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Uncle Sam wants you — and your spouse, siblings and friends

Tom Vanden Brook
USA TODAY
Meet newlyweds and battle buddies, Army Privates Britney Damuth and Michael King, who were married Oct. 20.

WASHINGTON — Meet newlyweds and battle buddies, Army Privates Britney Damuth and Michael King.

Married Oct. 20 — "my 19th birthday," Damuth said — the couple from Longview, Texas, shipped out days later to Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri. They enlisted through a revived Army recruiting program designed to let friends, including husbands and wives, join the service, train together and spend a year together at their first post.

Enlisting, Damuth said, "was kind of a random thing. We both wanted to better ourselves for different things in life other than east Texas."

The couple will train to become combat engineers, a specialty that recently opened to women. Engineers build bridges, clear landmines and destroy obstacles.

"She really chose that more than I did," said King, also 19. "We both like blowing stuff up."

Pvt. Michael King on his way to start training.

For the Army, the program, which had been suspended more than 10 years ago, takes aim at one of the top reasons young people don't enlist.

"They don't want to leave friends and family," said Kelli Bland, a spokeswoman for the Army's recruiting command.

So bring your friends and family along, the Army says. And through October, 168 people have signed up, 147 men and 21 women. The program has attracted other husband-and-wife teams, a brother-and-sister pair, twin brothers and batches of pals from high school, said Patricia Crowe, an Army recruiting official.

The Army would like to grow the program to 1,000 recruits. Every new soldier counts. The Army, for the fiscal year that ended Oct. 1, struggled to meet its annual goal of 59,000 recruits, and it needs 62,500 for the current year.

The Army dropped the buddy program about 10 years ago after officials struggled to meet the commitments it had made. The toughest to keep, Crowe said, was allowing soldiers to deploy together for three years.

"It promised the world to soldiers," Crowe said.

Pvt. Britney Damuth on her way to start training.

The new version ratchets back to allowing buddies to stick together from basic and advanced individual training to their first permanent post for 12 months.

For Damuth and King, basic training, which began for them on Wednesday, offers a welcome respite from filling out forms, undergoing medical exams and staring at books. Training also means an end to their honeymoon, such as it is. They have been told they'll be separated for at least 15 weeks during training, save for 11 days at Christmas.

"I think I'll like it a lot,"Damuthsays. "I like being surrounded by a bunch of other females that enjoy doing the same thing I do."

Like it enough and the Army may have Damuth and King for life.

"We talked before we got here about both retiring in the Army if it's what we like to do,"Damuthsays.

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