Reporting from San Diego — A few days after he arrived at boot camp here, Joshua Fry no longer wanted to be a Marine.
He was confused by the orders drill instructors shouted at him. He was caught stealing peanut butter from the chow hall. He urinated in his canteen. He talked back to the drill instructors. He refused to shave.
Finally, he set out toward the main gate as if to head home. He was blocked, but now he had the chance to tell his superiors a secret: He was autistic. Fry figured this admission would persuade the Marines to let him return to the group home in Irvine for disturbed young adults where he lived when he enlisted.
Instead, he was sent back to Platoon 1021, Company B. The drill instructors became more helpful, and in April 2008 he finished the grueling 11-week regimen and was sent to Camp Pendleton for infantry training.
Within weeks he was under arrest for desertion and possession of child pornography.
Documents in Fry's court-martial detail a troubled upbringing and a Marine career that was both improbable and misbegotten from the start.
But far from being a routine instance of a young man unable to adjust to military life, the Fry case has exposed an awkward issue for the Marines and other military services: Recruiters sometimes take ethical shortcuts to make their quotas at a time when Americans have tired of the nation's wars and finding recruits is difficult.
According to court documents, Fry's recruiter knew he was autistic. The Marine Corps is investigating the recruiter's conduct.
Compared with the large number of enlistees each year, the number of allegations against recruiters is small and the number substantiated even smaller. But a report by the State Department, prompted by concerns in Congress, concluded that even a small number of misconduct cases "fosters distrust of the military [and] such distrust makes recruiting for all even more difficult."
The Marine Corps has the highest percentage of substantiated misconduct claims. In the last three fiscal years, 265 Marine recruiters have been relieved of duty for misconduct, most commonly for hiding negative background factors.
Autism is not among the conditions that automatically bar a would-be recruit. But, if Navy doctors had known of the diagnosis, Fry would have been evaluated more skeptically during the pre-boot camp medical examination and most likely would have been rejected.
