghan officers said.

U.S. Army Capt. Michael Repasky, chief of the team that mentors the border police here, remains frustrated at the lack of logistical support. "I've been here five months and haven't been able to figure out why they aren't getting fuel," he said, explaining that the police receive fuel perhaps every two weeks and then run out.

That, in turn, makes the border police officers reluctant to move beyond their headquarters in the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, he said. "If they move farther from Lash, it will be harder for them to get what they need. They want a roof over their heads, hot meals, time to rest," Repasky said. "I can encourage them to start a new checkpoint. But the commander can say no, and there's nothing I can do about it."

The overall shortage of security forces in southern Afghanistan exacerbates such tensions. There are about 13,600 Afghan soldiers and 11,000 police officers in the south, and each force is short of 4,000 men for positions that have been authorized but not filled. U.S. military officers say Afghan forces should be doubled to provide adequate security in the south.

"The U.S. force is growing down here, but the Afghan force is not growing nearly as fast," said Col. Bill Hix, who until recently led the Afghan Regional Security Integration Command in Kandahar, another large southern province, overseeing the development of police and soldiers in southern Afghanistan. "We have people who are bleeding and dying, and we need to look hard at how we generate [Afghan] forces."

The shortages of capable Afghan forces means they usually assist with searches and security on operations planned and led by Marines, the mentors said. "Right now, they're just happy with us telling them 'Go there, do this,' " said Stephen Woods, a civilian police adviser with the Marine mentoring team.

There are exceptions. Two police officers buying lunch in Garmsir this week observed a drug sale, shadowed the dealer, detained him and seized 30 bundles of heroin, Grieco said.

Gaining approval for increasing the size of the Afghan forces -- which requires international endorsement -- has been a maddening process, said Hix, comparing it to "negotiating a peace treaty."

Even after such approval, many hurdles remain, particularly in the south, he said.

"It's a challenge to get people down here," said Hix, adding that units that deploy to southern Afghanistan often suffer higher rates of unauthorized absences. "The guys think there is a monster down here." Drug use in the forces is another problem, according to U.S. and Afghan officers. "We lose 5 to 10 percent of every class in the police force to opiate use," Hix said.

Training the police and army poses other challenges, he said. Police officers and soldiers -- the vast majority of them illiterate villagers -- require extensive training, but during a war only so many can be pulled away from their jobs at any one time.

Building training and other facilities for the forces and providing them with equipment remain slow because of red tape and contracting rules, he said. It takes 120 to 180 days to start work on a training facility and often more than a year to 18 months to field new equipment, such as the 1,000 Humvees on order for the Afghan army in the south. "We can't swing the money cannon quickly enough to adapt," Hix said.

Still, Hix said, the Afghan forces have made significant progress in the south. In the past year, the training capacity for regional police has doubled and the rate of those absent without leave has halved.

Despite the problems, Hix said that replacing foreign forces with homegrown ones is the only viable long-term solution, in part because the latter cost far less. "We should not be substituting U.S. troops for Afghans, which is what we are effectively doing now . . . in trying to secure and stabilize Afghanistan," he wrote in an e-mail.

U.S. and Afghan officers urged greater emphasis on professionalizing the Afghan police, which are at least as critical as the army in a counterinsurgency campaign but have received far fewer resources. Residents also have complained about corruption among police officers, the mentors say.

The police's law-enforcement role in Garmsir is limited because many of the officers are illiterate, Grieco said. "Paperwork, evidence, processing -- they don't know how to do it," he said. "You can't get a policeman to take a statement if he can't read and write."

Increasing numbers of residents are coming to the police station to report problems, said Staff Sgt. David Dillon, one of Grieco's team members. Still, as a patrol moved through the local bazaar, the police barely interacted with civilians, troubling their mentors.

Shopkeepers and residents eyed the patrol silently and did not respond to greetings in Pashto. An Afghan boy swore in English at one of the Marines, who responded: "Go home."

"They're still a little hostile towards us," Woods said. "They will throw rocks. They will give you that look. They don't trust us."